Reaching There

If you're a non-resident Indian in need of a police clearance certificate for a visa, education or any other purpose from an Indian consulate abroad, you're in luck. I recently (October 2018) did this from the Indian consulate in New York. And it was surprisingly troublefree and very convenient.  I went through the documentation list provided here . I applied in person so I didn't have to go through the anxiety of mailing my passport. I had the following readily available: 1.  Miscellaneous Application form  - as the document is in MS Word format, I added some extra lines to fit my rather long residential address in India. 2.  Nationality Verification Form - although it says 'applicant may fill' this form, I had it ready anyway. I typed the whole thing in a Word document to give me extra space for addresses etc. 3. Passport - I had the copies of passport ready, exactly the way described in the website. Although if you're missing copies you can ...

I'm trying to learn Python this year (2018). The reasons are to explore its uses in data science, which is a skill that's becoming increasingly important since last 4-5 years. A disclaimer first - I'm not a programmer by profession and have taken some programming courses in college. But as saying goes these days - everybody's a programmer, either by choice or just have to pick up the skill. And it's a good skill to have! That's my motivation for learning Python. One of the first things I realized is that I need some online classes and a local environment to practice. The best resource for the online material is Python classes by Google, which you can access here . And the best version to learn (at least if you're reading this in 2018) is 2.7.x. If you want to try your hand at later versions, you can go ahead. You can download it here . Once you've installed it on Windows (I don't have a mac!) you would want to execute Python code from Window...

We will talk about recycling in this post. However before we begin talking about practical methods let's go through a couple of concepts, one is a philosophical topic from the vast sea of the Vedic literature and the other is a concept, first raised by two British environmental economists, which has been adopted by European Union, UK and few private companies in the USA as well. #1 What is a Prarabdha Karma ? According to Vedic philosophy, every action will result in a reaction; i.e. every effort we make has a reaction on our destiny (by the way destiny here simply implies a future state, not fate) during an appropriate time. We as humans beings are making choices every moment that affects our now as well as future(s).  And all of these actions (Karma) impact our circumstances, preferences, tendencies etc. And by the way, Karma is not to be confused with fate. We always have the free will to act on our choices. However, we must bear fruit to all our actions;...

A Financially Naive Beginning It was 2006 when I came to the US as a young student from India, with some scholarship money and a lot of financial loans that my father helped me with. It was the first time I had my own credit card with a 300 US dollar credit limit which seemed a lot at that time. It wasn't until 2007 (yes, a year before the big recession of my generation) that I stepped into the stock market.  I still remember that I used Computershare to buy stocks of some large US companies. It was all new to me and I had never tried any kind of investing before and I had the luxury of having no firm financial goals. Luckily there was a message ingrained in my head that I'm investing for a long haul. I joined a training program where I learned what investing meant and how P/E ratio can help me with that. It was the basics that I had to begin with rather than a notion that investing means day-trading or a get-rich-fast scheme. I'm no expert but I would definitely say w...

If you search Hinduism, there are millions of different definitions and descriptions that are available. From the mysterious Rig Vedas that include the gods of Fire, Earth, Air etc. to Shri Krishna that gave the world the Bhagavad Gita (Song of God). Is it a collection of philosophies that delve with theological and psychological questions on the nature of 'I'? Or is it a collection of hymns in Vedas and Upanishads that talk about the rituals that need to be performed in a sacrosanct way to ensure prosperity and success of human actions.  Is it Vishnu, Krishna, Shiva, Hanuman, Rama or is it Tulsidas , Buddha, Mahavira, Surdas , Kabir, Mira? What is the meaning of being a Hindu or a believer in this ocean of philosophies or theories that seem to contradict each other? Is the relevance of Brahmin, Shudra, Vaishya or Kshatriya still a valid distinction of human beings? Is D vaita and Advaita philosophies contradicting each other? Am I an Aryan  coming from Turkmenistan...

Somebody rightly said that pictures are worth a thousand words. And by that magnitude a moving picture is perhaps worth a million times more. I can only imagine the impact the first motion picture created over a hundred years ago would have had on someone. It's something about motion that attracts the mind; whether it's a river flowing over the rocks making it's way to the ocean or some gyrating to the sound of nothing. Technology has advanced from Eadweard Muybridge's photography to Thomas Edison's motion picture to modern day movies from across the world that include works of art cinema, drama, documentaries, pornography to rovers walking on planets thousands of miles away! And the technological advances continue with every new model of phone or camera. As the world adopted the technology everything in last few decades got recorded on either a magnetic tapes and finally onto silicon chips in form of zeroes and ones. And somewhere on the course of this ad...

As I look inside me I can see all my biases swirling around inside my head (metaphorically speaking). And in a world filled with human beings we fluctuate between rationality, pragmatism, love, pessimism, indifference, hatred and conflict for almost all aspects of our lives. So it is very important to at least listen to a different point of view. As the first reaction is generally indifference or complete disdain. As I was browsing through news one of the topic that comes up frequently is Climate Change. I will not go into the politics of the issue or try to persuade anyone to accept or deny the premise or theory or fact or rumor or whatever someone considers it. My hands moved away from the remote and typed "Climate Change" on YouTube search and then for some reasons (maybe I was thinking about scientists) I added Carl Sagan to the search.  And behold, there was a keynote speech of Carl Sagan  before the 5th Annual Emerging Issues Forum at North Carolina State U...