Compared to the adventures of Day 1, Day 2 can be considered to be a dullard. We were extremely tired from previous travel and decided not to venture out too much. We "rested"
We had booked a one-bedroom house for our stay. The house was fully furnished and included a complete kitchenette.
Shree decided to test her culinary skills on me. Given her limited experience in this area, we had shopped extensively in a MTR shop in India, prior to our departure. Needless to say, the ready to eat packets were put to very good use by Shree. We made rice, Chappati with some ready to eat curries.
Towards the afternoon, we decided to plan a bit ahead for the trip. The hotel concierge had a lady with whom we can discuss about things we can do in Kona. We went and saw the various options around and decided to book for an afternoon snorkelling adventure for the next day.
The rest of the day, we again "rested".
Illige Shree mattu Ashvin avara day 2 katha samaaptavaayithu.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Friday, December 26, 2008
Day 1: Shree and Ashvin Escape from San Francisco Bay
The count-down timer counted 6 hrs and promptly chirped (We use timers instead of alarms; Our Nokia 6100 has a short-cut for count down timer and not for an alarm. The bright side is that now we know exactly how many hours of sleep we had). Yawningly, I looked at the cellphone. I was 5:15 am. I hate early flights. It makes us wake up at times that most techie people call the "mid-night".
A quick look outside the window made it even harder to actually get up. It was drizzling lightly. These cyclonic depressions are really depressing.
With the flight at 9:00am, we wanted to get in early at the SFO airport. We had called the shuttle for 6:15am. We figured, that it would take 1/2 hr to reach SFO, giving us well over 2 hrs to carry out the airport formalities. What could possibly go wrong? As per Murphy's law many. Upon boarding we realized that he is planning to make 4 more stops before heading to the airport, a slight oversight on our part. Still instead of 2.25 hrs, we get 1.5 hrs, which is plenty...right? Apparently not.
The first two stops went by easy (kinda like a warm-up). Our driver had trouble finding the third one even with a GPS-navigation device and the People to be picked up the last had trouble finding our cab, which surprisingly was parked right in front of their house. Anyways, by the time all the people who needed a ride on that cab were inside, my cell-phone was showing 7:45am. Still, we were quite a distance from the airport and the rain had steadily intensified.
FYI: We had to take 101 N to reach SFO and that is the direction of the traffic in the morning
Shree, on my side, increased the excitement of the whole event, by asking me the time nearly every minute :). It seemed like I was watching a basket ball match, and our team was trailing by very few baskets, with a few seconds to go. By the time I reported the time for the 25th time, we were at the airport.
After we checked-in our baggage at the curb, we knew we have won. There is no way the airlines can close their gates on us. To our luck, we found that the airport traffic was fairly light. So, security clearance was a breeze and we were at the gate by about 8:40am. Well in advance for the 9am flight.
After about 5.5 hrs of a rather uneventful flight, we reached Honululu, HI at about 12:30pm Local time. Honululu is in the island of Oahu. We had booked tickets from Honululu to Kona, Big Island, which was our final destination. Turns out that HNL has a number of terminals which are spread out and each inter-island airline would have flights from a different terminal.
We (read this as I, since Shree doesn't like to be a part of the goofups), unfortunately, had forgotten which airlines we were supposed to take. Although, there was enough time to travel to each terminal and ask the airlines there whether we are flying with them, Shree did not particularly fancy the idea of lugging around 50 lbs of baggage to every terminal. While all the details are stored online, I could not find the Internet (No wonder, I didn't have the AT&T Laptop connect card). So, I called up Lord Vishnu (read Hari) for help. With my Orbitz login and password, the lord was able to provide all the Flight Details and the Rental car details (which, we (again, read I) had forgotten as well).
Upon entering the right terminal, we were subjected to a very serious security check. My bag pack was sent through the xray machine thrice, only to recover a tooth-paste which had surprisingly escaped the India-US flight security check and the SFO-Honululu security check. It gave us the impression that we were about to enter a fortress.
Lo Behold, the fortress the security guarded:
The KONA Airport as seen, post security checks. It's an open air Airport.
The Tired Half-Shirt
The ladies behind me are perfoming the Hula-Kahiko dance. It is a traditional Hawaiian dance, common place in all their ceremonies. The statues are located at the Kona Airport.
After the routine baggage claim and car rental formalities, we headed to our hotel: "Kona by the sea". The hotel is built right in front of the Kona beach. As I mentioned before, Kona is in Big Island, which is relatively a new island when compared to other islands of Hawaii. Consequently, the beaches are lot rockier. Our Kona by the sea was no exception. It was built right on top of a rocky beach. Attached are some photographs that were shot from our room's balcony.
By the time we reached our hotel room, it was about 6pm. We got some food (courtesy MTR ready to eat packets) and rested.
Illige, Shree Ashvin awara Honey Moon Day 1 samapthavayithu.
A new vacation and some new Blogs
A long time ago, so long ago no one remembers how long ago, I was writing blogs. But then, I was happily vacationing in India. My enthu to write blogs decays exponentially (with a fairly large constant) from the time vacation expires. So, after that vacation, there were no blogs for quite a while.
Life presented me with another opportunity to take another vacation this Nov-Dec, and consequently, you lucky people are in for a treat :).
Oh yeah, BTW, we (Shreevani and I) got married.
The first few blogs will shed light on our Honeymoon trip to Hawaii, while maintaining the PG-13 nature of the blog.
Saturday, March 22, 2008
The God Delusion
Just yesterday, I was watching this video on Richard Dawkins' address at Lynchburg, VA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe7yf9GJUfU
He is a British Ethologist, Evolutionary Biologist and a popular science writer. But the talk was not about any of this. It was the talk about the most pressing question for many thinkers/philosophers/rationalists of the day: "Does god really exist?". The talk consisted of excerpts from his recent book "The God Delusion," in which he claims to have "proven" that god, almost surely, doesn't exist. He presented a 40-min argument on the morality of this Christian god (most of his references were from the Bible) and showed that given the understanding of mankind to date, and given the moralities of the day, god should be classified as a barbarian, someone in the ranks of Hitler, Mussolini and Saddam Hussein. Youtube also hosts a question answer session, which I personally couldn't watch due to time constraints.
I am self confessed agnostic. I do not admit the presence or absence of god. However, I am humble enough to admit that, god, as described by the religious scriptures, if were "found" to exist, would be beyond my understanding. God, by definition, need not fit the description of what most humans think as "moral". God is not a democratic government, whose fate/actions/properties are decided by majority of humans. I find the speakers' actions of trying to "rationalize" god at best laughable and at worst blasphemous. Hell! Most of my friends cannot even rationalize their wives and the speaker is trying to explain away god (or the lack of it)!
A couple of points about the talk itself and some arguments to the same:
The speaker points to a myriad of stories in the Bible where the "hero" commits what could be described by most modern men as "utterly barbaric deeds" with the blessing of the god. Then he concludes that God, who is the orchestrator of such massacres, should be called nothing but a Barbarian.
To this, I suggest the following thought experiment; Say you come home and switch on a TV. You see a English movie that you have never seen before and cannot recognize the actors. You see one guy killing the other guy with his bare hands. There is blood all over the guy's face. The guy is pleading but the other person goes on to kill him. If you fit the bill of what "most" people call moral today, you would most likely think "What a deplorable act."
Now, say your friend comes along and he can recognize the movie. He tells you the storyline and the horrific crimes committed by the guy who just died in the movie. I suspect that after hearing the entire storyline, your perception about the "hero" might change. You might even think that the "villian" actually deserved it.
My point is the following: By just observing a speck of the time line, estimating the morality/rationality of the entire time line will be error prone. We could still estimate it, but the confidence levels of the estimation will not be too high.
Science has become extremely successful in explaining a lot of the mysteries of this planet. It does so by advocating questioning, logic, reasoning, rational thinking, experimentation, etc. which are all the basis of what most scientists call the "scientific approach." In doing so, Science has transformed itself into a religion, where its followers believe that everything in this world can be explained by its own tenets (i.e., logic, reasoning, rational thinking etc.). Scientists and "rational thinkers" of the day are becoming extremely narrow minded in their approach by condoning everything that does not follow the rigorous scientific approach. This to me, is like, Christians using Bible to declare that Allah/Eshwar are farce.
Hopefully, someday Science would mature enough to leave god in peace.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
He is a British Ethologist, Evolutionary Biologist and a popular science writer. But the talk was not about any of this. It was the talk about the most pressing question for many thinkers/philosophers/rationalists of the day: "Does god really exist?". The talk consisted of excerpts from his recent book "The God Delusion," in which he claims to have "proven" that god, almost surely, doesn't exist. He presented a 40-min argument on the morality of this Christian god (most of his references were from the Bible) and showed that given the understanding of mankind to date, and given the moralities of the day, god should be classified as a barbarian, someone in the ranks of Hitler, Mussolini and Saddam Hussein. Youtube also hosts a question answer session, which I personally couldn't watch due to time constraints.
I am self confessed agnostic. I do not admit the presence or absence of god. However, I am humble enough to admit that, god, as described by the religious scriptures, if were "found" to exist, would be beyond my understanding. God, by definition, need not fit the description of what most humans think as "moral". God is not a democratic government, whose fate/actions/properties are decided by majority of humans. I find the speakers' actions of trying to "rationalize" god at best laughable and at worst blasphemous. Hell! Most of my friends cannot even rationalize their wives and the speaker is trying to explain away god (or the lack of it)!
A couple of points about the talk itself and some arguments to the same:
The speaker points to a myriad of stories in the Bible where the "hero" commits what could be described by most modern men as "utterly barbaric deeds" with the blessing of the god. Then he concludes that God, who is the orchestrator of such massacres, should be called nothing but a Barbarian.
To this, I suggest the following thought experiment; Say you come home and switch on a TV. You see a English movie that you have never seen before and cannot recognize the actors. You see one guy killing the other guy with his bare hands. There is blood all over the guy's face. The guy is pleading but the other person goes on to kill him. If you fit the bill of what "most" people call moral today, you would most likely think "What a deplorable act."
Now, say your friend comes along and he can recognize the movie. He tells you the storyline and the horrific crimes committed by the guy who just died in the movie. I suspect that after hearing the entire storyline, your perception about the "hero" might change. You might even think that the "villian" actually deserved it.
My point is the following: By just observing a speck of the time line, estimating the morality/rationality of the entire time line will be error prone. We could still estimate it, but the confidence levels of the estimation will not be too high.
Science has become extremely successful in explaining a lot of the mysteries of this planet. It does so by advocating questioning, logic, reasoning, rational thinking, experimentation, etc. which are all the basis of what most scientists call the "scientific approach." In doing so, Science has transformed itself into a religion, where its followers believe that everything in this world can be explained by its own tenets (i.e., logic, reasoning, rational thinking etc.). Scientists and "rational thinkers" of the day are becoming extremely narrow minded in their approach by condoning everything that does not follow the rigorous scientific approach. This to me, is like, Christians using Bible to declare that Allah/Eshwar are farce.
Hopefully, someday Science would mature enough to leave god in peace.
Democracy for the free world
Given that Democracy can lead to "Majority rule all" situation, and that people's judgment based on rather incomplete information is questionable, why is it that so many countries are pushing for democracy all over the world? Is democracy the best form of government that we can come up with? Or, is democracy vs non-democracy an ideological conflict?
My personal view is that its not an ideological conflict. Its pure business! Typically, countries like to sign up trade agreements, bilateral treaties, MoUs, etc that lead to what is called a "win-win" situation. There will be a tug-of-war between the two governments since each would want to squeeze the maximum out of the other. When governments fail to yield to the external agents, it creates a problem for the agent (Ex: Saddam Hussien threatening to switch to Euro for Oil trades. BJP refusing to sign up the nuclear treaty with the US, etc.)
If the government was non-democratic (like dictatorship, communist regime), its a huge problem for the external agent, since these forms of governments cannot be dismissed so easily. One has to wage a huge war and remove the form of government or create subversive coup attempts to bring in leaders who are inline with the expectations of the external agent. While these have been attempted in the past, the current situation in Iraq is a strong example of how things can go wrong.
Democracy, on the other hand, provides an easier alternative. You see, there are two things that are appealing to an external agent about a functional democracy
1. Every government rule is of finite duration
2. Every government has an opposition
When there is an opposition, there is a way. Anything that cannot be got with the current government can be pushed into the future as a deal to be discussed with the next government.
Fast forward to the election time: Campaigning is hard. It takes effort and it takes money. Often huge sums of money. The external agents don't have a dearth of this "money." It can be collected, raised and transferred to the opposition party's election fund. Elections can be rigged, Ballots can be stolen, people can be disenfranchised, threatened, etc, all with the help of "money".
Once the opposition comes to power, deals can be renegotiated and signed upon.
In conclusion, democracy provides an easier alternative for external agents to get the deals they want. A coup less/warless alternative.
Given that Democracy can lead to "Majority rule all" situation, and that people's judgment based on rather incomplete information is questionable, why is it that so many countries are pushing for democracy all over the world? Is democracy the best form of government that we can come up with? Or, is democracy vs non-democracy an ideological conflict?
My personal view is that its not an ideological conflict. Its pure business! Typically, countries like to sign up trade agreements, bilateral treaties, MoUs, etc that lead to what is called a "win-win" situation. There will be a tug-of-war between the two governments since each would want to squeeze the maximum out of the other. When governments fail to yield to the external agents, it creates a problem for the agent (Ex: Saddam Hussien threatening to switch to Euro for Oil trades. BJP refusing to sign up the nuclear treaty with the US, etc.)
If the government was non-democratic (like dictatorship, communist regime), its a huge problem for the external agent, since these forms of governments cannot be dismissed so easily. One has to wage a huge war and remove the form of government or create subversive coup attempts to bring in leaders who are inline with the expectations of the external agent. While these have been attempted in the past, the current situation in Iraq is a strong example of how things can go wrong.
Democracy, on the other hand, provides an easier alternative. You see, there are two things that are appealing to an external agent about a functional democracy
1. Every government rule is of finite duration
2. Every government has an opposition
When there is an opposition, there is a way. Anything that cannot be got with the current government can be pushed into the future as a deal to be discussed with the next government.
Fast forward to the election time: Campaigning is hard. It takes effort and it takes money. Often huge sums of money. The external agents don't have a dearth of this "money." It can be collected, raised and transferred to the opposition party's election fund. Elections can be rigged, Ballots can be stolen, people can be disenfranchised, threatened, etc, all with the help of "money".
Once the opposition comes to power, deals can be renegotiated and signed upon.
In conclusion, democracy provides an easier alternative for external agents to get the deals they want. A coup less/warless alternative.
Monday, March 10, 2008
The Common (man) Solution
Every man/woman in a country has an equal right to elect a candidate. This, largely is based on the premise that all men/women are equal and therefore no one's judgment is better than the rest. Every man/woman gets a weight of one in any general body election.
The problem is that the assumption about judgment of people is fundamentally flawed. I believe that good judgment requires at least the following two components
1. Person's ability to digest the information at hand and take the "best" course of action.
2. The penchant to get information in the first place.
Fact 1: People are not equal. Therefore the "goodness" of their judgment is likely to be different.
Fact 2: With red-tape reaching almost every body of governance all transparency is lost. Therefore, not all are well-informed.
Given these two facts, any general election where everyone is treated equally will lead to a questionable outcome. The decisions of people tends to get averaged out leading to a "average" solution to the problem (given the recent election results, I am more inclined to believe that the collective decisions of a bunch of average individuals leads to a sub-average result).
So, should democracy prevail? Should voting be a right or should it be made a responsibility?
Next post: Why does US want democracy everywhere?
The problem is that the assumption about judgment of people is fundamentally flawed. I believe that good judgment requires at least the following two components
1. Person's ability to digest the information at hand and take the "best" course of action.
2. The penchant to get information in the first place.
Fact 1: People are not equal. Therefore the "goodness" of their judgment is likely to be different.
Fact 2: With red-tape reaching almost every body of governance all transparency is lost. Therefore, not all are well-informed.
Given these two facts, any general election where everyone is treated equally will lead to a questionable outcome. The decisions of people tends to get averaged out leading to a "average" solution to the problem (given the recent election results, I am more inclined to believe that the collective decisions of a bunch of average individuals leads to a sub-average result).
So, should democracy prevail? Should voting be a right or should it be made a responsibility?
Next post: Why does US want democracy everywhere?
Friday, February 29, 2008
Democracy
Recently, I was on a transpacific flight. The time you get during the flight is quite a lot, and with me traveling in the economy class means that the laptop runs out of juice within the first two hours of the flight. So a fairly good deal of time was left for me to "think."
With the November election heating up, Hillary, Obama and McCain at the back of my mind, I started thinking about democracy. Is democracy the best form of government?
Democracy is allegedly the "government of common people." As the saying goes, democracy is the government
1. By the people
2. For the people
3. Of the people
Before we look into whether or not enfranchising "common men/women" is a good thing, lets look at whether or not democracy achieves its goal of providing representation to common man.
Take the recent 2004 elections for that matter. George Bush Jr. won the election with a margin of 10%. The final tally read 54-44. This was enough for the USA to declare George Bush Jr as the next president of the USA. What is wrong here?
Agreed Bush won more votes than Kerry. But even so, nearly 50% of the country was against Bush. By making Bush the sole winner, the voice of nearly 50% of US citizens has been effectively quelled. It is as though, people who voted for Kerry don't count.
A more interesting case is that of the 1992 election in which Bill Clinton was declared the winner. Bill Clinton won only 43% of the total votes, while George Bush Sr and Ross Perot raked up the remaining 57% of the votes. In other words, when Bill Clinton became the president, a majority of the US citizens were against him.
By making winner take all, democracy, in its current form, is effectively disenfranchising people who voted for losers. Theoretically, the number of discontented people can be arbitrarily close to the total electorate size (assuming large number of candidates). Practically, in any closely contested election, nearly 50% of the people will always be unhappy at the election outcome. Democracy fails to provide representation to every common man. At best, it can be described as "a form of government which provides representation to people who voted for winners."
Next Post: Is representation to every common man a good thing?
With the November election heating up, Hillary, Obama and McCain at the back of my mind, I started thinking about democracy. Is democracy the best form of government?
Democracy is allegedly the "government of common people." As the saying goes, democracy is the government
1. By the people
2. For the people
3. Of the people
Before we look into whether or not enfranchising "common men/women" is a good thing, lets look at whether or not democracy achieves its goal of providing representation to common man.
Take the recent 2004 elections for that matter. George Bush Jr. won the election with a margin of 10%. The final tally read 54-44. This was enough for the USA to declare George Bush Jr as the next president of the USA. What is wrong here?
Agreed Bush won more votes than Kerry. But even so, nearly 50% of the country was against Bush. By making Bush the sole winner, the voice of nearly 50% of US citizens has been effectively quelled. It is as though, people who voted for Kerry don't count.
A more interesting case is that of the 1992 election in which Bill Clinton was declared the winner. Bill Clinton won only 43% of the total votes, while George Bush Sr and Ross Perot raked up the remaining 57% of the votes. In other words, when Bill Clinton became the president, a majority of the US citizens were against him.
By making winner take all, democracy, in its current form, is effectively disenfranchising people who voted for losers. Theoretically, the number of discontented people can be arbitrarily close to the total electorate size (assuming large number of candidates). Practically, in any closely contested election, nearly 50% of the people will always be unhappy at the election outcome. Democracy fails to provide representation to every common man. At best, it can be described as "a form of government which provides representation to people who voted for winners."
Next Post: Is representation to every common man a good thing?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)