I don't know

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It is so funny how some Castle can come crumbling down. The same castle, which you built one day, to bury yourself in its confines. You never think of it. It requires only a small trigger, a small flashback and all your protection lies in tatters. You are left helpless in the stark reality. How much you try, there is nothing that could be done.

You never want to think of those questions. Still they keep coming to you. Answers are none. You want to be ostrich and bury your head in sand so that nothing finds you. But all goes futile. It never goes away nor do you get the answers. You keep running from it and you reach the same place again and again.

Something went past you long back. It doesn’t matter how hard you tried, it left you. You bury it so that you don’t need to think how it could happen? But it comes back to you and then you can’t believe it has already happened. You thought nothing can make you helpless (again); alas! it was just an illusion.

You are so confident of yourself that summer has gone and winter is here. Frigid, cold, dark winter and you love it. But the ice can melts one day and you are exposed. You thought this year is going to be different, this year the winter will be harsh, the ice on the lake more thick. But nothing has changed. A small prick and the whole layer cave in.

You look at God and think who is immortal?

Hamas victory - What it means for Democracy ?

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The shock waves, which came with the results of Palestinian election in ten years, were not limited to West Asia but transcended continents and countries. Most of the western nations and obviously Israel have expressed ‘serious’ concerns with Islamist Hamas group getting majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council.

The election which was held on 25th January saw 75% of voters casting the ballot. Out of the 132 seats, Hamas group won 76 seats thereby getting a majority in the council. The results precipitated the condition of west Asia with comments going back and forth between Hamas and political leadership of Israel.

There is also a view that Palestine was too immature for democracy as they elected a terrorist group. On careful analysis, I don’t seem to agree with this. When the turn out is 75%, which is much higher than the turnout in mature democracies like India, it shows strong resolve of people for choosing their own government. In this particular election, the mandate is not as much for Hamas as it is against the incumbent Fatah party. In the last ten years, Fatah group has been taken over by corrupt leaders and the legislative council failed to do anything worthwhile to improve the condition of common Palestinians. There was no other option but Hamas. If there is question over democracy then it is not due to Hamas but due to Fatah.

Most of the average Palestinians don’t agree to the extremist policies of Hamas. They are in favor of negotiation with Israel and ties with world community. No doubt the principle of Hamas has been extremism; it considers creation of Palestine as its religious duty and it also does not recognize Israel. Until the election results were declared even Hamas would not have dreamt of such land slide victory. At most it would have thought of emerging as some consequential group and to wield influence over the new government. . But a Hamas in government would be much different than Hamas till now. It is going to be subdued in its policy of extremism under the yoke of the immense responsibility running a country heavily dependant on foreign aid. Political feelers are already being sent out by Hamas leadership for negotiation over foreign aid. The exiled political head of Hamas, Khaled Meshal, in Damascus has talked of adopting a realistic approach over Palestinian authority and to work with Europe and US.

It is not the opportune time to come out with charged statements but of giving Hamas time to settle down and take cognizance of ground situation. Who knows the Palestine situation may be solved for good during the Hamas rule. It would then be the finest example of same democracy, which is being questioned now.

Google news

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Today when I was reading Google news, I saw an article with familiar title. Then I realised it was the title of my own article which I had written for Desicritics which was put up in Blogcritics and then finally to Google news.

You can read the article on Blogcritics or Desicritics

Mittal Steel Bids For Arcelor - Why?

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The New Year has not been particularly good for the board executives of Arcelor. Just days after wining the tough fight with ThyssenKrupp AG for buying out the Canadian steel maker Dofasco Inc, they are again huddling in their board room in less than 12 hours from now. This time the predator has been turned into prey.

The bid of Rotterdam based Mittal Steel has stunned everyone including Arcelor which has termed it as 'hostile'. Mittal Steel, controlled 88% by family of L N Mittal has offered to buy shares of Arcelor for Euros 18.6 billion in cash and shares. The steel industry has seen lot of mergers and consolidation in past few years, Arcelor itself being a result of the merger of steel companies of France, Luxembourg and Spain. But this bid has outshone all of them.

If successful, the combined entity will have total annual capacity of 115mn tones with the next biggest being Nippon Steel of Japan having capacity of 30mn tones. The hectic merger activity in steel industry started after Chinese demand lifted it from a multi-year slump. Since then, the insatiable Chinese hunger has seen soaring prices and profits increasing by 30 to 35 % for most of the companies. At its peak the benchmark hot rolled coil steel jumped from $200 per ton to $600 per ton which has since fallen to around $500.

But this Chinese demand is also supported by huge production from Chinese companies. The output of China in 2005 being 349mn tones, it is estimated that by 2010 Chinese total production will be much higher than its total demand. This would lead to glut coupled with possibility of a slump due to cyclical nature of steel market. This leads us to a question, why is Mittal Steel trying to snap Arcelor?

There are a few reasons. Though Chinese production capacity is increasing by leaps and bounds, it lacks good quality iron ore. It purchases most of the raw material from Brazil and Australia. In the merged company, by its sheer size, Mittal Steel will have greater bargaining power over suppliers who have increased their prices by 72% in recent times. This will give them an edge over Chinese producers of steel. Secondly, the steel industry has traditionally been a seller-driven market and Mittal would be able to restore it to that level so that they can tide over any slump. Thirdly, with economies of scale it could lower overall operating expenses and resist price hikes (Arcelor has a considerable mining presence)

The other reason could be that Arcelor and Mittal were competing with each other (Ukraine's state-owned Kryvorizhstal bid) in buying out other steel companies thereby increasing the price. This problem would be solved for Mittal with the takeover.

Chances are high for the takeover to go through as most of the share holders of Arcelor are institutions and they don't love individual companies. There could be a few hiccups like opposition from the French and Luxembourg governments. Mittal might also have to raise the price it is offering per share. Despite these hurdles, the merge will create an entity of considerable heft

'Google.cn', damn ethics, we do business!

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What happens when a firm faces a conflict between its purported 'ethics' and chance of making money? Simple, it chooses 'business' over 'ethics'. This is what the darling company of new age economy ‘Google Inc’ chose.

'Google' obsequiously acceded to all the (restrictive) requirements of Chinese government to place it servers in mainland China and get “Google.cn”. Chinese government was never comfortable with 'Google' and connections to its servers were routed through firewalls of government making the access slow for users. Chinese government in particular disliked the ‘cached’ WebPages facility which allowed users to view even those WebPages which were blocked by it. The slow access allowed the local search engine ‘Baidu.com’ to get 40% market share while Google had 30% share. How can 'Google', number 1 search engine of world see itself number 2 in the 'fastest growing economy' of world? The same Google whose 10 points ethics includes ‘interests of the user first’, ‘Democracy on the web’ and ‘The need for information crosses all borders’ conveniently chose to ignore all of this for 10% market share.

In US, 'Google' has been contesting the subpoena of Justice department which asked it to reveal random 1 million search results permanently stored in it servers. This investigation is being done to stop child pornography. Google says it is 'breach of trust' it has with its users. What a farce? Now who won’t believe that the real purpose of this is to earn few brownie points over Yahoo, MSN and AOL who complied with the subpoena? 'Hypocrisy' is the only word which does not gets stored in Google’s server.

'Google' has once again proved that when it comes to business, nothing is paramount than profits. After all when founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin take $1 as their annual pay, profits are the only way to maximize the share value and hence the stock option. They can’t afford to remain at 16th on Forbes magazine's list of the 400 richest Americans when Bill Gates is on number 1.

Go ahead Google, shout your slogan “Don‘t be evil.”

Republic Day

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Happy Republic day to all Indians !!!

The Observation

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This is the observation which led me to do research on Chernobyl accident. Last week as usual I was having headache and had no pills with me for it. There is one Apteeki(pharmacy) downstairs but my pounding headache didn’t allow me to go and buy it from there.

I remembered there is a first aid box in our office kitchen and wanted to try my luck in it. I opened the box and found it full of plasters, medicine patches, thermometer and two bottles of pills. Those pills were not of headache but one of the pills was “Jodix, 130Mg” manufactured by Orion Pharmaceuticals. The pill can be seen in the picture below.




This pill caught my attention. This is the pill you are supposed to take when you are exposed to radioactivity! I have seen first aid boxes in lot of places in India - in school, church, bus, plane, office, etc. In my school day it was one of our science projects to make a first aid box and we had to put contents like Band-aid, Dettol, pair of scissors, bandage, etc. But never pill for radioactivity. So, why it is in the first aid box of one of the office in Finland? My office has nothing to do with radioactivity, nor is there any other source of radioactivity nearby.

My mind was racing, when else it could be used? May be during nuclear attack and Finland never had good relations with Russia. But I don’t think anyone would get time to reach first aid box in case of nuclear attack, moreover this possibility was also preposterous. May be someone nukes Russia and Finland being the immediate neighbour we get exposed. But this idea was equally ridiculous. It is in this moment Chernobyl came in my thought. But how much was Finland affected by it? I did my research and Yes, Finland was indeed one of the heavily affected countries. I am sure that Chernobyl could have been the reason for all the Finnish first aid boxes to keep pill for radioactivity.

This is just my analysis and I am still not sure. If someone has any other details I would appreciate.

Chernobyl 1986 disaster

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Last week, one strange observation reminded of this accident. It happened two decades ago and also affected Finland. I will write about that observation in my next post but I did lot of information mining about this accident over the weekend and thought to put all this in my blog.
(click on the individual pictures to enlarge)

Introduction :

Chernobyl disaster, which could be termed as one of the worst civilian nuclear accident happened between 1am to 2 am on April 26th, 1986. This was worse than the accident at 'Three-Mile Island' power station in USA in 1979. Then no one was killed.

Location:



(source : Google Earth, Red dot is Chernobyl)

Chernobyl power station in Ukraine is located 7km from the border of Belarus, 120km north of capital Kiev. It is situated on the bank of the river Pripyat which is a tributary of river Dnieper, a major river of Europe. Ukraine and Belarus were the two westernmost states of erstwhile USSR.

Type:

Chernobyl power station was one of Soviet styled graphite moderated nuclear reactor. Using graphite as a moderator means that natural Uranium (99.3%U-238 and 0.7% U-235) could be used as critical mass. One of the other benefits of using this type of reactor is that weapon grade plutonium is generated as by-product.

The accident:

The reactor 4 was to undergo maintenance shutdown and it was thought to use this shutdown for one of the test. The test was to see if the inertial rotation of the turbo-generator could be used to run the water pumps during the failure of the power supply (if it happens due to some reason) and start of diesel engine generators. The test was delayed and started on 26th April at 1am.

The accident happened due to the design quirk of such reactors and bypassing several of the safety mechanism mandated for such conditions. All the manual control rods needed to control the reaction were pulled out, the emergency core cooling system was turned off. The steam supply to generator was stopped and automatic shut down mechanism was disabled.

Series of steps followed, all in serious violation of the safety regulations. This resulted in a vicious cycle of 'reaction' and 'steam generation'. Both went on unhindered. At 1.22'.30" seconds a computer printed out that it is extremely unsafe to operate the reactor and it should be shut down. The operators ignored the warning.

Shortly therafter two explosions took place. The 1000 ton roof of the reactor was blown off by the stream explosion and the graphite started to burn due to inward flow of oxygen. This fire spewed up volumes of radio active dust in atmosphere.

The aftermath

Local fire fighters and rescue workers came in almost immediately and all the fire in the building was extinguished by 5 am, but the core of the reactor continued to burn. 31 people died, 28 of them due to radioactive exposure. Almost all of them were the fire fighters and rescue workers. The explosion was not nuclear explosion but steam explosion much like other boiler explosions.

The news was not made public. In the next two days technicians in Finland and Sweden started to notice increased radioactivity over their atmosphere. In Sweden they thought some accident had occurred in their own facility and alert was sounded. They evacuated 600 workers, working in their plant, only to find out that source of this radioactivity was USSR. It was then on evening of 28th April, 2006, USSR radio broke this devastating news.


(source: TIME )

Helicopters dropped 5000 ton of Boron, lead, dolomite sand and clay but graphite continued to burn for 9 days. Most of the helicopter pilots were exposed to radioactivity as well.

A mass evacuation drive was undertaken and some 116,000 people living within 30km radius were shifted to different places. The town was empty and all houses were locked by soldiers. The most hazardous isotopes released in the accident were Cs-137, I-131 and Sr-90. The death due to direct exposure due to radioactivity was limited but the radioactive dust deposited by rain or otherwise caused and is still causing chronic disease. Iodine in particular caused lot of thyroid cancer cases.

The reactor 4 was enclosed in concrete tomb known as ‘Sacrophagus’ to stop further spread of radioactivity. The whole area was declared as ‘forbidden zone’ with check points established. The other reactors continued working.

The present

The town today looks much like haunted city of movies with an eerie silence. The houses, market places and everything else is empty. Despite being forbidden zone some 1000 people have returned, most of them are old people who could not adapt to living in cities and came back resigned to their fate. Soon after the accident all the pine forests died, cattles grew three heads and number of wild animals declined.

The Chernobyl power plant was finally shutdown for good on 15th December, 2000 by the government of Ukraine.


(source: Google Earth)

The above is google map showing the present condition of Chernobyl plant. The plant area is shown by the red rectangle. I could not find detailed map of the area and this is the maximum resolution. You can see flat tan green fields which indicate the natural vegetation grown over abandoned agricultural farms. The radio active particles have settled deep in this soil and those nucliedes having low half life have decayed. Consequently wild animals have increased in number now, though still feeding on contaminated water and food.

Weirdo me

This tag comes from Heather. I have to list five weird things about myself. For your 'Kaypoh' Heather :-

1. I remember most of the days of my past years. Sometimes, when I try to recollect some event and forget it, I will become restless. I won’t be able to do anything but to sit and think. I will sequence many things until I fully recollect that event. Only then I get relieved.

2. I usually become very emotional between 2am to 3am. So I never write emails, letters, cards or even talk to anyone during that time.

3. I can’t throw away papers. I have the grade card of my kindergarten days and almost every other paper. I even have the grocery receipt of last year.

4. I can’t stop myself from speaking when I feel very strongly for something or when I feel the other person is doing something wrong. Consequently, in my life till now, I have numerous spats with my school teachers, professors, director of my institute and even government authorities. Most of those times I have to pay dearly for this. Funny thing is that after my spat all those persons rise to so high levels. That professor is at a high position now; the director is at a very senior level in the Federal government of India and so is mine ‘that’ boss.

5. I won’t like to burn in electric crematorium. I will have this written in my ‘will’ to be cremated in a wooden pyre (if it comes to that).

Now I tag all of you who read this to write five most weird things about you.

It's got to be Finland

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Here is what the temperature is today ? To make the situation worse the Sun was out and this might have contributed to few of minus degrees.



This is winter in Finland !!

All about me

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Have been tagged by Sher couple of days back for this. Sorry for being a bit late.

here I go,

A - Age you got your first Kiss: The first person to see me would have either kissed or kicked me.

B - Band listening to right now: My Life – Billy Joel

C- Crush: First crush on my chemistry teacher in class 6th.

D- Drink of Choice: Acetyl Salicylic acid

E - Easiest person [people]: myself

F - Favorite band at the moment: Phil Collins (with or without his Band)

G - Gummy worms or gummy bears?: Gummy bears; worms look sort of digusting to me.

H – Holiday: Wish to go to Germany and Austria

I - Instruments: Screw driver, Bench vice, File, Wrench, Spanner, etc.

J - Juice: Grapefruit

K-Kids: My niece – spoke to her yesterday.

L - Longest car ride ever: Spanning across Tamil Nadu and Kerala, 3 days trip.

M - Major: Operations

N - Nicknames: Greenie

O - One wish: To get my answers

P - Phobia[s]: of gettting cheated

Q - Quote: “All acts are done deliberately”

R - Reason to smile: Act of compassion.

S - Song you sang last: “Strawberry pancake…don’t make me wait for one…badger..badger..”

T - Time you woke up [today]: 7.37 am (slept at 2am)

U - Unknown fact about me: let it go with my ashes.

V - Vegetable you hate: Capsicum

W - Worst thing to have happened to you: too worse to write

X-rays you've had: Chest

Y - Yummy food: Khichdi

Z - Zodiac sign: Cancer


I want to tag those who have not done this by now, play it at your convenience.

Micromanagement

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Napoleon said ‘If you want a thing done well, do it yourself’. There is no denial to this statement. We all can vouch for veracity of this statement from our experiences. But does this means that we should not delegate work? If one can, I would never suggest to delegate work, but this is simply not possible. If you have to achieve the larger goals then you have to delegate work.

This does not always mean you won’t get the desired result. The key is to manage the delegated work skillfully. If one wants to know ‘how not to do things’? I would suggest study ‘Enron Corporation’. The CEO of Enron who resigned just before the story was out Jeffrey K. Skilling, an MBA from Harvard University was one of the most unpopular among his colleagues. Though Kenneth Lay thought highly of me and said, “I don't think he has a non-strategic bone in his body". He always used to micromanage the projects (word from his colleagues) without taking care of the fundamentals.

It has never been a good idea to micromanage the work, after you have delegated it. Your employees need to be empowered so that they can take decisions on their own. If you want to delegate work and still take all the decisions, then it is sure shot recipe for disaster. What one should do is to have proper measurement system and checks in place.

Choosing proper measurement system is tricky and more so when you are choosing it for micromanagement. For example – productivity, efficiency, etc does not mean anything. Just like a balance sheet alone can’t tell about the health of a company so does productivity and efficiency for a task.


The point that I am trying to make is:-

Though it is best to do the work yourself, it becomes imperative to delegate work.
Once you have delegated the work, it is bad idea to micromanage it.
To still keep the work on track, have proper measurement system in place.
One should not go for conventional measurement system but anything that can measure and more importantly can communicate should be the choice.
It is in devising the measurement system ingenuity plays a big role.

Words of Wisdom

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These are the famous one liners from a 'not so famous' person.

Never win a fight for others.

Popularity is ephemeral, annonymity forever.

Trust can be broken only once.

Humiliate me once, your fault. Humiliate me twice, my fault.

Never take decisions based on assumptions.

'Yes' and 'No' are the only two answers you should believe.

Trust your enemy and love your friends (vice versa and you are doomed)

Honesty is the best policy and is never followed.

Be prepared for the worst, shit will surely happen.

If everything is correct, there is something wrong.

Any crisis that fails to kill you will make you stronger.

To be lonely you need to be alone.

Dependencies create complexities and leads to failure.

To send fax, first go to a fax machine.

Forgive but never forget.

(no credit for guessing the author)

Tag

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I had a chance to play a 'tag' game earlier but then I got busy and totally forgot it. So this time when Akanksha put this in her blog, I made sure to play it. Here it is,

FOUR JOBS YOU'VE HAD IN YOUR LIFE:
1) Design Engineer (ARDC) HAL, Bangalore
2) Finance Officer with Central Bank of India
3) Member–Rajeev Gandhi National Drinking Water Mission, working in the villages of Chambal divison of Madhya Pradesh(voluntary work–no pay)
4) My present job (it's there in profile)

FOUR MOVIES YOU WOULD WATCH OVER AND OVER:
1) Forrest Gump
2) A Beautiful Mind
3) Casablanca
4) Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind

FOUR PLACES YOU HAVE LIVED:
1) Many places in North, East, South and Central India
2) Finland
3) -----
4) -----

FOUR TV SHOWS YOU LOVE TO WATCH:
1) ----
2) ----
3) ----
4) ----

I don’t watch television.

FOUR PLACES YOU HAVE BEEN ON VACATION:
1) Italy(Venice, Florence, Pisa & Rome)
2) The Netherlands (Amsterdam & Eindhoven)
3) Sweden (Stockholm)
4) Finland

FOUR OF YOUR FAVORITE FOODS:
1) Smoked Salamon
2) Turkish Kebab
3) Tandoori Chicken
4) Khichdi
(and if I can get Pizzas from Italy)

FOUR PLACES YOU WOULD RATHER BE RIGHT NOW:
1) Country side of Austria
2) Corporate boardroom
3) School Classroom
4) Any place of my life before 1997

Bloggers you would like to play this tag

Papiha, Heather, Veera, Twilight, Jessie, Aaki, Anonymous, trupsster and all those blog readers I know. Please play anyday you get time.

Memories - are they true?

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Napoleon once said “History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon”. What is present today will become history tomorrow? I didn’t get a chance to understand the meaning of this statement from a wider perspective as that of Napoleon, but I have found what it means in individual lives.

Our memories were all ‘present’ happening one day and then they are surmounted by fresh happenings. This process is spontaneous and can’t be tinkered by anyone, however mighty or diminutive. But apart from the transition nothing is sacrosanct. If you think that memories are always perfect account of what had actually happened then, I suggest, delve again.

I have always maintained that human mind is the most powerful thing in this universe. It is only a human who can mould and mend things to suit himself/herself. I have had many chances of interacting with people over a longer period of time and I am usually amazed at their memories. The would recollect things which were variant and in some cases exteremely different from what had actually happened. Initially I used to think that they were prevaricating but their conviction made me believe that it is indeed their memory. They have not forgotten what has happened, but they have shaped their memory in that way. And almost in all cases this shaping was done in a manner which suits them best or brings out the best of them.

Is this phenomenon true for everyone ? No, it isn’t. Isn’t it easier to forget something totally than to shape it differently in your memory ? Yes it is easier but there are reasons for the latter. What kind of memories are changed ones ? Rarely a memory where some one has done something commendable will be changed, it is the ulterior works which are shaped differently and stored. What is the reason for this ? There is a reason, no one when speaking to one’s conscience will speak lie or would accept that one has done something wrong. This is the only place where a person is honest, otherplace it is rarely practised. Many a times people change their memories to remember themselves as honest and all their acts justified in honest ways. It works. If a sinner tells himself/herself that nothing wrong has been commited by him/her then trust me, their memory will be shaped that way. They will never remember, hence never accept that they have done anything wrong. This could explain one reason why many times there is no redemption from proven sinners.

This changing of memory sometimes go so far as to show off. But still they refuse to accept that they have done something wrong or they are responsible for it. Of course there could be material proof and witnesses but not all times it is worth the effort to bring out the actual happening. If a person is so determined then it will hardly serve any purpose.

Whether the memory is changed, or slyly paraphrased, can never be proved. This is the harsh reality of this imperfect world where truth & honesty does not always prevail. If you extend the locus of this to cover continents and decades then this is what, I guess, Napoleon meant.

P.S – this is in no way related to something as in “The Manchurian Candidate”, that is an artwork of imagination.

Trip down the Internet memory lane

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Today I had the trip down my internet surfing days. The day perhaps 6 years back when I opened my first email id, the days of slow dialup connections, high surfing rates in cyber cafes eating up most of my pocket money and the days of Yahoo! Those days it was total monopoly of Yahoo, from email to Instant messenger. It was so funny even to hear Yahoo, it reminded of a song in one old Hindi movie. Now days, I guess, people are using more of Google- for mails, Instant messenger, blogs, frappr, maps etc. I think Google has one of those networking database as well which I hate and never registered myself in any of them.

I remember funny things about Yahoo; they are not as old but not that recent as well.

Once I got totally hooked up with yahoo games- the ‘Literati’. I would wait whole day at work so that I could go home in evening and start playing. If you have played literati, which I am sure most of you, then you would know, it is really hard to win the games in your initial days, even if your English vocabulary is good. When you login to literati, I discovered that Yahoo puts a small square of different colors besides your name. For first few days you would be provisional, and then you would begin with black square. Depending on how many games you win you will progress to yellow, blue, green and red (I don’t remember them exactly). I had lost many games and won only one, which cause the other player abandoned the game. I decided to somehow improve my statistics and change the color of square from black. I decided that I will play only with newbie’s like me. I would go and see which all black players are waiting at the table and I would join them. This way I managed to win few games. I was happy.

Once as usual I pounced on one provisional user name. I like a seasoned player greeted with ‘gl’ (games lingo). The other player got the first chance and started with a bingo!(35 bonus points) I thought may be it was fluke but it was the worst game I had. Ten minutes later I had the most humiliating defeat and I was shocked. After the game, the other player said ‘gg’ (good game). I could not place this and wanted to know how it happened? I got my answer. She was a 47 years old American lady and she told me that she was playing this game for years but today created a new user name!!!

The other funny thing I had observed with Yahoo advertisement. I don’t know whether that advertisement comes now or not, the funny thing was the place it used to come. If you would see the webcam of the other person in an Instant message then just below the live picture of the other person you will find this advertisement. It would say something like ‘Want to be seeing someone else? Come to Yahoo personals, the best dating service’. Yahoo engineering infidelity!!!

Diminutive Indian

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There is this new blog, totally centered on India related topics. It consists mostly of debatable topics.

You all will find the blog by diminutive indian interesting.

Please pay a visit at this blog. It also allows you to post in this blog, if you wish so.

Selfishness - a virtue

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What exactly is Selfishness?

The popular usage of selfishness is for a sinful adjective where one person behaves in total disregard to consequences of his/her actions on others. Such selfish person will be ever ready to do anything just to satisfy whims. But is there any positive aspect of selfishness; is it justifiable to be selfish? The answer lies in how we define selfishness.

One of the first people to speak about the positive aspect of selfishness was Ayn Rand which was illustrated in her book “Fountainhead”. The virtuous aspect will be clear if we see the alternate (correct?) definition of selfishness.

Selfishness is related to one’s own self. A person will be selfish only when the person is independent; true to mind, thoughts and values. All the actions by such person will be out of convictions; will go through all kinds of difficulties and obstacles but will never compromise with the values and thus be selfish. The most distinguishing feature of that person will be ‘integrity’ i.e. such a person will ‘walk the talk’. And will never sacrifice others for own needs or will indulge in any ‘desire-satisfaction’ acts. Such a person will be ready to suffer all kinds of hardships to live for the ‘self – values’; and most importantly a selfish person will never be hypocrite.

The popular usage of selfishness as sinful behavior implies acts which are done for whim-fulfillment, and not for ‘self’. Every person has some biological and psychological needs and these needs are ‘objective’. A person will always strive to fulfill these needs. Humans live in social world and to satisfy the objective needs there will be interactions and those interactions has to have the virtues of benevolence, rationality, integrity etc(to be fulfilling). Hence such persons will never act in disregard to others rather act in regard to oneself. So the ‘real’ selfish acts will never be sinful.

The truth of concept of objective needs can in some way explained by the theories given by Richard Dawkins in his book “The Selfish Gene”. Dawkins answers questions like; why are people? What is Man? Is there meaning to life? He explains that this is all for the gene to survive. Gene – the unit of heredity will do anything to survive, an animal is nothing but a machine made to survive the gene. Thus there is selfishness in any animal, and this selfishness is for the objective need’. Gene is the basic and abstract unit of selfishness.

In fact if one has to judge whether the feeling of love, friendship, respect or admiration is true or not then one should see if the person exhibiting such a feeling is selfish or not. If for that person love, friendship, respect etc are catering to the objective needs then it is a true feeling and the person will always be committed. If they are just for whim-fulfillment then those feelings are shallow and there will be no commitment. To understand ‘Self’ is the prerequisite to selfishness. A person is most true when he/she is selfish. Love, friendship and respect is nothing, but token of satisfaction of those objective needs.

New Year

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I know I am a bit late.


Wish you all a brand New Year !!!



New Year dawns on Helsinki

Hope you all had a good time and ushered the first day of this year with a smile on your face.