Another mail beginning with a quote from Obiwan Kenobi and you just _know_ it’s about philosophy. This mail is just me thinking aloud for everyone to hear, and maybe add to my dilemmas or possibly provide some interesting insights into them. I’m not keen on reaching an answer, but would like more points of view to add to the ones I have listed as my own.
This isn’t a controversial mail, so keep your adrenaline low. This isn’t about open source vs closed source. This mail is simply to list down the different view points I’ve seen people have, and people who didn’t have any. I have two minds even on the issue of whether it’s better to _have_ an opinion or whether it’s better to make choices on the moment, and based on what. In X-Men, when Wolverine asks Storm, “Are you’re on the right side?”, she answers, “At least, I’ve chosen a side.” I’m not sure which of them is more appropriate, but it does lead me to question many of the truths we cling to.
The purpose of this article is to discuss the point of view people take when performing an activity. Many a times, we lose focus of what we want to achieve and begin going off-track. It’s times like these when one has to sit down and decide what is important to him. Success? Sure success is important. But everyone’s own definition of success is different and one has to just sit down and define what one feels success is all about.
The reason I decided to speak on this is because at many times in life, we’ve been faced with mutually exclusive choices, and all choices seem as if they were simultaneously a success and a failure. To some extent, Gandhian thought does help keep yourself calm. And of course, religions attempt to answer most of these dilemmas, and if you read about a larger number of religions, your insight increases along with it. But I guess the key to making good choices is to accept that there is no definite specific “answer” that one can arrive at, and live with it.
What really makes a choice challenging is the realisation that you’re on your own. When you come right down to it, there is nobody “on your side” so to speak. Everyone has their own agenda, and everyone has their own objectives. Just because two choices coincide in actions, doesn’t mean the “choices” themselves coincide, it simply means that the resulting actions of those choices turned out to be identical for two people.
But part of the solution is knowing that you’re on your own. There is nobody really “with you” when you make those decisions. That also allows you to prevent people from making you feel guilty of what you’ve done. Sure they try, and they will keep trying, but part of being happy depends on not allowing it to “get to” you.
On this note, let me deviate a little as to how definitions of success can cause friction, and the earlier you realise what your definition of success is, the sooner you learn to get along with the world. Especially since I spent almost my entire life feeling as if I was swimming against the current in a powerful river.
Many of you received a mail from my recently saying that I am just honestly internally happy here at Microsoft after a long time, and I don’t feel the need to constantly keep struggling in order to overcome my internal insecurity. It was then that I began reading a bunch of philosophy and figured it what it was all about.
Understanding your idea of success:
The first challenge is to to figure out what your concept of success is. This could take a long time to figure out, with a lot of hindi-movies, idealistic literature, utopian promises, bigshot nametags trying to influence you from all directions. Even if you do figure out what your idea of success is, there will be quite a few people trying to make you feel guilty about it. The second challenge is to not allow them to do so. This takes even longer to achieve and can be quite a painful struggle. The third major challenge is in realising that you’re always alone in this struggle. Even if you meet “like-minded” people, very subtle differences in your ideologies can throw you back to square one. So you really just need to believe in yourself and move on, without much expectations of help or support. But once you’re there, trust me – it feels awesome!
For me, it has always been about the effect. It has always been about changing the world. Less talk, more action. If you remember, I began to get very irritable towards my last days of the CSLinux project. That was partly because too much discussion went on about philosophy and licenses. For me that was largely irrelevant. As I keep mentioning, many people out here at Microsoft used to be heavy Linux freaks at one time. I won’t try to guess their reasons for ending up at MS, but my reason was plainly that, for me, Qt vs Gtk API libraries has never been a problem. For me, a better UI has been the objective.
Part of the reason I was impressed by the Open Source Cafe people was because after a long time, I met people who talked with me in terms of effects. Suppose we define “to help farmers” as our objective, and suppose we produce a lot of GPL’d code which at the end didn’t help them, then would I define it as success? Frankly, I wouldn’t. And neither did Paritosh, which is why we got along. I don’t particularly care about helping farmers or coming out with GPL’d code. If for whatever reason, I ever began a project “to help farmers”, then my definition of success would be that at the end of the whole ordeal, it _has_ to end up helping farmers.
Here’s where I cease to be an open source guy, and possibly even not a Gandhian at all. If I need to keep my code closed _in_order_to_ help farmers, I’d do it without a second’s thought. If you feel that’s signing the deal with Davy Jones, then I’m Captain Jack Sparrow! Part of being at peace with yourself is to overcome the tendency to allow others to make you feel guilty for what you do. For too long, even after my parents kept insisting that I shouldn’t give a damn what others said, I used to allow others to make me feel guilty about myself.
If what I do is open sourced by my parent company? Sure why not. Whatever turns you on. Would I jeopardize my objective of helping farmers because someone prevents it from being GPL’d? Hell no! If farmer’s aren’t helped, there’s no purpose for me being there meddling with anything. I’m a problem solver. I’m there to take up the challenge. If someone buys my code for a billion dollars and gives it out for free? Sure, go ahead! You get your kicks that way, I’ll get my kicks by drinking Champagne and we both end up happy.
Life is about challenges again – technical ones and social ones. When we sit down for group meetings (which is 15 minutes in a month, and my manager thinks even that’s a waste of time), we discuss about “how to run a matrimonial site” (well, the kind of stuff we do is crazy – you wouldn’t believe it). If the site gets people married, we succeed. If we can’t get people married, we’re fired, regardless of what webserver we ran it on and whether the married couples were allowed to modify its code and redistribute it to their kids.
Understanding that ideas are free:
Here I’m going to promote some “free as in free speech” kind of freedom. In the movie “Ben-Hur”, Messala’s predecessor comments, “You can tie them up, you can torture them, but how can you make an idea go away? How do you fight an idea?”
While this is true, Messala’s response is equally important to understand, “How do you fight an idea? With another idea.”
Many times, people will try to make you feel guilty for what you believe in. Never allow them to do so. Ideas are free. We all know that there isn’t really such a thing as free speech. If I were to go on the road and speak against a prominent personality, I’d not make it out alive.
But ideas are totally free, because you don’t have to speak of them. But they’re equally vulnerable due to the fact that they’re hidden. If I speak against a famous personality, there are physical people who would
physically kill me. Society is much more sinister when it comes to fighting against freedom of ideas, they do it with another idea.
Understanding that guilt is not external:
I feel like quoting a certain character from a Perry Mason book (almost all characters in his cases have memorable quotes). The character is a 70-year-old great-grandmother who smokes, swears, drinks, and does whatever the hell she wants to. When Mason asks her about it, she replies, “People spend their childhoods preparing for their middle-age, they spend their middle age preparing for their old age, and they spend their old age making peace with God. I feel sorry for people who’re afraid to die. But I feel even more pity for those who are afraid to live.”
What society does to you, is make you afraid to live. It gives you certain ideas – through “culture”, “heritage” and “religion”, apart from media, and other means, society makes you feel guilty of your ideas. Even if you keep your ideas to yourself, people try to make you feel guilty for having them.
The second step in making peace with yourself is to prevent yourself from feeling guilty. I’ve always been an “academic purist”. Recently someone mailed me and told me that I work for the very industry that I speak against. What was amazing this time around was that I didn’t feel guilty at all. Just an year ago, it would have thrown me off balance – either I’d have fired off an angry response, or locked myself in a dungeon working on a project to satisfy my insecurity. This time, nothing. I plainly told the guy to mind his own business and if he has anything productive to do, then to do it, but his mails will no longer make me feel guilty of what I’m doing.
It also gave me a clear idea of how people try to trap you. I’ve spent quite a while in academics, on research projects and stuff. During those times, this very guy used to say, “Have you ever worked in the industry? Who are you to speak against them when you yourself never experienced it?”
That was the reason I came in the industry in the first place. For a few years, I wanted to be in the top company that everyone dies to get into, and in possibly one of the most high-profile teams within it. Now when my aces trumped all their “industry” cards, they try to make me feel guilty about leaving academics. And it’s amazing to see just upto what extent people will go to.
I’m going to respond publically to this person. Just because I work in the industry, doesn’t mean my comments against the “industry experts” apply to me – frankly because my work speaks for itself. However, if applying those comments to me is what it takes to apply them to others, so be it. Apply them to me. And also apply them to others. In fact, during every talk I give in front of students, I discourage them from joining the industry and make it very clearly known that I _did_not_ get admission in a Ph.D. program anywhere. Make every industry expert say the same. 
In fact that shows just how much more demanding academics is and what high quality is required there. I get paid at least five times of what I would get if I were in a Ph.D. program with the most high-profile CSIR JRF scholarship, and yet I cannot get admission to that Ph.D. program (even in Pune University). That’s proof of the kind of people who choose academics. While it’s disappointing to me personally, it does make you feel proud that probably the very elite are going there. And it gives you an idea of what the “industry” really is. The industry pays five times to someone who’s not even given admission in a Ph.D. program that pays five times less.
Try to remember the next time an “industry expert” tries to impress you. Nothing puts things quantitatively in perspective as much as money does.
