Heave-ho

Am stealing the phrase from a friends blog. She had posted a series of "I have realized that" pics, of which the above struck me. I have changed the background becos it had a very pessimistic picture on it. The phrase struck me specifically because I was thinking about my faith and its beliefs and basis today. (Talk of coincidences :) )

Anyways, I had a few discussions back home about 'keeping faith' in God, where people said that 'faith' is important, and sticking to my decision to postpone that later, recently I have come to the conclusion that hard work is the best religion.

Sumedh had written a classic post on the concept of God. I find myself agreeing to the same, tho with a milder criticism of the human mentality. I think that the concept of God has been created to counter insomnia. Rather than face the fact that things might not go the way they are wanted, because of a lack of skill/effort/aptitude. Human nature forces us to have wants, but few people understand the fact that these should be limited, to their efforts. Increasing efforts ought to yield expected results.

In case there still is a dearth of results, then it means that there has been a lack of efforts .. nay not just back-breaking efforts, but those of directed, efficient, 'sensible' and if possible, elegant, efforts....

By efficient, I mean the efficiency that is observed in critical/super-critical times. This concept was gifted to me during my JEE training period by Prof M. Prakash was thus : "In the JEE you shall solve 105 problems in 180 min, that is you solve a problem in about 105 sec. At home when you are studying, how many problems do you complete in an hour?? Around 15-20... So now do you feel you are working hard enough?" Since then 'efficiency' has been among the sought after goals.

The word 'sensible' doesn't mean that the goals should be sensible, never!!, they should be 2 steps ahead of what you think you can achieve... 'Sensible' here means that the efforts should be just that... sensible. It definitely isnt just a conventional, tried and tested approach. It may be a proper conventional approach,a doomed but valiant fight, an arbit idea or in some cases it may be something crazy that makes you go "wooohoooo!!" But in the end it is .. well "sensible" ;)

Elegance in a solution is desirable. There may be some cases when brute force yields the best results, but that shall according to the problem at hand and the discretion of the solver.

I do not want to include luck into the equation of getting results, for three reasons. 1: The existence of luck needs some external agency for its creation, which then can be called as God :) and 2: I think luck is a function of your efforts. There is a phrase to the effect of "The hard worker is the luckiest." and 3: most important, I haven't given it much of a thought wrt the effect of penning it down. So to a first approximation, let us include just effort.

Here's to directed, sensible, efficient efforts. Would close off with a few rules, don't know if I have heard the first one anywhere, but the remaining 2 are by yours truly

Rule 1: "Aukaad se jyada aur vakt se pehle kisi ko kuch nahi milta"
Rule 2: "Aukaad is a function of your determination and efforts.
Corollary 1 to rule 1: "You don't get anything less or later than you deserve""