Dowry: a social evil?

This is something born from my readings of the world around myself. I would write this first para as a sort of disclaimer for two conflicting reasons. The first being that I do not want to write this as a self-righteous personality setting forth some big views, for I have a partial view of society and world that I have seen from my point of view. Also I will not claim to be a best read man, though I have read to some extent. And secondly I would also not say that these are trivial things with my strictly personal views, or hint being overly modest, as that would depict lack of self-belief. So, what follows, is something of essence whose extent is for the reader to decide. Here is something that I wanted to say, but not sure to whom.

We have all learnt of dowry as a social evil. This is a fact that I believed in by heart and had almost decided to never take it. This was embedded in me with a rigor, given my schooling and the prevailing thought of our intelligentsia that influences the education system of my nation. I vaguely remember some debates during school time which were destined to make these points clear in young minds, and yes I was intrigued and believed in them.

I'll raise my point with an example. Consider a family say 50 years ago, well read, cultured and progressive. Given these things it also wants to preserve it values though being open to reason and experiments. One of the many long held traditions is that the girls claim no inheritance rights and the parents money is equally divided amongst sons (unlike primogeniture). This is more a matter of convenience and less of tradition as girls are married off almost as soon as they are legally eligible and preferably to far of areas. As the family does want to expand and not close themselves in a closed shell most marriages are arranged atleast in another town. Now since the girls are sent to far off places, they hardly ever meet again. Even in today's world of shrinking distances, this remains largely true. Division of property, as is the custom happens at parent's demise or when aging parents will so. Often, it is true that it is not possible or feasible for the girl's new family to travel at the time of division. So, how about simplifying the procedure by means of dowry?

I am sure that someone must have raised this argument but it may have got lost somewhere. As we view it, we give away a large chunk of what the parents have to the marrying girl. It is an unsaid understanding that the parent's responsibility towards the girl are henceforth over and the girl shall never turn back for anything more. This actually makes a lot of things simpler. Now the girl is a part of her husband's family and her first duties lie there. There is no more in terms of inheritance that remains as the girl has already parted with her due. And also since the girl has left the house, she has almost nil influence on the division of property because even to date most divisions happen on emotional quotient rather than on rational basis.

However, this is not implemented with an iron fist and parents always consider the girls a part of their families. As is it said, "Whatever you do for girls will always fall short". This perfect (or some may rosy?) picture may not hold true for all cases. But then no single argument can hold true for all cases. It is what we choose to look at, which makes what we think.

Its not like that there have been no staunch believers in the "wrongdoing psychology" that probably does comes to us, certainly not from within. There have been people who stood steadfast against dowry and refused a single rupee, only to be later taunted by their wives for loosing out on their fair share of inheritance. To an extent this is true.

I was just watching a movie, Narnia..., where there was a dialog "Get treated like an animal for long enough and that's what you become." Somehow we are always treated like wrongdoers for our beliefs and customs. This long seething feeling of wrongdoing remains and brings the worst in anyone. If I am already doing wrong by taking dowry then why not a little over do it and squeeze out every penny that I can.

I am not sure where this idea of dowry being evil originated. Probably it was a part of a larger conspiracy to devalue us in our own eyes. I am not sure how true are claims that point out the supposed evils of the Indian society, for they seem to aim at incriminating me in my own eyes even before I understand their meaning. It is always said that, 'aim to catch the students young' and "teach" them the "right stuff" before their minds are set. So from a tender age I am given to believe that there are numerous evils in my society and even in my own self that I have to fight. Isn't a child's mind susceptible to propaganda as well. What if the belief that these are social evils, itself is flawed. Why is a child not made to confront these with his own thoughts and experiences when he is sufficiently old enough to separate wheat from chaff? I was recently confronted with this misuse of the power, to influence young minds, when my younger brother came up with a startling remark that "we should not vote for X party because it supports trade unions...". I was shocked, because it was party Y that brought the concept of trade unions and all political parties in India are involved with trade unions.

Though I have digressed from the original topic of dowry, I have already said a lot. I would close with a few more words, "Don't criminalize the fire because it burns or the blade because it cuts, for without either even food is a forgotten thought."

Honey show me the money

Time and again my life revolves around same things. One of these is a deep sense of inadequacy. I keep getting stuck around words and move over them again and again. This title is just another set of words I got stuck around. This time connecting this with something totally different as may not be apparent at the first look.

When reading maths we learnt the concept of uncountably infinite. Its a beautiful concept as I understand it. It answers a simple question, can you count infinite. No I can't, but the tools I use, can. The tool is mathematics. Infinite is after all infinite, so is the tool. As long as I can put a number to every item without missing any, I can count as many of them as may be there. This includes infinite items. So I can count infinite. However there is a limitation, the item to be counted has to mapped to a linear scale. Any expansion that happens in more than one dimension cannot be counted, hence the concept of uncountably infinite. Actually I have digressed a lot from what I had to say so I'll come back to track with the intended meaning derived from this gyan.

Paisa haath ka mael hai (money is the dirt of palm, it comes and goes with no trace). A commonly used joke. Actually the creation of money is one of the biggest changes that have occurred in the history of mankind. Its a blatant attempt to linearize the world on a single scale "money". A few personal experiences shook me hard to think about this. Last couple of relationships that I saw being forged and destroyed as a result of this linear judgment of things, money. We'll break a commitment because we can't see it fitting the higher position on the universal linear scale or we are eager to form one as it takes us higher on the linear scale. I'll spare the details, but these slew of events that I have witnessed and as I have understood are a mockery of everything that's present around us. We can rate anything and anyone using this single scale. And there comes the market, the concept nursed and glorified (shall I say daemonized) by a unipolar world.

There used to be a term I often heard in my childhood, "lakeer ke fakeer" being used for people who would never listen to reason. Looking around I find that this can correlate with my environment, the lakeer being, money. Somehow my impression is that the life has multiple dimensions and hence is mathematically unmappable to a single linear scale. However it seems that solvability of this problem is no concern for people who think they solve the problem on regular basis.

Sometime ago, if my memory serves me well, I read that "prominent educationists" find that the system of exams and marks does not adequately judge a student. Therefore a grade system is being pushed that rates students on a coarser level. Though its implementation is another point of a major debate, its better then before. But anyways, it still is a linear scale and lives are judged by people who are themselves qualified by this very system. I wouldn't push this line of thought much as this will mean another digression.

Back to money or the problem of a single linear scale. For "his dumbness" as I refer to the common man this scale is a single measure of comparison. This is common man is not a fool as he always takes care of his money. By most standards that I am aware of, this is the smartest thing to do. Families split, friendships break, faith is destroyed, trust evaporates, all for conformance to the single scale of human existence.

(Can't resist some sensational statements). All this exercise just to relieve myself of the itch to say something.

The virtue of randomness

Personally speaking, randomness forms a big part of me. So there is a natural liking, though I have always considered organized behavior as a true virtue. Its something I am not, but want to be. Anyways getting back to the subject.
I had a Mysore trip a few days. Another of the random shots that we pulled off on a saturday afternoon. Me and a friend decided to go Mysore on bike. Since I had already been there on the bike only a couple of days back and knew that the highway is a 4-lane beauty, we decided to hit the road. So the two of us on our respective bikes, zoomed towards Mysore. This was when the devil's workshop (my idle brain) set into motion.
I just observed the traffic and the human behavior of slowing down or zooming up just to avoid traffic. Actually, I myself was doing the same to stay clear of traffic and enjoy my drive. This as one may argue builds up randomness in the traffic system of the highway. And as we compare this to the largely dumb networks that we create on the name of information superhighways we can estimate the dumbness of the internet. Actually the networks that we usually create are fairly deterministic. This leaves very less room for randomness. As a result there are scenarios where they get clogged up.Well I must say that it was the randomness that saved as a lot of trouble. There were scenes when two buses or trucks would be driving side by side leaving no room for anyone to overtake. This used to be painful as their typical speed is 40 or 50 Kmph. But I must bless the inherent randomness of traffic that they would part their proximity and let others overtake them.
There are several factors here that may be said to be playing a role here, like human common sense or goodwill, but it ultimately leads to randomness in the system in a sense that all of the people on the road are not taking the same decision of speeding up or slowing down at the same time.
I must say that it saved us some time & a lot of frustration.

Random thoughts

Just remembered an old incident. It would be good to document it.
There was a military guy doing his masters in my department. Once we had an argument at tea board on the need of research and the useless algorithms that we are working on. The discussion waivered to content based image searching. And he said, "who would want to search images except in some highly specialized environment. And its pretty much an unnecessary wastage of resources which can be utilized to achieve some better results". I was my usual abstract and confused self but I stuck to my point. Anyways the discussion was over after sometime and we talked about many other things.

Then when we were walking back to the department, he was talking to another friend who had been in the group all time. They were discussing about the collection of movies that they had got and had to clean some of them due to space crunch on the hard drive. He just mentioned that there was a movie which they earlier copied from a pirated CD for which they have a better print now and he could not recall the name of the movie. So it would save them some space if they delete the older version.

I just had an idea and said, "This is where we use content based image search". There were no further comments on the topic and I felt good for having made a point. I do not know when will this kind of resource intensive research be available to common man, but I guess someone in some research lab will be working on this.

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." Ken Olson, Chairman and founder of Digital Equipment

"In these days, a man who says a thing cannot be done is quite apt to be interrupted by some idiot doing it. Elbert Green Hubbard (1865-1915)"

I just felt that I should write what happens in my life and what I do whether willingly or unwillingly, and whatever I go through.

So I have spent the first two weeks in office in my first job. Things are looking confusing till now as I am still not able to zero in on the reason for the first PR assigned to me. Its a small bug in an older release of the OS, but I could not zero in on the problem.

Just a bit confused about what needs to be done. This requires a lot of reverse engineering and the usual cscope stuff that we used during Linux Kernel Internals. A lot of old stuff is coming back now. Though it seems similar but a lot of stuff has gone now, there is a sense of similarity but there is something missing. It would become ok in time.

This week the productive output isn't much. Hoping best for the next week.