user friendly

What is user-friendly ?

I think it is one of the much used and misused words these days.

Who is the user who decides whether ‘something is user friendly’ or not.

I remember the days in the academy, when every tactical exercise involved a briefing in hindi or hindusthani to be precise . Whenever you left out some details, the instructors were always quick to point out, “Don’t assume anything, don’t leave out the details, remember, Sepoy Bhoop Singh has to understand”. So, Sepoy Bhoop Singh was the bench mark and you addressed your briefing to him so that he finds the orders “user-friendly”.

Later while serving as staff officer to senior officers , you heard, “I don’t have time, just put it in one page or better still a 5 minute presentation” here it was not Sepoy Bhoop Singh , but General Sher Singh who demanded a user-friendly brief.

(Do the generals really lack time, and if so, how is it they are able to devote hours at the golf course and at parties ? My own suspicion is that after their own brief making days, they have now totally lost the ability to read and comprehend anything beyond one page or any presentation without the user-friendly images.)

Why is it that I find the traffic in any city not at all user-friendly ? Every vehicle on the road seem to be hell bent on running into my car, and every sign post is placed in such a way that I see it only after taking a wrong turn. Oh, No my driving is not all that bad, it is just that the environment is not user-friendly, expecting me to keep my eyes and ears open and expecting me to concentrate. In a user-friendly environment I would just have to think of reaching a particular place and I should be there, after all it is the latest model car.

When you develop a software which requires the user to answer difficult questions like in which format one wished to save the file , or for that matter when you expect the user to enter the current time or date in a particular format, you come under fire for making a not so user-friendly stuff. Secretly, software developers call the so called user-friendly software as idiot friendly.

Just assume that you are making software for idiots and you will never go wrong; may be for the proverbial Sepoy Bhoop Singh.

Can you call a banana not so user-friendly fruit because it just would not peel itself and somehow find its way into your mouth that you have thought fully kept open?

Somehow when it comes to computers we end up doing exactly that.

Books, books and books-III

After leaving the School, I had a brief stint at Loyala College Chennai, for about four months before I joined the NDA. The college library was good but it did not have an open access system. You had to consult the catalog , fill out a slip giving your choice of books and at the end of the day, the books were issued, if available. You could also reserve a book if it was under issue. Well, it was difficult to pick up a book by just the title and the author, unless you had seen the book before. Moreover, one missed the pleasure of physical browsing of books. Its like ordering a pizza on telephone as compared to placing an order after leisurely taking in the sights and sounds and aroma in a restaurant.

And it was like a blind date. Once, I filled out a slip “Basic Theories by Freud” and after the classes, I was greeted by a real monster of a book, a hard bound edition , over 1000 pages weighing over a kilo. I had to lug it home , browse through for a few days before lugging it back.

It was a too short a stay at Loyola to settle down to any focused reading.

At NDA, again, there was a very good library, though it was hardly used by the cadets. Firstly cadets had little free time and more importantly, library was simply not considered a ‘hip’ place to be in. In fact during our time it was part of the punishments to spend the Sundays at Library. Defaulters (you did not have to do much to be labeled a defaulter; a button of slightly different shade, or a twisted lace in your boots can fetch you 7 or even 14 restrictions). Each day of ‘restriction’ included a run in the evening and 3-4 reportings and on Sundays , it included a library session. It goes without saying, I had my share of ‘restrictions’

It is at NDA that I read all the volumes of complete works of Swami Vivekananda, Biographies of Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda by Nikilananda and Romain Rolland , Atmabodh and Kindle Life by Swami Chinmayananda. It is natural that philosophy and psychology are grouped together by librarians,. So my next stop was Psychology. I was particularly interested in Jung; a book I intend revisiting is “modern man in search of a soul".

No Tamil books here and only fiction I read was ‘historical fiction’. I remember reading everything written by Alexander Solzhenitsyn including some prose poem; Gulag Archipelago, The First Circle, Cancer Ward, The Love-Girl and the Innocent, August 1914, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. To sum up, for whatever reason, it was all serious reading and just no fun reading. May be I equated serious stuff with English and it was much later that I read books like PG Wodehouse.

http://mi59.blogspot.com/2010/09/books-books-and-books.html

http://mi59.blogspot.com/2011/01/books-books-and-books-ii.html

http://mi59.blogspot.com/2011/05/books-books-and-books-iv-regimental.html

http://mi59.blogspot.com/2011/05/fifth-and-last-part-of-books-books-and.html

Books, Books and Books - II

This is in continuation to the blog on 29 Sep 10. Then, I was counting the days to move to Mhow for good. I thought I would have all the time in the world; but as the saying goes , ‘Man proposes, God disposes’. After Sep, it is only now I have sat down to write something.

My school had a very-well stocked library, or so it seemed to me as a nine year old. I had opted for Lower Tamil (third language ) and I was the only one in my class to do so. My teacher thought I was actually better at Tamil than the guys who had opted for higher Tamil (second language) and he let me spend the time at the library. That was fun.

I started with children’s books, but soon graduated to short stories and novels. The library had a fair collection of English books and generally one started with famous five & secret seven, and moved on to Perry Mason, Agatha Christie , ‘Sudden’, Alistair MacLean, Nick carter, Arthur Hailey and so on . But barring an odd book from each category, my reading was mostly in Tamil . In Tamil ,we never had any children’s books really. so it was Akilan, kalki, Naa Parthasarathy, Jeyakanthan, Jekachirpiyan, Mu varatharasanar and so on. Then there were the popular women writers like Anuradha Ramanan, Indumathi, Ramani Chandran, Sivasankari, Vaasanthi anuththama, Lakshmi (aka thirupura sundari) . Lakshmi was like mills and boons in Tamil. I admit, I liked reading lakshmi kathai as much as other books. Reading in Tamil was fun, fast and easy. Fortunately for us, our teachers never forced us to read English books nor they forced us to converse in English (as they do nowadays) and in any case I used to score better in English than the “famous five” types. (Penguin’s David Davidar was a classmate of mine and he was a voracious reader; thanks to the high weightage given to grammar, I used to outscore him in exams.)

Moreover lots of books from other Indian languages and some foreign languages were available in Tamil. Many famous Russian novels including War and Peace were available in Tamil. I remember reading “Mother “ by Maxin Gorky when I was in 7th or 8th. I did not learn much about the nuances of the Bolshwik struggle or about communism, but the travails of Pavel Mikhailovich against the Tsar’s regime definitely made some impression.

During that period I read hardly anything other than fiction and biographies. Essentially it was Tamil fiction, but a fiction that covered a whole host of serious contemporary social and political issues of those times.

http://mi59.blogspot.com/2010/09/books-books-and-books.html

http://mi59.blogspot.com/2011/01/books-books-and-books-iii.html

http://mi59.blogspot.com/2011/05/books-books-and-books-iv-regimental.html

http://mi59.blogspot.com/2011/05/fifth-and-last-part-of-books-books-and.html

50 Spiritual Classics

Read "50 Spiritual Classics" by Tom Butler-Bowden.

Every book listed is definitely worth a look, but depending on your own temperment, culture and upbringing some of the books may be more appealing. I have made my own short list of 12 books which includes books read, read and forgotten and books yet to be read.

Jonathan LIvingston Seagull	Richard Bach
The Tao of Physics	Fritjof Capra
Black Elk Speaks	Black Elk
An Autobiography : The Story of my experiments with Truth	MK Gaandhi
Enchiridion	Epictetus
The Prophet	Kahil Gibran
Siddhartha	Hermaan Hesse
Memories, Dreams and Reflections	CG Jung
Think on these things	J Krishnamurti
The Razor’s Edge	Somerset Maugham
The Miracle of Mindfulness : An Introduction to the practice of Meditation	Thich Nhat Hanh
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance	Robert Pirsig

parking sign posts : Mhow

dog tags philosophy

The picture you see is of the dog tags I have been carrying around with me for all these years since 1979.

The dog tags have a specific message.

For the benefit of my civilian friends who may chance upon this write up,"A dog tag is the informal name for the identification tags worn by military personnel, because of their resemblance to actual dog tags. The tag is primarily used for the identification of dead and wounded along with providing religion (to provide for calling a Catholic Priest, Jewish Rabbi or Hindu Pandit for Last Rites) and essential basic medical information for the treatment of the latter, such as blood type" (courtesy wikipedia)


In the Indian army there are two metal tags worn by every soldier, one on his wrist and one around the neck. The idea is that one remains with the body and the other is sent to the family and an addition advantage is that at least one of the discs can be located even if some body parts are missing.

It has just five items of data. the service number, rank, name, blood group and religion. Every bit of data has a specific purpose. Service number , rank and name form the mandatory information to be given to anyone (including the enemy if a prisoner of war) for the purpose of identification.

The simple information contained on that small aluminum tag can speak for you if you can't speak for yourself; it could mean the difference between a positive identification and an uncertain future for those who survive you, should your identity be "...known only to God."

What really interests me is the 4th and 5th bits of information, ie blood group and the religion. For a wounded soldier, one treatment that can really mean life/death is timely blood transfusion and you need to know the blood group at the earliest.

In case the casualty is beyond any treatment, then the most important information required is whether to bury or to cremate , to call a panditji or a maulvi ; so there is the mention of the religion.

In short what the tags convey is “tips to save the body or to dispose of the body as appropriate”

In case it is the latter,one of the discs is dispatched to the NOK (next of kin) along with other personal effects of the soldier, as and when the time permits.

For the soldier himself, what a way to live ? What an attitude to live with ? Before an operation the soldiers prepare their wills, make monthly allotments to family and update the address es of NOK. Since you don’t know when a war will break out, these activities take placed during "peace time training exercises”. Once a war breaks out all you have in your person , other than rations , water and warlike stores are these dog tags with their briefest of messages.

Is it possible to wear such an attitude in peace time ? Can we issue clear, concise instructions to people who need to know, as to what exactly to be done to preserve this body or to dispose off the body and of course instructions to dispose off other worldly possessions ? I suppose once you can do that,the chances are that you would actually live longer !

Books , books and ..books

Books , books and ..books, that is the earliest memory of my home. Books in the attic, books on the shelves, books on the table and................books all over the floor. this is partly because of the love for books but more so because of the inherent laziness to organize and being too preoccupied with reading that you don't give the necessary time and effort to earn some real bucks and to put in some real effort to create a library to care for the books you love so much.

my father subscribed for kalki, kumudam, kalkandu, kalaimagal, deepam, manjari, kannan , ambulimama and thughluq, not to mention the deepawali malar published by kalki, sudesamitran, ananda vikatan etc. to top up this reading was the books from libraries, Connemara Pubic Library, and the district library simply called the "mukku library" roughly translated as " nukkad " or "corner".

I never realized till much later in life that majority of our countrymen did not have the luxury of a "street corner library" . Only when I did my BLIS degree at Madras University did I learn that just five of our states have legislation to provide libraries to general public. Another thing I learnt was about the father of library science in India, Shri SR Ranganathan who I believe is distantly related to us.

At the outset, let me make it clear, this post is not to glorify the readers, (though it sounds so) but to understand them, to understand ourselves. Book readers are not superior beings for I have met many people who are much smarter, much more intelligent and much more wiser than some of the voracious readers I have met.

having said that, some of my favourite quotes on books are:-

A book is a garden,an orchard, a storehouse,a party, a company by the way,a counselor, a multitude of counselors . - Henry Ward Beecher

No man can be friendless when he has God and the companionship of good books. - Anonymous

A good Bookshelf is ...

A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civilised countries in a thousand years set in the best order the results of their learning and wisdom.

The men themselves were hidden and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought they did not uncover to their bosom friend is written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.

– RW Emerson

so said some wise men..

In the run up to republic Day camp, we go through a series of camps to train the cadets. I shared a room with a rajasthani friend of mine, who had a knack for making money, was good at organizing, but was generally not guilty of reading. after a long day, seeing me curled up on the bed with a glass of whiskey in one hand and a book in the other (evidently he had never ever seen a spectacle like that ) he spontaneously remarked ,"sir, aapke lie to book snack ka kaam karta hai" Well, so be it.. book is a snack, book is food, book is drink and it can do any good or harm that food and drink can do.

but once a reader, always a reader and for good or bad you cannot stay away from books. A curse or a blessing I know not.

I would love to die with a book in one hand and a glass in the other, with MS Subbulakshmi's 'kurai onrum illai" streaming in..... oh! what a lovely way to go ! ya, a book shelf within reach, with a choice collection of kahil gibran, paulo coelho, spinoza and our own shankara and ramanuja.

and a pen and notepad at hand to record the 'death poem' of the Japanese, should the maker care to make you his instrument.....

something like

"Like dew drops

on a lotus leaf

I vanish. "

My earliest memory of my interaction with books was not a pleasant one. It was a typical Sunday ; I remember because the magazines , the newspaper man had delivered were "kumudam and kalkandu. Those were the days when week days were marked by the weekly magazines you received and the beginning of the month by the monthly periodicals and a fortnight was marked by.. yes you guessed it by fortnightlies like thughluq. I was in 2nd standard,( folks, I was in first standard when four year old and in second standard when I was four and half years) . I saw my brother reading "kumudam' and promptly I snatched it from him and I pretended to read. He quietly picked up the other magazine and started reading and I had to snatch that too. My father who was watching all this , gave a sound whacking, "enna asigai paaru" . yes, I was jealous , but not because i did not possess the book; i was jealous because he could read and I could not. Today I believe i would love such envy in my kid, or any kid for that matter. I don't remember when I actually started reading , first the jokes, which were a aplenty in tamil magazines and later stories... But the first motive to read was through what we call a negative emotion, 'plain envy'....

................will continue by the grace of God

http://mi59.blogspot.com/2011/01/books-books-and-books-ii.html

http://mi59.blogspot.com/2011/01/books-books-and-books-iii.html

http://mi59.blogspot.com/2011/05/books-books-and-books-iv-regimental.html

http://mi59.blogspot.com/2011/05/fifth-and-last-part-of-books-books-and.html