Religious Customs: Possible thinking behind them

Religion, the opium of masses isn't more potent in any other place then in India. The country might be second most populated, but certainly boasts the highest population of Gods. In-fact I can safely say that each of the Upnishads (one of the religious scripture of Hinduism) will have mention of more gods then all the gods that Greeks could have thought of. (Greeks would be the second most populous deity community). Ubiquity of God is what every religion preaches, but influential mid-century Indian followers went a step ahead and created ubiquity of places of worship. They were thinkers of tomorrow, so they could see that in future there would be chronic shortage of land hence the people per unit place of worship might not be sustainable, so they came up with new ideas. Associate certain trees with a God, so if you do not have a temple around, you can have your god equivalent banyan tree, or maybe catch a snake and feed him, and God would reciprocate with blessings. If you have river or mountain around, they are worth worshipping, so save flat areas for housing construction and make temples in same caves of mountains.
The “custom” creators had also foreseen the food shortage, and hence devised a method to cut down upon consumption through ingenious concept of “fasting”. Some would say that it works well for the digestive system etc., but for medical effectiveness of fasts it should be done once every month and a recovery regime have to be followed after it. Certainly fasting twice a year or for 3 days in an auspicious week or only during daytimes in a month, would do no good particularly when it is followed by hefty food. If you think that PETA is something that originated in modern times than you are duped by a gimmick. There was an earlier avatar of PETA which was more secretive then priory of Scion, and infiltrated in the team which was designing the religious customs every time. Though unlike present PETA movement, these ancient infiltrated had some personal penchants for certain animals, so someone who loved Cows, made it a holy animal and got all future generation of cow protected from a large chunk of masses while someone else made some other animal listed as "dirty" and hence got it protected from even larger chunk of humans. These people could not be regarded as true originators of PETA rather the person who first thought about holistic animal welfare and fought hard to protect them by strongest mode, religion should be the deserving founder. Since he/she didn't had a very strong influence so could get the clause of “eating animals” as forbidden, for only certain communities. He/She might have been successful for getting it for entire follower section had it been any other day as the day of discussion was the day when the “Rajinder dhaba” equivalent of that times had started their centre and had made their inagural delivery as free to these guys. Tasting the delicacy they thought that it would be utterly immoral if they keep entire future population aloof of such great experience hence complete ban was ruled out. But still post this event, Neanderthal man who ate raw animals, had offspring who would categorize touching a well spiced meat, as sin. The PETA lobbyists were strong, so they could not seek a complete ban on eating of animals through "custom" changes, but they did include some confusing clauses. These clauses made many present day humans to be totally unclear on the correct custom and they end up being “purely human” by not eating animals, on a particular day of a week just to be safe. So by and large the objective of those earliest PETA activists was partially successful. Rejection of complete ban had fallout as well. Few of these early PETA lobbyists defected from the mainstream religion and helped in establishing new religions, which had “no-killing” as guiding principle. However they could not get much people to switch loyalties from the older religions as by the time these lobbyist had become totally active, Rajinder express equivalent had infiltrated in much larger parts and addiction to well cooked chicken/meat was difficult to get out of.
Whatever might the present state of customs and following be, one thing is clear that there were far sighted and thinking individuals who conspired to create customs and thereby have contributed in lessening the vagaries.

P.S: I would be dishonest if I would say that I deny existence of God. Neither I am well read in religious scriptures, so many assertions might be ignorant opinions. I have better knowledge of one religion (the one to which I belong) so could cite more examples from that only

Flight of Imagination

For the past one year I had the opportunity or to put it in proper sense, the misery of travelling alone quite a number of times. Although invariably all such journeys ended up offering nothing which could be called good, but still you always hope to have something ,every time you are about to travel. The expectations are same whether you travel by train or flight and just like any other expectations, they are not devoid of build-ups.

If you are about to travel by air, there is a significant time of yours which goes in praying to God to make you sit next to an interesting (read hot) co-passenger. There are few things which are considered worth praying even by the atheists, and this tops the list. So you spend some time praying to god for such beautiful coincidence at the same time parallelly imagining things that would happen once God accepts your most cherished wish. The moment you reach the respective airline counter ,you start looking around, searching for the possible "gift" sent straight away by the master above, whom you had not bothered with any requests since your last travel. Presence of god’s gift would not fulfil your wish rather you have to work out a way to ensure that you get the gift. So you observe the gift’s movement and ensure that you stand behind her while she is getting her boarding pass processed. You have to keep your ear lobes fully functioning to hear out and if required (which will be in most cases) your eyes, to look for the most important numbers printed on her boarding pass. So when the airline executive asks for your seat preferences , you confidently mention your choice and quiet clearly- well my lucky number is 17 so I would prefer the row of same number and since my name has "E" in it (somewhere) so I would want to sit on the seat which has the same letter, so 17E would be good. The flummoxed executive would think that this guy is out of his mind, but on face he would pass a smile and will say, “Sure sir”; after all, these are the moments where their training of hypocritical hospitality is tested.

So finally you think it is your lucky day, god has colluded with you and finally you got what you had been dreaming of since the moment you left your home for the airport if not longer. From the moment you have secured a boarding pass to the moment boarding is announced, you start creating dummy conversations,that you would start with your cherished neighbour. Your imagination, charged with the power of positive thinking, would create numerous topics in your mind incidentally all of which would appear to be insanely interesting to the neighbour. You do not want to be disturbed in this critical exercise of scenario projections and hence would switch off your cell phone and cut yourself from every other distraction except the one for which you are planning. As in dreams of inception, you would have had endless conversations each lasting more than 2 hrs, multiple times for many scenarios, squeezed in a small time frame of 30 minutes, flat. If somehow IQ was measured at this time, you would have beaten Einstein by a margin which would have made him look like a lunatic. So finally boarding is announced, your moment of glory, the time when you would test all those hard worked scenario to put in place, has come. You would have butterflies in your stomach, nervousness which would be same as what Sir Edward Lutyen would have had when he would have laid down the foundation of Viceroy's house in New Delhi. You think that your scenarios are perfect but as always there is some scope of screw-up but today the person with the blue umbrella sitting above has been helping you a lot; so while you are standing in the line to board the aircraft, you start praying for each of your scenarios to go as they went in your projections.
You enter the aircraft, manically rush to reach your lucky seat 17E , only to find your neighbour totally turned towards the window and looking outside. You sit next to her and now start revising all the opening sentences, as by divine help you have got some extra time to prepare your master act, act which would be as important as the opening presidential debate of Mr. Obama. You keep rehearsing, meanwhile the flight has taken off, and she is still looking outside, totally ignoring your presence. You start getting impatient but can't do anything other than wait. Suddenly she turns and starts searching for something in her bag, you think that you would offer her your help for whatever she might be searching but then she finds it. It is the sleeping eye mask. She wore it and slept and with it your flight of the dreams, crashes. You console yourself by ogling at the airhostess, who would unfailingly pass fake smiles, which they would have learned at Frankfinn. So with it ends your journey which remains etched in your memory as it is amongst the only cases where you would have hated the situation when a hot girl slept next to you!

Operational analysis of a Puchka delivery (Gol Gappa)

Just in case if you are wondering what puchka is, then for a larger good, it is gol-gappa or panipuri as it is called in north india and other parts. I do not have the statastics but I am very sure that kolkata's contribution to World's (Which will be quiet close to India's) consumption of puchkas would be sum of other top nine consuming cities put together. Delhi is famous for Chat and all the other fried stuffs but still even in chandni chowk you would not find a puchka-seller standing every 200 metres if not less, the site is possible only in kolkata. If you are a consumer, waiting for the delivery of the product (which in this case is puchka) and just by chance you happen to be an Industrial Engineer (just because you have a degree which says so) then you tend to ponder over the operations of the product development (which again is puchka). Earlier I critized the selle for the amount of time that the seller is taking in making the delivery and hence might be loosing customers which might be impatient and would walk away. I thought that there must be some flaw in his operation else you should not be having such a long waiting time. And hence came the idle brain in action and started analysing the whole value stream of the puchka preparation.
When you are analysing the problem in any system the first step is to look for the bottle-neck, which I quickly identified (even a 4th grader could have done that) and it was the process of making the mixture which he uses to put in the puchka, before stuffing it with the tangy water. I started thinking over what a similar seller in Delhi was doing and what the present puchka wala is doing, I was doing this to identify the best practise. I realised that a puchka seller in Salt lake (which is an area without any lakes in kolkata, just in case you do not know) makes fresh mixture virtually every time when a new set of customer are served, while I could weakly recollect from my experience in Delhi that a gol-gappa seller in chandni chowk always kept his mixture ready and hence his time to delivery was quicker. Identifying the problem led me jump directly to the conclusion that the puchka seller in salt lake is servicing lesser customers because he is not maintainig inventory and hence his constant stockouts may lead to reputational loss. Yes reputational loss! The puchka wala will have a reputation of a lazy and hence an impatient customer might not turn up to him and would not even refer others to the product and referral can be a big sales booster in this segment.
When the product delivery started, I realized the amount of customization that the consumer was looking for. So an old lady had eaten 10 pieces and she had different preferences for each one of them. For many of the preferences the seller had to customize a small segment of the mixture. And this old lady was not the only customer, which such varied preferences but I realized that it was only I who had not mentioned my preferences, rest all had their preferances changing with each piece. Since this extent of cutomization was alien to me, I was not even aware of what my 10 or even 5 preferences would be incase I want to excercise them.
I realised that customer here was entirely differnt from what it was in Delhi. The customer here values customized delivery of puchkas, something which a customer in Delhi do not even thinks. Since customization takes time hence waiting time is the tradeoff for this additional service. I tried to examine this mixture making part of the value chain even more closely and realised that the seller brings all the boiled masehed potatoes and it is the last stage of mixing the spices which he does on site at the time of delivery. So he has actually delayed the customization step till the very last stage and hence customer preferences could be taken into account. The system is very similar to the model which Dell computer sytems followed, they too have everything and assembles the hardware as per your preferences and hence just like the old lady you can have 10 computers with different configurations delivered at same time! Dell is considered a pioneer of this approach of customization but I am very sure that the practise of the puchka walas would have existed earlier than this. So if the founders of IBM or hewlett packard would have had puchkas in Kolkata in some poin to history and would have done similar analysis, they certainly would have encorporated this critical pratise of operations and hence Michal Dell would have had nothing new with him. Result he would have not made Dell Inc. the brand which it is today. The ultimate result, the PC market would have been highly monopolised and not oligopolistically competitive as it is today. In that case a computer would not have been of the price which they are today and people in india would have had suffered most.
So this is how owners of IBM not coming to Kolkata and having puchkas, prevented world from robbing of the IT revolution.

P.S. I am not being gender biased but I have not yet seen a female puchka seller hence all the references in the writeup are made accordingly.

Living Life by Ticks

When you are in a city with minimal people you know and that too not interested in the activities that you might be interested in, you tend to kill a majority of time in senseless quality thinking. You start thinking about your philosophy of life, and suddenly you realize that there is no such philosophy. You try to fix your behavioral patterns of the past on a big drawing board and try to relate it to any of the banal philosophies of life, which you have heard of (living life each day, planning for everything etc etc used frequently in movies). Once such day passes, you also become inquisitive about other's philosophies of life. The objective of search is three fold, first to confirm whether it was only you who had lived so long without any philosophy , second, is their any other philosophy which could actually be your philosophy (remember you figured out "your" philosophy by best fit method recently) as well it is just that I didn't knew it and the third objective could be more of a testing of your so called philosophy with the others and judge whose was better and in case other's was better, can it be adopted?
I was recently in a similar phase and hence was actively looking out for the "philosophies of life". Of all the philosophies which were quoted, most were highly subjective and you could hardly relate to any of those, particularly when you hardly understand what the catch phrase actually means or what will it mean in your life's setting. However the philosopny which appeared most interesting and I found it to be most easily adoptable and was in some loose sense lifted from one of the Hindi flicks, was "living life by tick". Concept is simple, make a list consisting of all the things that could be done (or Should be done, your choice) and start completing them (and ticking your virtual list) . With every tick you would know what type of tasks do you enjoy doing or hate doing and hence could elaborate your list within a category or eliminate some sections from your list accordingly. For example if "learning musical instrument" is something that would be on your list, once u learn one instrument, then probably your list will expand with listing of all the instruments within in, in case you liked the first instrument. In this way one would be able to explore a wide variety of things that are on offering and maybe could lead you to the task where your interests lies. Another good aspect of this philosophy is that it enriches your experiences in life and hence you could reach the famed position of "been there done all". However it is not advisable to count ticks on others' lists when you are adopting this philosophy as many would have ticked so much within a subsection, which appears very alluring to you, that you would either give up or would fully focus on that section, without realising how much hard work was required in each tick. Both of which are the stances that you don't want to start with in your philosophy of life. Another aspect of it is, in case you do not encounter your "natural interest" area early in the list, you might end up doing a lot of things without actually completing subsections within a section, something which would prevent you from becoming "specialised" in one area, something which might forced achievable if you are not living by this philosophy.
"Living life by tick" an operational form of philosophy which has a catch phrase of "one can't afford to miss anything". Although this philosophy would appear to be least philosophical but still is most straightforward and easily followable. So in case you do not have any philosophy of your own and want to adopt some philosophy to govern your life then it could be the one. If you are not adopting it then at least you have one extra option to choose while answering "what is your philosophy of life", and awkward question which if not someone else then your conscience would surely ask some day sooner or late.

P.S. This question regarding philosophy of life raises only when certain neurons of brain cross-connect, an event which has very high probability if you have had high intake of certain processed chemicals like alcohol or certain natural products like marijuana