4 Shudras are not untouchables!

While discussing about reservations in Indian system, my friends told me that it is okay to give reservations for Shudras. I asked him, what do you mean by Shudra? My friends said, weren't they untouchables?
Often we don't know the history or remember some part of it. The above information might have come from false interpretation or limited knowledge. In my history classes, I never taught about the actual history of India. The actual history of India is not well written and highly speculative. All we know for sure that there was a system existed in India. There was Varna system and caste system. Caste are different from Varna. This must be well understood. People often mix here. They think Varna and Caste system are same. They are not same, may be mixed but not same. Varna is basic division of then society in four major parts,
- Brahmin (mainly priests, scholors)
- Kshatriya(kings, warriors)
- Vaishya(traders)
- Sudra(craftsmen, labourer)
Castes are endogamous groups which may sub-divided in sub-caste.

But the untouchables are not part of any of this. They are simply outcaste. Anyone outside the then society and not in varnas are outcaste, chandaal.

Untouchables or even the shadow of them were considered unpure.

The outcastes are below sudra and not a part of society. So next time if you hear someone is confusing between shudra and untouchable, tell them the reality.

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1 Trip to Morbe Dam

Monsoons in Shyadris are always awesome. Especially the village side is lush green, with hills all around, numerous waterfalls, rainy wet roads and the garama garam snacks. This time I wanted to go somewhere on National Highway 4. Nothing was specific in my mind. Me and Sapana, decided to take a bike ride from Navi Mumbai to somewhere near to karjat. I was looking for smooth and green drive on NH4 and Sapana was looking for waterfall. We all started on Sunday noon, packed very small bag and camera. Besides we took no raincoats but a small umbrella with us. Now this is very risky in rainy season around the areas of Mumbai Pune. Rain could start at any moment. But my entire plan was to get wet, so we were never worried. The journey started from Thane on Sunday noon around 1 pm. Our first stop was Panvel MacDonalds. We had quick burgers and then set for NH4. As soon as we had crossed Panvel, roads became cleaner, without potholes, four lanes with divider. Green trees on both sides of road and mountains at distant. Everything was just green. The drive on bike was just awesome. But all in all, our back and bum started aching as we move forward. The lonavala climb was in sight about 25 km. Then suddenly we read a tiny board about a DAM. We made a U-turn and went for it. It was Morbe dam, we never had heard of. But we took some unknown inspiration and both decided to go there. We were expecting nothing special, but at the first site a placid lake water view gave us cheers. It was slightly raining, two distant foggy mountains and tranquil shallow water in front of us. It was calm around. I spent few minutes looking at the mountains, lake and dam. The experience was very peaceful. Not many people were around, no garbage, no stinking smell, nothing but a calm romantic view handshaking of nature and man made figure. We spent about an hour at this place, went back with short fond memories about this small trip. 

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0 Anti-Corruption tamasha and People

Since Anna Hazare declared that he's going to fast in peaceful way at Jantar Mantar, I have started following the movement. Corruption in India is a chronic problem, and must be tackled before it eats us all. Everyone will agree, but not everyone will agree on how the movement should follow the path. In general, any movements where people are agreed on the goal but not on the strategy have parallel but different routes of achievement. Freedom movement in India had Gandhi, Bose, Bhagat Singh singing different tunes but for same goal. For many people Hazare is unconditional leader, whereas for some Baba ramdeo is just taking limelight from the movement started by Anna. The baba is still very much immature in politics and has not deal with them on political issues before this agitation. On the other hand, Anna Hazare has long experience with Maharashtrian powerful leaders. The fast is not new to Anna. But even Anna has limitations. He can't be compared with Gandhi. The picture created in front of Indians is that all the politicians are crooked, corrupted and thugs. In that case, it’s all common people vs. political class.
With the start of this movement, people have put all political parties and in general all politicians bar. While we must consider that there is considerable truth in these allegations as none of the politician with corruption charges went in Jail. Corruption is rampant in India as we all know, but from where to start is the real question. There are anti-corruption bureau at almost all the districts in India. This department exists with CBI, CID etc. Along with ED, Income tax, Central Vigilance Commission, Lokayukta all exist. But they exist with very minimal powers. The willing to fight against corruption doesn’t reflect in these personal. After all, corruption is in Indian blood, so corruption exists in all the area which deals with public. Education, health, public works these are the oasis for corruption.

The movement is trying to create cure than prevention. Of course the cure is important as the disease is well blown. The remedy is not so easy or one day solution. Consider, if someone want that he will always stay lean. For this he’s to follow the path of complete and well balanced diet along with exercise. For a fat person, getting lean is a process and this process has to continue throughout the life of the person. Same is with this cure; this should not be seen as silver bullet.

Even the lokpal bill which is proposed with so many things will have all the powers. In the end the lokpal will have to investigate and give judgment, but this will not stop the accused to call the high court wherein his case will be pending for long. So in the lokayukta is nothing but the arbitrator between common people and accused. Hence this will not solve any problem as we thing it will. But this could be seen as 2nd step against corruption. Why I have said that this is 2nd step, because I consider Right of Information Act was the first step. I agree that this act need many corrections and protection to the people using act. But in general this act has created fear among babus. The accountability is now on rise.

So can we think on and try to find some common problems and possible remedy.

1)    The low level corruption at various public departments
2)    The corrupt people even if they caught are not punished for long time.
3)    Tendency of common public about escaping the law
4)    The awareness about the wastage of public money among all class of people
5)    Business grown with the help of corrupted people
6)    Justice delayed
7)    Delaying or doing nothing will also be considered under corruption
To be completed…

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0 Learning from Failures

This is a developer summary on the project developed and managed from scratch. This is my experiements in last 3 years.

The last project was developed (?) and (mis) managed entirely by me and colleague with the same experience as me. In the process I have understood the importance of design, planning, processes, project management, test management and code reusability, etc. I have learned this all from the failures.
The project was started on a note that it will be a small migration from dot net to java, should be complete in 6 months and we are free to use any thing we want to.

Communication:
The problem started with communication. The requirements were not clear, but as old habit die hard, at least for us Indians, we never bother for a more specifications. Rather, we had imagined things as they have come and implemented. Of course, in the end, the product was not so near to what was expected. It was not far from expected either. But it dragged a project a little bit more, just for rework.

Unit tests:
This is best part of our project. More often we don’t have unit test cases (Junit), but in case where the unit test cases were written, didn’t serve the purpose.
I have noted down the problems below:
- Unit test cases were connecting to database. They will fail in other than dev environment; hence we found a solution to have different config files for different env.
- Unit tests were more close to system tests where we test the entire system and not just part of it.
- Discussed Test Driven Development but never ever tried to implement
- We never had time to write unit tests. ;-)

Code Documentation:
While we always has specification and functional stuff defined on project wiki, we never seriously believed in documentation on code. I know that document is not always helpful or necessary, as masters say that clean code is always preferable.
But we had neither. :-D

Coding Style:
All developers has there own style of writing the code. Hence our code was cluttered with two not so different styles, Hungerian and CamelCase. One developer has declared class variable like m_BlaNothing, while other has blaNothing. The formatting specified for code is different for both developers. Even the development environment was not same, I was using BEA Workshop (Bea’s eclipse with weblogic debugging facilities) and other has eclipse. When the third developer joined the team, he started using the latest version of eclipse.

Design:
Now in India, 3 years of coding experience seems good. I don’t consider myself as a bad developer and colleague is also good thinker and developer. We both had just above 3 years of experience when we started working on this project. Soon after I came to know that we have had very limited knowledge about the designing the software. I realized that I can write a complicated piece of code, but can’t design system entirely from scratch. It’s a huge limitation. Designing software comes with experience and practicing and reading lots of design pattern and much more. And at that time, I knew only one design pattern, Singleton. ;-)

Code Reusability:
We knew from start that code should be reused. But we have lacked with the vision of how to achieve this.
I think following we should have done:
- Put generic code at common place.
- Communicate often about the code.
Instead what we have done is,
- Never discussed amongst us as what we are developing and how are we developing
- The developed code, even if it at common place, is not communicated with others.
Now, the problem started occurring while we were refactoring some code after few years. Many times, we had just updated at one place, forgetting others. So usually we had problems on Prod env.

Clean Code:
Every programmer should read once, Clean Code book. We had done all the things, exactly opposite as what is said in that book. And we faced the consequences.

Half baked implementation of frameworks:
Spring, iBatis, Hibernate etc, was used at will. If developer things that JDBC is his comfort zone, then use JDBC otherwise iBatis. Spring was always underutilized as none of our modules used any of the spring features.

Test Case Management:
The automated and manual tests are managed in Quality Center. We have developed a wonderful script using, VAPI-XP script to automate our web services. We have also managed to use selenium to manage web based modules in quality center.
But the main problems with those test cases are, they check for more conditions than required or specified in test case. Hence test case can fail even if the output is what is expected.


I have seen things going wrong, and managed to correct them. I have learned a pretty hard lesson in all this process. But on the bright side, I have come up as a better programmer. I think that’s the best part.

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0 Getting Social

Recent developments in social networking sites are now a phenomenon. The pace of connecting people is so huge that it can be only called as mass rage. People of all age groups are attracted towards some form of networking. One may wonder how people used to interact with each other when the technologies like internet and mobile were not developed. The technology is helping us to move closer and making truly marking an era of single global village.
All at the same time a new form of commerce is developing within social networks. The advertising which was earlier limited to TV or radio commercials are expanded to the social media. Mails are scanned by autobots, chat windows are showing text based ads, searching information are promoting paid ads and many more. The revenue is not just generated for the companies who own social network sites, but also to those small businesses who want to reach to the larger audiences at lower price and more eyes of user. It is easy to search as well as order things on net than that of going out and finding one. Just take an example of courier service, once dubbed as potential failure after invention of e-mails are now booming because people have started purchasing on net and couriers are delivering the orders. The form of business has changed with creating a lot more of possibility of creation of new jobs.
Let us not forget the allegations towards these networking. Parents are complaining that the pupils are stick to computer, and doing lesser physical activities. Few studies have shown that kids with too much of time on net finds real world boring, whereas the virtual world the things happens faster. They start off and end relationship on the click of the mouse. On the other hand, few kids are sharp enough to start their own business and also not shy with complete strangers.
Shadowy identities have been created and a person pretends to be the one they are not. But with the gradual shift towards web2.0 sites are more about extending the real identity or names. So with real people develops real relationship. Isn’t it is great that people don’t get time to call others but at the same time everyone can be able to get updated about the others. Just update own site and follow the others. People now don’t forget the birthdays. 
The topic is relatively new and lot to be there to study about the socializing behaviour of people in new era. At the same time, it is doubtless that everyone enjoys socializing.
Happy Socializing!!!

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1 Best Reservation for Women

The public transports for Mumbai are Local trains and Best buses. Democratic republic government of India has a policy of Reservation for all the public domain for deprived class. Women are considered to have disadvantages as dominated by men; the government has introduced reservations for women in local trains and best buses. This provides a general convenience to all women, who face problems while travelling at peak time. Mostly men have not at all any problem of having reservations for women. But certainly they are not so happy with the situation. The main arguments are
- Women should occupy the reserved seats first.
- In case if no reserved seats are available then go for general seats.
With these arguments, it is unacceptable for them that women can occupy on general seat if the reserved seats are vacant. Further, the situation worsens if the guys are standing and there are still vacant seats for women and few women are occupying seat in general.
On the other hand, gals don't give a damn what men's are thinking. They find seats easily and of course they don't mind.
I don't want to argue on either side of debate. But I feel people often miss the few points in this debate and associate too much with personal experience.

The fundamental law for reservation is:
The quota is limited for the people who are addressed, and the remaining positions are for all people.
If we look closely to the above statement, the second part is more interesting, "for all", that means all the people including the one who are qualified for the quota.
But few men feel that the system is discriminating and find women are taking undue advantage of the situation.
My points are:
- If someone wants to opt out for quota, then it is their fundamental right not to take advantage of quota system.
- In case, if someone see the general seat, then they should occupy it first, so that the other girls who will enter after the bus is full will get the reserved seat. So girls have higher social concerns over guys.
Arguments on either side may not satisfy all people unless we have the equal resources with human population.

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