Bad obsession

No need to say good bye

2010-05-23T06:05:00.000-07:00

It started out as a feeling
Which then grew into a hope
Which then turned into a quiet thought
Which then turned into a quiet word

And then that word grew louder and louder
'Til it was a battle cry

I'll come back
When you call me
No need to say goodbye

Just because everything's changing
Doesn't mean it's never
Been this way before

All you can do is try to know
Who your friends are
As you head off to the war

Pick a star on the dark horizon
And follow the light

You'll come back
When it's over
No need to say good bye

Now we're back to the beginning
It's just a feeling and now one knows yet
But just because they can't feel it too
Doesn't mean that you have to forget

Let your memories grow stronger ans stronger
'Til they're before your eyes

You'll come back
When it's over
No need to say good bye

Be Angry and Sin Not

2007-09-18T06:26:00.001-07:00

Its not Saturday, nor I am free, but I took out some time to write this post on the emotion which I thought should be given some credit, as we in our daily life experience it lots of times. I thought I should do some research on this very important, yet hated emotion.

So, you have lots of emotions. At different times, you may be happy, sad, or jealous. Anger is just another way we feel. It's perfectly OK to be angry at times — in fact, it's important to get angry sometimes. But anger must be released in the right way. Otherwise you'll be like a pot of boiling water with the lid left on. If the steam doesn't escape, the water will finally boil over and blow its top! When that happens to you, it's no fun for anyone.

"Be ye angry, and sin not. Let not the sun go down upon your wrath, neither give place to the devil" (Ephesians 4:26, 27).

It's okay to get angry at times, but don't act upon it. Eph 4:29 says don't let corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth. Meaning if one gets angry keep it to yourself.

I think even god gets angry sometimes. Many religious or other guides to behavior discuss anger in some way.

* The Bible warns "do not let the sun go down on your anger"; that is, do not let feelings of anger last so long as to become sinful, but rather, deal with them before they reach that point. There is, however, what is commonly referred to as "righteous anger", as demonstrated by Jesus when he made a whip and cleared out the merchants in the Temple. In Romans 1:18, the sin of man also provokes the wrath of God, who not only punishes sinners, but also provides a way for them to appease His Wrath.
* In Islam, anger is seen as a sign of weakness. Muhammad said, "The strong is not the one who overcomes the people by his strength, But the strong is the one who controls himself while in anger." and "The best of you are those who are slow to anger and swift to cool down... Beware of anger, for it is a live coal on the heart of the descendants of Adam."
* Anger in Buddhism is defined here as: "being unable to bear the object, or the intention to cause harm to the object". Anger is seen as aversion with a stronger exaggeration, and is listed as one of the five hindrances. It is a common misconception that spiritual saints never get angry. This is not true: even the Dalai Lama, the spiritual Guru of Tibetan monks, gets angry. However, there is a difference; most often a spiritual person is aware of the emotion and the way it can be handled. Thus, in response to the question: "Is any anger acceptable in Buddhism?' the Dalai Lama answered:

"Buddhism in general teaches that anger is a destructive emotion and although anger might have some positive effects in terms of survival or moral outrage, I do not accept that anger of any kind as a virtuous emotion nor aggression as constructive behavior. The Gautana Buddha has taught that there are three basic kleshas at the root of samsara (bondage, illusion) and the vicious cycle of rebirth. These are greed, hatred, and delusion--also translatable as attachment, anger, and ignorance. They bring us confusion and misery rather than peace, happiness, and fulfillment. It is in our own self-interest to purify and transform them".

* In Hinduism, anger is equated with sorrow as a form of unrequited desire. The objects of anger are perceived as a hindrance to the gratification of the desires of the angry person. Alternatively if one thinks one is superior, the result is grief. Anger is considered to be packed with more evil power than desire.

What I am trying to say here is its okay to be angry. I don't know, why I am trying to justify that its okay to be angry at times but there are lots of points which helps me prove this. Another quote to support my point is :

“Love implies anger. The man who is angered by nothing cares about nothing.”

Edward Abbey says love implies anger. I think he is true, someone who do not care about anything can never get angry. And if you care about someone, you will get angry. Thats a good justification for being angry.

Another interesting theory is "Anger is Love". According to Linda Dove, we have been taught that anger is destructive, that by being angry we can hurt someone or get hurt ourselves.

Anger is a way of saying to the Universe and those in it that you deserve to be treated in ways that are unconditionally loving and respectful. Think of anger as a divine “force” that cleanses and makes room for something more loving to grow. When we speak of anger, we are talking about expressing anger from an understanding of the Oneness. When this happens we come to value not only our own Selves but also those of “others.” How can this be true, you might ask, when to express your anger could be hurtful of other’s feelings or get yourself hurt?

Read the full article here: http://neholistic.com/articles/0031.htm

So, I think is good to be angry, but whats important is that we should control it and should not let it act upon us. I have no idea, why I am writing about anger. Everything seems to work out very well in my life. I am enjoying the fast pace of changes happening in my life. I think I should stop justifying each and everything happening in my life and should concentrate on this which are important for me, or may be I am just too angry with myself.

I will continue to explore various emotions which I go through ( though I still claim that I am not angry), and would like to thanks Wikipedia in my this endeavor.

Untitled

2007-09-08T03:58:00.000-07:00

Title of this post is not "Untitled" but the image displayed above. I don't know whether you will understand the meaning for this image now, but by the time you will finish reading this post I think you will know what I am talking about. By the way I really don't know why I am writing this post, may be its Saturday, and I don't like to work on Saturday or may be something else.

So it all starts with Wikipedia. For those who do not know Wikipedia, it is a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world. With rare exceptions, its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet, simply by clicking the edit this page link. Coming back to the point, I was reading about emotions on Wikipedia , now why I was doing that is again a mystery. I found that Emotion, in its most general definition, is a complex psychophysical process that arises spontaneously, rather than through conscious effort, and evokes either a positive or negative psychological response and physical expressions, often involuntary, related to feelings, perceptions or beliefs about elements, objects or relations between them, in reality or in the imagination. Never thought that something as simple as emotion will be so complex, and the term has no single universally accepted definition.

I thought I should research this topic more, and I found out that there are total 43 kinds of emotions. Wow, 43 is a big number. Though I was impressed by this one emotion, which also happens to be the title of this post.

This emotion is a constellation of emotions and experiences related to a sense of strong affection or profound oneness. The meaning of this emotion varies relative to context. Sometimes it is seen as an ineffable feeling of intense attraction shared in passionate or intimate attraction and intimate interpersonal relationships. Though often linked to personal relations, this emotion is often given a broader signification, its a emotion of humanity, of nature , with life itself, or a oneness with the Universe, a universal emotion or karma . It can also be construed as Platonic emotion (name) , religious emotion, familial love, and, more casually, great affection for anything considered strongly pleasurable, desirable, or preferred, to include activities and foods. This diverse range of meanings in the singular word (name of this emotion) is often contrasted with the plurality of Greek words for (name of this emotion) reflecting the concept's depth, versatility, and complexity.

Let me first tell you what are those other 42 emotions. They are:

Acceptance, Affection, Aggression, Ambivalence, Anger, Apathy, Anxiety, Compassion, Confusion, Despair, Disgust, Doubt, Ecstasy, Empathy, Envy, Embarrassment, Euphoria, Fear, Forgiveness, Frustration, Guilt, Gratitude, Grief, Happiness, Hatred, Hope, Horror, Hostility, Homesickness, Hysteria, Loneliness, Paranoia, Pity, Pleasure, Rage, Regret, Remorse, Sadness, Shame, Suffering, Surprise and Sympathy.

Interesting thing is all of the above emotions are one way or another related to the emotion which I have been talking about. I can keep writing about the relation of each of these emotions with the central emotion, but I think it will all be meaning less if I write about them without feeling those emotions.

One thing which I am feeling right now, and may be that is the reason why I am writing this post, is this emotion is so strong that you would give up everything. To just feel it once, to know that you are part of something special. To know that you can feel what this emotion really is; to know, to feel, to (the title of this post).

FIA clamps down on flexing floors

2007-03-28T07:28:00.000-07:00

Ferrari and BMW Sauber are likely to have to modify the designs of their cars' floors after a warning was issued by FIA technical delegate Charlie Whiting.

Apparently following an informal complaint made by McLaren Mercedes at the Australian Grand Prix, Whiting has sent a letter to all teams informing them that detailed checks will be carried out on cars' underbodies during scrutineering in future to ensure that teams are adhering to the rules about banned moveable devices.

The floor designs of both Ferrari and BMW passed the former flexibility checks in Melbourne, but the teams are likely to present modified cars to scrutineers on the Thursday of the upcoming Malaysian Grand Prix.

Spain's Marca newspaper, meanwhile, revealed that McLaren brought the matter to the FIA's attention with a letter from engineering chief Paddy Lowe, in which he asked the governing body for permission to apply a similar design to its own MP4-22 model.

2007 Technical Regulations: 3.17 Bodywork flexibility:

# 3.17.1 Bodywork may deflect no more than 5mm vertically when a 500N load is applied vertically to it 700mm forward of the front wheel centre line and 625mm from the car centre line. The load will be applied in a downward direction using a 50mm diameter ram and an adapter 300mm long and 150mm wide. Teams must supply the latter when such a test is deemed necessary.
# 3.17.2 Bodywork may deflect no more than 10mm vertically when a 500N load is applied vertically to it 450mm forward of the rear wheel centre line and 650mm from the car centre line. The load will be applied in a downward direction using a 50mm diameter ram and an adapter of the same size, Teams must supply the latter when such a test is deemed necessary.
Cliquez ici...
# 3.17.3 Bodywork may deflect by no more than one degree horizontally when a load of 1000N is applied simultaneously to its extremities in a rearward direction 780mm above the reference plane and 20mm forward of the rear wheel centre line.
# 3.17.4 Bodywork may deflect no more than 5mm vertically when a 500N load is applied vertically to it at a point which lies on the car centre line and 380mm rearward of the front wheel centre line. The load will be applied in an upward direction using a 50mm diameter ram, teams will be required to supply a suitable adapter when such a test is deemed necessary.
# 3.17.5 The uppermost aerofoil element lying behind the rear wheel centre line may deflect no more than 5mm horizontally when a 500N load is applied horizontally. The load will be applied 800mm above the reference plane at three separate points which lie on the car centre line and 250mm either side of it. The loads will be applied in an rearward direction using a suitable 25mm wide adapter which must be supplied by the relevant team.
# 3.17.6 In order to ensure that the requirements of Article 3.15 are respected, the FIA reserves the right to introduce further load/deflection tests on any part of the bodywork which appears to be (or is suspected of), moving whilst the car is in motion.

JavaME Tips: Safe Mobile coding

2007-03-22T23:38:00.000-07:00

Did you know that I make mobile games? Yes I do and I code games using programming langauge called Java 2 Mircoedition(J2ME). I found this wonderfull article on one of the mobile game developer magzines. If you are also in mobile gaming and coding you will enjoy it..

Author Bio: Pascal Bestebroer, Technical manager, OrangePixel

With an experience of game design and development going all the way back to the old 8-bit era, Pascal Bestebroer has, in the last couple of years, written and designed over a dozen games for mobile devices. From original concepts to classic platform and shooter games, he has proven to understand mobile games and game design in general. He has been actively helping begginers and independent developers by writing various articles with an endless enthusiasm.

There are many talented developers out there who are writing mobile games. Thanks to the free tools available and the fairly simple language, J2ME has become the most popular environment to write mobile games in. It brings us back to the days of bedroom and basement coders writing a complete game in a months time, unlike the huge PC and Console projects that require 30-100 people working a couple of years.

However, even though most developers can write a fairly decent game, the big problem that this area of game-development has is the fragmentation of mobile devices. No matter what developers forum you visit, or what industry people you talk to, they always come up with the same problems: every mobile phone works in a different way.

Now this was a huge problem in the early days of mobile games, and although it still is a problem today, it should be noted that it is a lot less of a problem and one that can be remedied for the most part.

In this article I will discuss some tips, mainly aimed at the indie-developers out there that want their game to be distributed and/or published by other companies. We (www.OrangePixel.net ) get weekly requests of people offering their games for publishing, and in most cases we have to say “no thanks”. Not because the games are bad, cause as mentioned before there are some very talented developers out there, but we say no because the game simply is not trusted to run on a lot of phones.

Emulators are crap

First the main rule: Don’t trust an emulator! No matter who created it or what phone it tries to emulate. Don’t trust the freaking things. You would think a specific emulator for a specific phone brand or model would do the exact same thing as the phone. However most emulators don’t seem to use the same J2ME environment as the actual device.

Our developers usually just use Sun’s WTK Emulator to do most of the development and testing of the game logic, and for some simple things we use a brand specific emulator to test out some low resolutions and special API support.

For the rest, we use real phones in most of the major phone families.

We are family

You can usually trust all Nokia40 devices to run things in the same way, same with all Nokia60. Further more all Sony midp2 devices seem to have much the same code and they usually don’t have any strange bugs in them. Same with Sagem midp2 devices.

For the Motorola phones most of the 300,400,500,600 series are the same, except for some issues with the soft keys where some firmware versions use negative numbers and others use positive numbers.

You can find lists of most of the major brands on their developer sites, and it is worth checking into to find the similarities, of course you will need some testing out, but once you know where the bugs are it isn’t that hard to code around them.

Midp2 got nothing on me

Now let’s start with some of the code tricks and tips to make your code run on as many devices as possible. The first and easy trick is: midp1. Just write your code in midp1, cause there is not much that midp2 offers anyway.

All the fancy sprites and layers stuff is usually very badly implemented. No optimising is done, and it can be done A LOT better using your own specific code. The only useful stuff that MIDP2 provides is the setFullScreenMode () call and MIDI playing.

Most developers that dive in will start using the layers and sprites and collision stuff, etc. I’ll be honest, I did the same thing a few years ago. So trust me on this, be warned, learn my lessons, and keep your code simple and keep control.

Sprites

“So how do I handle sprites?” you might ask, well, it’s simple. You just clip and draw images. Really it is that simple. Say you got the below image strip:

Figure 1.1

As with the normal sprite class you store your images in a sprite-strip. Let’s say every frame in your image is 24x24 pixels in size, now if you want to display frame 0 it’s a simple matter of:
Int x=0;
Int y=0;
Graphics.setClip(x,y,24,24);
Graphics.drawImage(mySprite,x,y,Graphics.LEFT|Graphics.TOP);

The X and Y variables define the location where you want to display the sprite and the 24x24 defines the width and height of your sprite. The clip will make sure only the first frame is displayed at position X,Y.

If you want to display the next frame in your strip, you simply shift the drawImage with 24 pixels (size of the first frame) like so:
Int x=0;
Int y=0;
Graphics.setClip(x,y,24,24);
Graphics.drawImage(mySprite,x-24,y,Graphics.LEFT|Graphics.TOP);

As you can see we set the clip still at the position of (X,Y) but we draw the image 24 pixels to the left of that area, effectively showing the second frame in the strip since that image will fall in our “clipped window”. The advantage of drawing your sprites with this technique is that you have a lot more control over what you draw and how to optimise your images, and it should be faster then the Sprite class on most phones.

Old school collision detection

Although the pixel-based collision detection of midp2 is very nice, it is not something we can’t live without. There are many ways to do collision detection, and these range from very simple to very bloated.

As you can imagine I prefer the very simple collision detections. It will not be as accurate as some other ways, but let’s face it, we are looking at a tiny mobile screen that doesn’t have the best of quality (on most devices anyway). So why would you want to do pixel-perfect collision detection? Who would notice the 2 empty pixels at the edge of a sprite? (Answer for those thinking this is a quiz: nobody).

So how to do the most basic collision detection, well the ingredients are: The (X,Y) values of 2 sprites (player + monster, or monster+bullet, etc) and the (width,height) of both those sprites. Finally mix those ingredients with this cool function:
public final boolean collide( int pX1, int pY1,
int pW1, int pH1,
int pX2, int pY2,
int pW2, int pH2) {

if ((pX1<=pX2+pW2) && (pX1+pW1>=pX2) && (pY1<=pY2+pH2) && (pY1+pW1>=pY2)) {
return true;
} else {
return false;
}
}

That fairly simple function should take care of your collisions! What you do is a rectangular check on the two images, by checking if the 2 object-positions overlap. To break it down into some normal English, the overlapping happens when all of the below are true:

* * If the left edge of Object1 is smaller then the right edge of Object2

* * If the right edge of Object1 is bigger than the left edge of Object2

* * If the top edge of Object1 is smaller than the bottom edge of Object2

* * If the bottom edge of Object1 is bigger than the top edge of Object2

If you want to give the player a bit more advantage, you could decrease the width and height values of either both or one of the two objects. This gives the player a little extra margin of error and could give your game a better feel.

Independent resolutions

Something that is hard to work around is the variation in screen resolutions. Now you could write different versions for every resolution available, but you would be much smarter to make your game scale dynamically to the resolutions.
All our games are written with resolution-variations in mind. We constantly use the displayWidth() and displayHeight() values to centre images, draw extra status bars, display a bigger playing field, etc.

As some would argue that you can’t use the images designed for a 128x128 display on a 176x220 display, I say “yes you can”. Of course you have to decide what the most important resolutions are to target. These days I think the 176x220 resolution is the most common one, with the 128x128 still very much available on the many nokia40 devices that are in use.

With this in mind, we tend to create our sprites in a size of 24x24 pixels, this looks bright and clear on a 176x220, while not being “to big” on a 128x128 resolution. For background images (tile’s) we generally go with a 16x16 size for every tile.

It will require some extra thinking and creativity about your game interface, but making your game independent of the resolution will make porting to many different devices so much easier.

Image management

One of the stranger and more annoying problems is probably the problems with Images. Although this is slowly becoming a problem of the past, there are still phones around that have problems with images that are bigger then the display screen. Now I have no clue how this can happen, and why the phone manufacturers bugged it like that, but it happens.

So to be on the safe side, try to keep all your images at a maximum size of 128x128 pixels. Images that are wider or higher then 128pixels can cause problems on handsets out there.

Some more crappy phones will even demand a 127pixel size as maximum, but then you are talking about phones that shouldn’t be running games to begin with cause they can’t handle it. So stick to the 128x128 size and you should be safe.

Finally try to keep your images to only 256 colours, this should be more then enough for decent looking sprites, as I would personally say that a palette of 64 colours is usually enough to cover most of the images in a game.

Memory management

Another problem that is luckily becoming less and less of an annoyance, is with memory. As we all know Java works with a garbage collector, however this can be a fairly lazy garbage collector. Although the java implementation SHOULD do garbage collection, on a fair amount of phones it will not always do it’s job.

I’m not going into the problems with this, cause there are many different views on how things work on some phones, ranging from only collecting garbage that won’t leave gaps to not collecting at all.

From our experience the following few tricks should help you stay on top of things:

* * Try to load your most general images at the start of your game, and never release them. So think about the main player sprites, a bitmap-charset, a logo image, special effect images, etc. Basically the images you use through out the complete game.

* * Avoid loading when it’s not needed. If you load new graphics for every world of your game, make sure you only load them when the world changes. So if a player just finished level 1 of world 1, and continues to level 2 of world 1, don’t load the graphics since you already have them. It saves a lot of memory issues and garbage collection problems to keep the loading of graphics to a minimum.

A good test is to set the memory of your emulator to a low value and play around a bit. Make sure to set that memory lower then an actual device would have, since the Emulator most likely does a better job of garbage-collection. Personally I prefer to use the Nokia40 emulator with it’s 120kb memory limitation, cause if a game runs on that, you should have no memory problems on any of the newer devices.

Jar sizes

Although it’s hard to give tips on this that are new, I still feel like this is a very important part of making your game available on as many handsets as possible. Most of the games I see submitted for publishing are bloated JAR files that are around 200kb in size. Although in a few more years this might not be a problem due to better data-traffic rate’s and phones, right now 200kb is just way to big.

Tricks to keep your JAR files down in the order of small optimisations to big optimisations:

* * Use small file names; Not a big thing, but using 1 or 2 characters for file names, and removing the extensions saves bytes.. simple as that. If possible don’t use many subdirectories for your resources, just dump it all in one directory, again saving extra bytes by not having to keep track of sub directories and their names in the Jar file.

* * Remove messy files; Very often you will see things like “thumbs.db” files in jars, or “temp.txt” files that are obviously not used by the game but are stupidly included in the Jar file. Make sure this don’t happen as they can easily add kb’s to your Jar.

* * Use PNG optimisers to make your images smaller. This can range from simply optimising the colour palettes of the PNG files, to removing the shared-palette from all PNG files and assembling those PNG files in your game, saving about 768bytes per image.

Although many people will tell you to use different Zip methods to create your Jar, we strongly recommend NOT to do this. It is asking for problems with phones that can’t handle those methods and simply won’t run or recognise your Jar files.

Finally

I honestly hope the above tips will help people getting their games to run on more phones. I guess that the most important thing to understand is that you should stay away from any strange tricks and geeky idea’s.

Keep your code simple and your resources optimised. Create your own framework, or blueprint if you like, to build your games on. This will allow you to build more games faster, with shorter test periods, and less strange bugs.

And finally, don’t give up when your first game crashes on most phones you test it on. Identifying those bugs and problems will help you in future projects.

Vodafone Mclaren Mercedes Blog

2007-02-06T10:12:00.000-08:00

After was about thinking about starting another blog exclusively for Formula 1 (my interest and my hobby) and Team Mclaren Mercedes for quite some time. On my 23rd Birthday, I gifted my self a new blog dedicated to my favorite Formula 1 Team Vodafone Mclaren Mercedes. I present to you "Vodafone Mclaren Mercedes Blog":

http://mclarenf1-akash.blogspot.com

This blog covers team Mclaren Mercedes and will have all the news,views and analysis about all the Formula1 events. This is my second effort on Web to show my love to Mclaren Mercedes team. Earlier one, is a Orkut Community "TEAM McLAREN MERCEDES INDIA" which is India's Biggest Mclaren Fan community. You can visit this community at: http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=10621278

Please visit the blog and feel free to comment on it.

Orkut adds Videos

2007-02-02T01:24:00.000-08:00

Orkut is now is the same league as Myspace, Hi5, Porkolt and other social networking websites which allow user to upload the videos. Only differnece is you have to upload videos to Google video or Youtube (Bought by Google) and then add the link of video under favourite video. I could see this coming as only features which Orkut missed compared to Myspace and Hi5 were Music and Videos, and with Google have power of Youtube and Google Video, favourite video was the next thing.

Orkut turned 3 years old and they added videos. I turned 23 today and even I am adding video to my blog. Also I will be posting more frequently from now on and you will get lots of Formula 1 news/videos/and pics on this blog. Becuase I am a Mclaren Mercedes Fan, blog will be focused on it.

To begin this I am adding my first video. I hope you enjoy it.

10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job

2006-12-28T02:40:00.000-08:00

Well I have a job...but following article is really inspiring.......

Link : [http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/07/
10-reasons-you-should-never-get-a-job]

Just for fun I recently asked Erin, “Now that the kids are in summer school, don’t you think it’s about time you went out and got yourself a job? I hate seeing you wallow in unemployment for so long.”

She smiled and said, “Wow. I have been unemployed a really long time. That’s weird… I like it!”

Neither of us have had jobs since the ’90s (my only job was in 1992), so we’ve been self-employed for quite a while. In our household it’s a running joke for one of us to say to the other, “Maybe you should get a job, derelict!”

It’s like the scene in The Three Stooges where Moe tells Curly to get a job, and Curly backs away, saying, “No, please… not that! Anything but that!”

It’s funny that when people reach a certain age, such as after graduating college, they assume it’s time to go out and get a job. But like many things the masses do, just because everyone does it doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. In fact, if you’re reasonably intelligent, getting a job is one of the worst things you can do to support yourself. There are far better ways to make a living than selling yourself into indentured servitude.

Here are some reasons you should do everything in your power to avoid getting a job:

1. Income for dummies.

Getting a job and trading your time for money may seem like a good idea. There’s only one problem with it. It’s stupid! It’s the stupidest way you can possibly generate income! This is truly income for dummies.

Why is getting a job so dumb? Because you only get paid when you’re working. Don’t you see a problem with that, or have you been so thoroughly brainwashed into thinking it’s reasonable and intelligent to only earn income when you’re working? Have you never considered that it might be better to be paid even when you’re not working? Who taught you that you could only earn income while working? Some other brainwashed employee perhaps?

Don’t you think your life would be much easier if you got paid while you were eating, sleeping, and playing with the kids too? Why not get paid 24/7? Get paid whether you work or not. Don’t your plants grow even when you aren’t tending to them? Why not your bank account?

Who cares how many hours you work? Only a handful of people on this entire planet care how much time you spend at the office. Most of us won’t even notice whether you work 6 hours a week or 60. But if you have something of value to provide that matters to us, a number of us will be happy to pull out our wallets and pay you for it. We don’t care about your time — we only care enough to pay for the value we receive. Do you really care how long it took me to write this article? Would you pay me twice as much if it took me 6 hours vs. only 3?

Non-dummies often start out on the traditional income for dummies path. So don’t feel bad if you’re just now realizing you’ve been suckered. Non-dummies eventually realize that trading time for money is indeed extremely dumb and that there must be a better way. And of course there is a better way. The key is to de-couple your value from your time.

Smart people build systems that generate income 24/7, especially passive income. This can include starting a business, building a web site, becoming an investor, or generating royalty income from creative work. The system delivers the ongoing value to people and generates income from it, and once it’s in motion, it runs continuously whether you tend to it or not. From that moment on, the bulk of your time can be invested in increasing your income (by refining your system or spawning new ones) instead of merely maintaining your income.

This web site is an example of such a system. At the time of this writing, it generates about $9000 a month in income for me (update: $40,000 a month as of 10/31/06), and it isn’t my only income stream either. I write each article just once (fixed time investment), and people can extract value from them year after year. The web server delivers the value, and other systems (most of which I didn’t even build and don’t even understand) collect income and deposit it automatically into my bank account. It’s not perfectly passive, but I love writing and would do it for free anyway. But of course it cost me a lot of money to launch this business, right? Um, yeah, $9 is an awful lot these days (to register the domain name). Everything after that was profit.

Sure it takes some upfront time and effort to design and implement your own income-generating systems. But you don’t have to reinvent the wheel — feel free to use existing systems like ad networks and affiliate programs. Once you get going, you won’t have to work so many hours to support yourself. Wouldn’t it be nice to be out having dinner with your spouse, knowing that while you’re eating, you’re earning money? If you want to keep working long hours because you enjoy it, go right ahead. If you want to sit around doing nothing, feel free. As long as your system continues delivering value to others, you’ll keep getting paid whether you’re working or not.

Your local bookstore is filled with books containing workable systems others have already designed, tested, and debugged. Nobody is born knowing how to start a business or generate investment income, but you can easily learn it. How long it takes you to figure it out is irrelevant because the time is going to pass anyway. You might as well emerge at some future point as the owner of income-generating systems as opposed to a lifelong wage slave. This isn’t all or nothing. If your system only generates a few hundred dollars a month, that’s a significant step in the right direction.

2. Limited experience.

You might think it’s important to get a job to gain experience. But that’s like saying you should play golf to get experience playing golf. You gain experience from living, regardless of whether you have a job or not. A job only gives you experience at that job, but you gain ”experience” doing just about anything, so that’s no real benefit at all. Sit around doing nothing for a couple years, and you can call yourself an experienced meditator, philosopher, or politician.

The problem with getting experience from a job is that you usually just repeat the same limited experience over and over. You learn a lot in the beginning and then stagnate. This forces you to miss other experiences that would be much more valuable. And if your limited skill set ever becomes obsolete, then your experience won’t be worth squat. In fact, ask yourself what the experience you’re gaining right now will be worth in 20-30 years. Will your job even exist then?

Consider this. Which experience would you rather gain? The knowledge of how to do a specific job really well — one that you can only monetize by trading your time for money – or the knowledge of how to enjoy financial abundance for the rest of your life without ever needing a job again? Now I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have the latter experience. That seems a lot more useful in the real world, wouldn’t you say?

3. Lifelong domestication.

Getting a job is like enrolling in a human domestication program. You learn how to be a good pet.

Look around you. Really look. What do you see? Are these the surroundings of a free human being? Or are you living in a cage for unconscious animals? Have you fallen in love with the color beige?

How’s your obedience training coming along? Does your master reward your good behavior? Do you get disciplined if you fail to obey your master’s commands?

Is there any spark of free will left inside you? Or has your conditioning made you a pet for life?

Humans are not meant to be raised in cages. You poor thing…

4. Too many mouths to feed.

Employee income is the most heavily taxed there is. In the USA you can expect that about half your salary will go to taxes. The tax system is designed to disguise how much you’re really giving up because some of those taxes are paid by your employer, and some are deducted from your paycheck. But you can bet that from your employer’s perspective, all of those taxes are considered part of your pay, as well as any other compensation you receive such as benefits. Even the rent for the office space you consume is considered, so you must generate that much more value to cover it. You might feel supported by your corporate environment, but keep in mind that you’re the one paying for it.

Another chunk of your income goes to owners and investors. That’s a lot of mouths to feed.

It isn’t hard to understand why employees pay the most in taxes relative to their income. After all, who has more control over the tax system? Business owners and investors or employees?

You only get paid a fraction of the real value you generate. Your real salary may be more than triple what you’re paid, but most of that money you’ll never see. It goes straight into other people’s pockets.

What a generous person you are!

5. Way too risky.

Many employees believe getting a job is the safest and most secure way to support themselves.

Morons.

Social conditioning is amazing. It’s so good it can even make people believe the exact opposite of the truth.

Does putting yourself in a position where someone else can turn off all your income just by saying two words (”You’re fired”) sound like a safe and secure situation to you? Does having only one income stream honestly sound more secure than having 10?

The idea that a job is the most secure way to generate income is just silly. You can’t have security if you don’t have control, and employees have the least control of anyone. If you’re an employee, then your real job title should be professional gambler.

6. Having an evil bovine master.

When you run into an idiot in the entrepreneurial world, you can turn around and head the other way. When you run into an idiot in the corporate world, you have to turn around and say, “Sorry, boss.”

Did you know that the word boss comes from the Dutch word baas, which historically means master? Another meaning of the word boss is “a cow or bovine.” And in many video games, the boss is the evil dude that you have to kill at the end of a level.

So if your boss is really your evil bovine master, then what does that make you? Nothing but a turd in the herd.

Who’s your daddy?

7. Begging for money.

When you want to increase your income, do you have to sit up and beg your master for more money? Does it feel good to be thrown some extra Scooby Snacks now and then?

Or are you free to decide how much you get paid without needing anyone’s permission but your own?

If you have a business and one customer says “no” to you, you simply say “next.”

8. An inbred social life.

Many people treat their jobs as their primary social outlet. They hang out with the same people working in the same field. Such incestuous relations are social dead ends. An exciting day includes deep conversations about the company’s switch from Sparkletts to Arrowhead, the delay of Microsoft’s latest operating system, and the unexpected delivery of more Bic pens. Consider what it would be like to go outside and talk to strangers. Ooooh… scary! Better stay inside where it’s safe.

If one of your co-slaves gets sold to another master, do you lose a friend? If you work in a male-dominated field, does that mean you never get to talk to women above the rank of receptionist? Why not decide for yourself whom to socialize with instead of letting your master decide for you? Believe it or not, there are locations on this planet where free people congregate. Just be wary of those jobless folk — they’re a crazy bunch!

9. Loss of freedom.

It takes a lot of effort to tame a human being into an employee. The first thing you have to do is break the human’s independent will. A good way to do this is to give them a weighty policy manual filled with nonsensical rules and regulations. This leads the new employee to become more obedient, fearing that s/he could be disciplined at any minute for something incomprehensible. Thus, the employee will likely conclude it’s safest to simply obey the master’s commands without question. Stir in some office politics for good measure, and we’ve got a freshly minted mind slave.

As part of their obedience training, employees must be taught how to dress, talk, move, and so on. We can’t very well have employees thinking for themselves, now can we? That would ruin everything.

God forbid you should put a plant on your desk when it’s against the company policy. Oh no, it’s the end of the world! Cindy has a plant on her desk! Summon the enforcers! Send Cindy back for another round of sterility training!

Free human beings think such rules and regulations are silly of course. The only policy they need is: “Be smart. Be nice. Do what you love. Have fun.”

10. Becoming a coward.

Have you noticed that employed people have an almost endless capacity to whine about problems at their companies? But they don’t really want solutions – they just want to vent and make excuses why it’s all someone else’s fault. It’s as if getting a job somehow drains all the free will out of people and turns them into spineless cowards. If you can’t call your boss a jerk now and then without fear of getting fired, you’re no longer free. You’ve become your master’s property.

When you work around cowards all day long, don’t you think it’s going to rub off on you? Of course it will. It’s only a matter of time before you sacrifice the noblest parts of your humanity on the altar of fear: first courage… then honesty… then honor and integrity… and finally your independent will. You sold your humanity for nothing but an illusion. And now your greatest fear is discovering the truth of what you’ve become.

I don’t care how badly you’ve been beaten down. It is never too late to regain your courage. Never!

Still want a job?

If you’re currently a well-conditioned, well-behaved employee, your most likely reaction to the above will be defensiveness. It’s all part of the conditioning. But consider that if the above didn’t have a grain of truth to it, you wouldn’t have an emotional reaction at all. This is only a reminder of what you already know. You can deny your cage all you want, but the cage is still there. Perhaps this all happened so gradually that you never noticed it until now… like a lobster enjoying a nice warm bath.

If any of this makes you mad, that’s a step in the right direction. Anger is a higher level of consciousness than apathy, so it’s a lot better than being numb all the time. Any emotion — even confusion — is better than apathy. If you work through your feelings instead of repressing them, you’ll soon emerge on the doorstep of courage. And when that happens, you’ll have the will to actually do something about your situation and start living like the powerful human being you were meant to be instead of the domesticated pet you’ve been trained to be.

Happily jobless

What’s the alternative to getting a job? The alternative is to remain happily jobless for life and to generate income through other means. Realize that you earn income by providing value — not time – so find a way to provide your best value to others, and charge a fair price for it. One of the simplest and most accessible ways is to start your own business. Whatever work you’d otherwise do via employment, find a way to provide that same value directly to those who will benefit most from it. It takes a bit more time to get going, but your freedom is easily worth the initial investment of time and energy. Then you can buy your own Scooby Snacks for a change.

And of course everything you learn along the way, you can share with others to generate even more value. So even your mistakes can be monetized.

Here are some free resources to help you get started:

The Courage To Live Consciously (article on how to transition to more meaningful work)
Podcast #006 - How to Make Money Without a Job (audio)
Podcast #009 - Kick-start Your Own Business (audio)
Podcast #014 - Embracing Your Passion (audio)
10 Stupid Mistakes Made by the Newly Self-Employed (article)
How to Build a High-Traffic Web Site (or Blog) (article)
How to Make Money From Your Blog (article)

One of the greatest fears you’ll confront is that you may not have any real value to offer others. Maybe being an employee and getting paid by the hour is the best you can do. Maybe you just aren’t worth that much. That line of thinking is all just part of your conditioning. It’s absolute nonsense. As you begin to dump such brainwashing, you’ll soon recognize that you have the ability to provide enormous value to others and that people will gladly pay you for it. There’s only one thing that prevents you from seeing this truth — fear.

All you really need is the courage to be yourself. Your real value is rooted in who you are, not what you do. The only thing you need actually do is express your real self to the world. You’ve been told all sort of lies as to why you can’t do that. But you’ll never know true happiness and fulfillment until you summon the courage to do it anyway.

The next time someone says to you, “Get a job,” I suggest you reply as Curly did: ”No, please… not that! Anything but that!” Then poke him right in the eyes.

You already know deep down that getting a job isn’t what you want. So don’t let anyone try to tell you otherwise. Learn to trust your inner wisdom, even if the whole world says you’re wrong and foolish for doing so. Years from now you’ll look back and realize it was one of the best decisions you ever made.

Mumbai Rudest....????

2006-06-23T03:55:00.000-07:00

Well...Even I used to think so.Before you start reading further...I would like to tell you what is post is all about....Its about a survey conducted by Reader Digest according to which New York is most polite city in the world...and our won Mumbai..(Ammchhi Mumbai....) is rudest....

Take a look at the list...

ROLL OF HONOUR

1 New York (80 per cent)
2 Zurich (77)
3 Toronto (70)
4= Berlin (68)
4= São Paulo (68)
4= Zagreb (68)
7= Auckland (67)
7= Warsaw (67)
9 Mexico City (65)
10 Stockholm (63)
11= Budapest (60)
11= Madrid (60)
11= Prague (60)
11= Vienna (60)
15= Buenos Aires (57)
15= Johannesburg (57)
15= Lisbon (57)
15= London (57)
15= Paris (57)
20 Amsterdam (52)
21= Helsinki (48)
21= Manila (48)
23= Milan (47)
23= Sydney (47)
25= Bangkok (45)
25= Hong Kong (45)
25= Ljubljana (45)
28= Jakarta (43)
28= Taipei (43)
30= Moscow (42)
30= Singapore (42)
32 Seoul (40)
33 Kuala Lumpur (37)
34 Bucharest (35)
35 Bombay (32)

Now you must be thinking why there is no Delhi..Bangalore...or other Indian city...Well answer to that question is:

Reader’s Digest magazine sent reporters into the principal city of each of the 35 countries in which it publishes to conduct a survey of local politeness. Three tests were employed: dropping papers in a busy street to see if anyone would help; checking how often shop assistants said “thank you”; and counting how often someone held a door open.

TimesOnline(UK) says principal city in the country, that good news for all Mumbai...but the bad news is we are the rudest...(I mean according to survey).All Mumbai based news papers...TOI, HT, MIDDAY, DNA,MIRROR...everyone is trying to tell their reader that we are not rude...we are civil...we feel for the city and everyone from heart...and similar kind of arguments.

I don't believe any of those newspaper....but at the same time I don't even agree with RD's survey.Picking up a papers...holding doors...saying thanks....is that enough to brand a city as polite....or rude...(if they don't do that..).

After reading the survey....I thought they are right. Try catching a train in peak hours and you will know how rude are people to each other.I generally avoid doing that....but on one such occasion...while getting out of the train....I got a deep cut on my hand...I still have that mark..on my hand.But in the same train...I have seen...people..taking care of each other,saying sorry, when they push you...and smiling to each other even if they don't have breathing space.
That means even if we are rude...(becasue we do not say thank you , hi bye...etc)...we do care about everyone around us...we do try to help people ....and that why I think people call Mumbai, a city with Spirit.

I think now its the time for us ( not BMC, not MMRDC)....to start working together to improve our own city...and make it one of the best city in the world...(We know we have no competition in India.. :P (see that TIMESONLINE wrote...principal city in the country ;) )

While Inagurating Mumbai Metro Rail Project ( One step toward better Mumbai), Our Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh said following statement which is very encouraging for all Mumbaikars.

“Last year, they (Mumbaikars) demonstrated to the country and the world their resolve, their determination, their energy, their spirit of cooperation and tolerance, and I salute them.’’

Another Fun Ride....

2006-01-02T02:15:00.000-08:00

Bikes..and Long drives..... A true passion, and I share it with my group. (IIT wing junta)

Last Year in Jan, I along with my Five friends went on a unplanned trip to Goa, a 1300 Km ride completed in two and half day. Trip all of us can never forget.

Around 1 am 31st December.. I hear a knock at my door.I was watching "Kal ho na ho" on Doordarshan along with Sammy ( My room mate) at our Andheri flat.When I opened the door, I saw Dopa, Shanty and Mucchi with Shanty and Mucchi in helmets. I asked them to come inside. I asked them whats there plan and they said they are thinking of goinig on a long drive, just to rediscover the magic of our Jan ride to Goa and to bide a great adventurous farewell to 2005.I asked them where are we going and Dopa said " Hum Kabhi plan karke kahi gaye hai kya...aaj bhi nikal padege tahalne". I acted fast and got dressed up soon. This time...unlike the last time...We also..took sweaters and jackets with us to counter December cold.

I wished Sammy Happy New Year( Even thou it was more than 20 hrs left...) But I was not sure where I would be when India will welcome new year.

All set...to start another long trip..we leave my house.After reaching S.V Road Andheri. Dopa asks" Kaha jana hai....abe kisi se puche hai ki Ahemdabad road per koi Tahalne ki Jagah hai kya". Shanty replys" Abe Goa chale hai.....maja aagega". I rejects Shanty's suggestion...I tell them..Goa will be expensive..and very exhuastive. " Mucchi then says" Abe Ahemdabad road per hi chalete hai...kuch na kuch to hoga...Aur waise bhi mujhe Kal raat apne bhai ke Ramp Walk per jana hai isliye subah tak wapas aa jayege". We keep discussing various options....and felt that Ahemdabad Road option is not good one...and we should move towards Panvel, and while driving toward Panvel...we can decide where to go. We starts moving again. From Western Express highway to eastern Express Highway. Before SakiNaka...Mucchi suggest that we should cross Ghatkopar to reach highway, I say No. Mucchi take a turn at Saki Naka...and We more toward Ghatkopar....moving againsts our own decisions...and untracable to others.After getting lost...We decide(on cellphones) to meet at Aaroli CheckPost. Finally we meet each other...and decides that we should move together becoz next time if we make mistake...we wont be able to reach others becoz...our cell phones wont work outiside Mumbai. We keep Driving..Cross..Dhirubhai Knowledge city, Nerul, KharGhar....and decide to stop at Panvel McDonald.

Now its time to decide the destination.Goa pops up again. We take Coffee sips...to counter chilling night.Dopa says Lonavala...I say Alibag..., many other names pop up....but finally we decide to go to Alibag. And we resumes aur...ride....we keep driving....untill we see....a turn...which goes....to Goa...Shanty again says...GOA.....but we decide to move ahead. We keep driving....Temperature kept decreasing....we refill and again start driving.....but soon we get the feeling that we are not moving toward sea side...but moving towards hills....to comfirm this feeling.....we stop..and ask one man Alibag ka rasta.

Dopa: Uncle ji, Alibag ka rasta kaha hai??
Shanty to me: Abe Bhaiya bolna tha.
Uncle: Where u going.....yaha kaha aa gaye bhai tum log......Alibag ka turn to 40 km piche chut gaya.....
Dopa: Kya bol rahe ho
Uncle: Haan woh turn jo Goa jata hai na...wahi turn hona tha...
Me: Ohhhh....
Shanty; Yaar Goa hi jana tha....
Mucchi; Ab kya Kare...
Uncle: Dekho...Khopoli 4-5 km hai....waha se..Shivaji ke putle ke pass se turn loge to sidha rasta Pen jata hai.....aur Alibag jata hai...
Dopa; kItna km hai waha se Alibag...
uncle : 50...per abhi tum Khoploi jau...aur subah hone tak intejaar kar.....Us raste hai koi bharosa nahi....

Dopa: Kya bharosa nahi......kharab hai kya...raat mein drive karne mein problem hogi kya

Uncle: Aree...Driving ka chodo yaar....Waha Pathar maarte hai......

Dopa: kya bol rahe ho...

Uncle: haan...Koi Bharosa nahi hai Us raste hai.....Panther fekte hai.....pata bhi nahi chalega..ki kaha gaye....

Everyone...is silent....

Dopa: Lonavla chalte hai....10-15 km hi hai.....kaha pathar ka ke marege.....

Uncle.: Arre...Khopoli Jao...waha Chai piyo....aur subah nikal jao.... That road will be better for u...but abhi koi bharoisa nahi hai...

We decide to move to Khopli...which according to uncle was only 4-5 km.

now..I am behind..Mucchi....
Mucchi to ME: kahi woh uncle to apna Chuitya nahi kaat raha hai na....pata chala khopche..mein le ja raha hoon....
I tell him not to think like that....We see the signborad..Khopoli 15 km....we drive together....all of us thinking about...what uncle said to...us..

We stop before Khopoli for tea....and talk to people about road to Alibag....Chaiwala says...arre...woh rasta to theek hai...bus bada bada gudda hai....We asked him abt pathar....he says...are woh to karjat side hota hai....we ask him...is it safe to drive at this time of hr( 4: 30 am ) he says..yes....

We move ahead.....reached Khopoli...but again do not take correct trun...and move straight ahead towards lonavala...I ask Shanty to stop....and sugguest that we should confirm the road. We go to a police chowki..ask the hawaldar for direction.....when Dopa Mucchi...saw that we are talking to Police....they take a fast turn.....and run back.....after some time they came back..thinking that Thula hamari le raha hai..but we guys have a good conversation...with thula...and gives us...all correct directions.

Now we had the correct directions....Before moving on them...We stop at a Chai ki dukan....We again asked...Chai wala about the road...and pather pekne wala incident.....He says road...is good...and drivinig wont be a problem.Another coustomer at the Tea stall...says...yeah the road is good...Just to confirm...we ask him about pather...pekne wala incident...and he said " BOSS WOH to Timing per hota hai....agar galat time hoga to kuch bhi ho sakta hai".

All of the start laughing ....stilll not sure....whether to go or not to go...Muchhi se...Chalo..Lonava chalte hai...wahi room le lenge...New yr bhi wahi banayege....I strongly say now...becoz..almost every other weekend we go out to lonavala for drive....also I thought Mucchi is just bluffing....as he has to attend him brother ramp walk at Lokhandwaka complex. Shanty Say" Aaj mein Final Destination 2 dekhi hai....." Woh dekho...Traffic pole gira...aap per....." and Suddenly....all lights....went off.....All of us...starts laughing...again.....

But we decide we should not waste time...and resume with our journey.....65 Km ahead is Alibag....Dopa asks...kya karenge..Alibag mein....I replyed..." Arre maine dekha nahi hai yaar...bas ek baar dekh lenge...chai piyege...aur fhir Mumbai"

We start again...but this time....road is bad....and at the same time....we were thinking abt the Pather phekke marne wali baat. Mucchi says to Dopa "Abe agar koi pather mare...to sir daba lena....mai bhaga lunga". We keep driving.....road keeps getting worse and worse....and we cover 35 km of bad road strech...we could see....light appearing from horizons.....Now only 3o km to Alibag....We decide to drive continiously till we reach our destination. After another hr long drive...we reach Alibag beach.

Sun was about to rise...above the horizon...We sat on the beach....and watched the last sunrise...of 2005...Red shades.. sun rise above the waters..and hills...( Muchhi,,," Abe Suraj shaded hai.." )

Beach was full of life.....many people...came there along with there respective groups....Childern came there with parent and enjoyed the horse ride....also...we witnessed...a Dogs orgy..;).

We had anda pav and tea. Stop there for some more time would have resulted in wasting the whole day...and we were sure...we will sleep there on the beach it self.....Without waiting for more time...we started back... This time without...taking wrong turn.......head straight ..non stop...towards..IIT. We reached IIt around 11 am.

Alibag is around 90 km from IIT, but we drove around 250 km to reach there....But we never regreted it...our aim was to drive...and rediscover the magic of our last long bike ride....and we did that......

After driving around 350 km....all night...all we now needed was a good.undisturbed sleep....

After talking shower...I went straight to bed...and woke up...around 7 in the evening.

I added another great bike ride in my long list of bike rides.....this one too....as rememberable as others....

BLOGGING WILL BE BACK......

2005-12-26T22:48:00.000-08:00

NEW POST SOON.........................

Current events:

-> Annirudha Visited me on Christmas
-> Arun in Town
-> Khan Cracked Job in Inductis.....Big Party....;)
-> New year plans too be decided...
-> Blogging to start soon

2005-07-28T06:47:00.000-07:00

hi all..i am back..on my blog and also back in mumbai....

Nowdays everyone is asking me "Why are you back in Mumbai..when you were suppose to join Tavant, Bangalore ? ". And then comes the explanations which I have repeated 100s of time that I got a new job in Mumbai, In Octane Mobile, A company working in Mobile Applications and Gaming.I think that sounds intereting.
But things are not that easy in Mumbai, i am taking up a place in Andheri East and its damn expensive, but anyway have to deal with it.But the good news is I will be in Mumbai, a city with a spirt to live...and this was see again on 26th -27th when 966 mm of rains came down in single day and Mumbai was flooding. But I think its the sprit of the city that its back of business as usual next day even though people were still thinking and talking about the highest rainfall ever in the city in a single day.

Will be writing more..in coming days, btw i am joining my job on 2nd Aug.

Moral Basis of Justice

2005-07-01T07:47:00.000-07:00

Justice is a concept involving the fair and moral treatment of all persons, especially in law. It is often seen as the continued effort to do what is "right." In most of all cases "right" is determined by either the majority or logic. If a person lives under a certain set law in a certain country, justice is considered making the person follow the law and be punished if not.

All societies around the world need a prop for proper functioning of various administrative, legislative and social mechanisms. This prop is in the form of Laws. Laws govern people in various realms of life. But philosophically Laws are nothing but the meeting point of Morality and Justice. That brings us to the debate whether Justice has a moral basis.

Several theorists and intellectuals have tried looking into this. Plato one of the stalwarts in the field of philosophy had looked into the matter deeply. In his Republic he extensively discusses about the basis of Justice being morality. He tried to tie justice with and individual’s internal state, his morality, rather than to social norms or good consequences. Aristotle on the other hand believed that situations and communities are just, when individuals receive benefits according to their merits, or virtue, that is those most morally virtuous deserve more of whatever goods society is in a position to distribute. An individual who seeks more than her fair share of various goods, has the vice of greediness and a just individual is one who has rational insight into her own deserts in various situations and who habitually takes no more than what she deserves. Both Plato and Aristotle emphasized the role of reason, both in perceiving what is just and in allowing us to act justly.

But sentimentalists like Hutcheson and Hume have a different take on the issue. According to them justice has a grounding in universal benevolence rather than in morality. According to Hutcheson universal benevolence can never hinder the path of justice. Hume though believed that individual justice at least sometimes conflicts with what benevolence would motivate us to do, believing that judgments about virtue and rightness depend on our capacity for sympathy and morality rather than on some form of reason.

Societies are always debating over the right balance of justice and morality. Rawls, one of the modern stalwarts in the field famously stated that good of society as a whole cannot deny an individual his rights and justice. Even if at the cost of an individual’s justice a larger number of people benefit, it would be unjust to deny the individual his fair share. But the flaw in it is that some people who have more cannot make up for other people having less.

But Justice and Morality change with time and location. A Law considered valid at an instant may not hold at a later date. So is the case with morals. Child marriage which was a norm throughout India a few centuries back is considered unlawful and unjust among most of the educated masses at the present time. (Though in villages child marriage is still considered sacred).Morality and justice are also location dependent. Example of this can be seen by comparing morality and laws in Europe and Middle East. Polygamy though allowed in great parts of Middle East is banned in most of Europe. Prostitution though lawful in Netherlands, is a crime in Middle East and several other countries. But though Prostitution is legally allowed in Netherlands, the prostitutes are morally looked down upon.

All laws therefore may not be morally right. Capital Punishment, though applicable in lot of countries, is considered morally wrong. But this brings out the aspect of the form of government in the countries it holds. Most of the countries having Capital Punishment are either authoritarian or dictatorial. Even the four democracies, including India and United States, are debating over scrapping it.

But legally unlawful things may not necessarily be considered immoral. A good example of this is child marriage, which we spoke about earlier. In villages where it is vehemently followed it is considered sacred and any interference is considered interference with the will of their gods. In Rajasthan when a police officer tried stopping a child marriage, her hands were chopped.

Laws may not necessarily be derived from the moral standing of the society. It sometimes has to be rationally correct.

Classically, justice was the ability to recognize one's debts and pay them. It was a virtue that encompassed an unwillingness to lie or steal. It was the basis for the code duello. In this view, justice is the opposite of the vice of venality. In jurisprudence, justice is the obligation that the legal system has toward the individual citizen and the society as a whole. Justice (in both senses) is part of the debate regarding moral relativism and moral absolutism.

Moral absolutism is the belief or theory that there are absolute standards against which moral questions can be judged and suggests that morals are not determined by societal or situational influences. According to moral absolutism, morals are inherent in the laws of the universe, the nature of humanity, or some other fundamental source. Moral absolutism is often contrasted with moral relativism.

Moral absolutism regards actions as inherently or inarguably moral or immoral. Moral absolutists might, for example, judge slavery, the death penalty, or childhood female genital mutilation to be absolutely and inarguably immoral regardless of the beliefs and goals of a culture that engages in these practices.

In a minority of cases, moral absolutism is taken to the more constrained position that actions are moral or immoral regardless of the circumstances in which they occur. Lying, for instance, would always be immoral, even if done to promote some other good (e.g., saving a life). This rare view of moral absolutism might be contrasted with moral consequentialism—the view that the morality of an action depends on the context or consequences of that action. Modern human rights theory is a form of moral absolutism, usually based on the nature of humanity and the essence of human nature.

A primary criticism of moral absolutism regards how we come to know what the 'absolute' morals are. The authorities that are quoted as sources of absolute morality are all subject to human interpretation, and multiple views abound on them. For morals to be truly absolute, they would have to have a universally unquestioned source, interpretation and authority. Therefore, so critics say, there is no conceivable source of such morals, and none can be called 'absolute'. So even if there are absolute morals, there will never be universal agreement on just what those morals are, making them by definition unknowable.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant was a promoter of moral absolutism.

Moral relativism is a view that claims moral standards are not absolute or universal, but rather emerge from social customs and other sources. Relativists consequently see moral values as applicable only within agreed or accepted cultural boundaries. Very few, if any, people hold this view in its pure form, but hold instead another more qualified version of it.

Moral relativists hold that an unsharable, personal, and aesthetic moral core lies at the foundation of personal choices. They deny the possibility of sharing morality at all, except by convention. A simple way to express this view is that "everyone draws their own moral from the same story" and behaves according to their own impression, acceptance, or rejection of it. It is often confused with ethical relativism which holds that morality can be shared but only between closely-knit groups sharing a moral code and committed to joint action, e.g. an ethnic minority in a hostile situation.

A moral relativist, on the other hand, would hold that even people in such a circumstance do not follow a common moral code, but are simply unable to follow their varying personal urges due to social pressure.

Moral relativism stands in contrast to moral absolutism, which sees morals as fixed by an absolute human nature ( Jean-Jacques Rousseau), or external sources such as deities (many religions) or the universe itself (as in Objectivism).

Moral basic of justice is administered by the theory of absolutism but countered by relativism. Both the theories are supported by examples and criticized by many people. Moral absolutism can not explain many of the doubts. Consider, for example, the 6th Commandment "Thou shalt not kill": Many if not most conservatives recognize numerous exceptions, including killing in war, and killing which is necessary to defend one's own life and property and the lives and property of other (law-abiding) citizens. The commandment in question is sometimes rendered "Thou shalt do no murder", which is intended to imply the legitimacy of some of these exceptions, but this rewording is really a copout because all it really says is "Thou shalt do no bad killing", where the definition of "bad killing" is left to one's minister, one's personal proclivities, or the legislature -- none of which are widely recognized as sources of absolute wisdom.

The Sixth Commandment, however, is not a special case; for it is easy to come up with reasonable exceptions to virtually any other rule of "absolute" morality. For example, adultery is defined by law, so if laws change, or if they differ in different localities, then this means that a person might be considered to be committing adultery by one set of laws but not by another, or at one time but not another -- all of which hardly places adultery in the "absolute morality" category. Likewise, stealing is dependent on particular legal definitions, but also involves such complicated moral situations as the poor man who takes food from a rich man to keep from starving

It is important to realize that morality is not absolute, it is even more important to realize that it changes with times and situations. Perhaps the most striking example of this is sexual morality: In earlier times, the possibility of pregnancy and venereal disease made extramarital sexual intercourse virtually unthinkable for those caring to lead anything other than a thoroughly degraded life; but with the development of contraception and venereal prophylaxis, the most important barriers to extramarital sex disappeared, giving rise to the "sexual revolution". This is not, of course, to say that sexual freedom is an unmixed blessing; but it is to point out that, in at least this case, morality is dependent on the current state of technology.

As we can see that Moral absolutism have many problems, it’s not the only theory with problems. Moral relativism also have many problems with it as it could not give a proper solution to many of the situations.

Let us consider a few examples of how moral relativism affects the way many people approach public moral issues. The abortion issue is one of the main argument against relativism.

Some abortion-rights advocates, in response to pro-life arguments, emote such bumper-sticker slogans as: "Pro-choice, but personally opposed," "Don't like abortion, don't have one," or "Abortion is against my beliefs, but I would never dream of imposing my beliefs on others." These slogans attempt to articulate in a simple way a common avenue taken by politicians and others who want to avoid the slings and arrows that naturally follow a firm position on abortion. It is an attempt to find "a compromise" or "a middle ground"; it's a way to avoid being labeled "an extremist" of either camp.

The pro-abortionist's unargued assumption of moral relativism to solve the abortion debate reveals a tremendous ignorance of the pro-life position. For the fact is that if one believes that the unborn are fully human (persons), then the unborn carried in the wombs of pro-choice women are just as human as those carried in the wombs of pro-life women. For the pro-lifer, an unborn child is no less a human person simply because the child happens to be living inside Whoopi Goldberg or Cybil Shepherd. Ideology does not change identity.

Contrary to popular belief, the so-called "pro-choice" position is not neutral. The abortion-rights activist's claim that women should have the "right to choose" to kill their unborn fetuses amounts to denying the pro-life position that the unborn are worthy of protection. And the pro-lifer's affirmation that the unborn are fully human with a "right to life" amounts to denying the abortion-rights position that women have a fundamental right to terminate their pregnancies, since such a termination would result in a homicide. It seems, then, that appealing to moral relativism (or moral pluralism ala Mario Cuomo) to "solve" the abortion debate is an intellectual impossibility and solves nothing.

Another example of how ethical relativism affects the way many people approach public moral issues can be seen in the arguments concerning the right to boycott products advertised on television programs which certain groups believe are psychologically and morally harmful. The usual argument in response to these groups is, "If you don't like a particular program, you don't have to watch it. You can always change the channel." But is this response really compelling? One must point out that these groups are not only saying that they personally find these programs offensive, but rather are arguing that the programs themselves convey messages and create a moral climate that will affect others especially children in a way they believe is adverse to the public good. Hence, what bothers these groups is that you and your children will not change the channel.

As long as these groups do not advocate state censorship, but merely apply social and economic pressure to private corporations (which civil rights and feminist groups have been doing for some time now), a balance of freedoms is achieved. Both are free to pursue their interests within the confines of constitutional protection, although both must be willing to accept the social and economic consequences of their actions. This seems to best serve the public good. Notice that this position does not resort to ethical relativism, but takes seriously the values of freedom, the public good, and individual rights and attempts to uphold these values in a way that is consistent and fair.

As we can see that both moral absolutism and relativism can have some problems with it , but tells us that justice and morality are closely related ; infact , the ultimate principles of morality and justice are overlapping, if not the same.

Can you predict whats gonna happen next in your Life...

2005-06-26T14:25:00.000-07:00

I think everyone wants to know whats gonna happen next in his/her life....and therefore people go to astrologers, read daily zodiac prediction..and similar things to know their future.In business people follow trends and thus try to forecast.But I am not trying to find any solution to how to find what will happen in future nor i want to know whats in the future. I just wanna write about a persons' past few years ...which I think he could never have predicted or even thought about.

FOUR YEARS AGO

Entred a guy, named Akash in the one of the best institute of the nation, with lots of dreams in his eyes.He knew it will be tough to survive, but determined because he wanted to prove to his world that he existed.

As every other new guy he started making friends, friends which he never thought will become very important part of his life.He spent all his first year making friends, shouting for his hostel and ignoring his studies.May be the fast pace of life deleted his ambitions.

THREE YEARS AGO

After spending three months at home he came back to his institute, but this time he was sophomore. He had juniors and he had seniors, seniors who were waiting for him in his wing to take every piece of cloth from his body.Initially there used to be long sessions of ragging and then started the long session of fundes.He was feeling good here.But remember he wanted to prove himself.He started working for the institutes cultural festival.He made new friends, he ignored studies more. He worked like a horse to prove himself.Then came the time when he thought he will get the reward for his hardwork.But I think he never understood its not easy to predict things.He could not get the position for which he worked so hard.He was depressed.He started ignoring his studies more.But remember he made friends in his first and second year, they always supported him. His friends support and his hard work paid off, he got a position in other institute body.And he thought now he will prove everyone that he existed.At the end of year he passed with good grades( to his surprise) and had a position of responsibility , and not to forget friends.

TWO YEARS AGO

He started working hard for his new position and was also succuesfull in deliverying things at the best form.Many people knew him and he knew many people.He spent most of his time working and rest of the time sleeping.All this attention was new for him, and thus he forgot about the think for which he came to the institute, studies.He thought as every time he will get good grades this time as well but this time his luck was not happy with him.He thought this has to be worse time in his academic life.For support he was looking for his friends, but this time he was surprised to know that even if many people knew him and he knew them , they were not this friends. Only few people were there when he wanted most of them to come.He never predicted this thing will happen.Over the next few months he started looking for friends which will be with him for all his life.I dont know whether we was able to find those friends or not, but he made some really good friends which i know he will never forget all his life.

ONE YEAR AGO

With his new support system but with his crippled academics, he entered in his fourth year of Btech education.This time he did not wanted to prove himself to the world. He knew its not difficult to prove the world that you exist, but its very difficult to prove yourself that you exist.This time he just wanted to give a kick start to his career by securing a good job. He started improving his academics and worked real hard to get a good job. Most of the big companies didn't even gave him chance to compete because of his low CGPA.But he was not depressed.He worked hard this time.Meanwhile he was working hard he was also strengthened his attachment with his support system.He just wanted to bring smile on the faces of family and his support system.All his hard work paid off when he was able to secure a job in a good company with good compensation. Then started the celebrations, I think celebrations are still on.He decided to spend rest of his time in the institute in a way doing things which he will always remember.And suddenly ended his four years of education. He was all set to join this company in Bangalore , finshed all his booking and started bidding goodbye to all his firends which used to be the important part of life.Often he used to think about his new life in a new city, his friends for life and about the feeling for emptiness which will be created when he will leave for other city. And then happened which he, niether his family nor his friends thought. He got a job oppurtunity with better position of responsibilites in the city of Mumbai. His friends are happy because now he will be with them. His family is confused about his new job. But I am still trying to know what he is feeling about this whole thing.

CURRENT TIME

I think he is excited but at the same time he is nervous about the whole situation.He has decided to leave his job at Bangalore, and decided to learn alot more joining the company at Mumbai.But as usaul because he is not able to predict whats up next in his life he just wishes that he should never regreat his decision at any point of time in his life.Also he is happy to be back with his support system, but fear that he might not loose the support.

Well this simple story of a simple guy tells us that its not easy to predict future.But I just wish this guy a future which is he could never have predicted but in a positive way :).

Don't Cry

2005-06-26T13:39:00.000-07:00

Talk to me softly

There's something in your eyes

Don't hang your head in sorrow

And please don't cry

I know how you feel inside I've

I've been here before

Somethin's changin' inside you

And don't you know

Don't you cry tonight

I still love you baby

Don't you cry tonight

there's a heaven above you baby

And don't you cry tonight

Give me a whisper

And give me a sigh

Give me a kiss before you tell me goodbye

Don't you take it so hard now

And please don't take it so bad

I'll still be thinking of you

And the times we had... baby

Don't you cry tonight

there's a heaven above you baby

And don't you cry tonight

And please remember that I never lied

And please remember

how I felt inside now honey

You gotta make it your own way

But you'll be alright now sugar

You'll feel better tomorrow

Come the morning light now baby

And don't you cry tonight

An don't you cry tonight

there's a heaven above you baby

And don't you cry

Don't you ever cry

Don't you cry tonight

Baby maybe someday

Don't you cry

Don't you ever cry

Don't you cry

Tonight