Does a religion define a person ? ( An amateur's point of view )

[Disclaimer: This is not meant to offense anyone, just putting out few things that are mingling in my mind]

In a time, we fight each other for various reason [ religion, race, sex ... to name a few ], I am sure many might have spent enormous time studying what cause them and why we cant at least avoid it in the future.  Given the title, it should be noted that I have not done any background reading on this, so I must apologize if I am re-stating things that are already in the public domain or state somewhere else before.

Lets try to define a person ... Why do we people rise against each other ? Without going to the big stage, why would you stand against any other person ? I am sure you won't hit someone you just met in the bus for no good reason [ sadly society today is full of such stories killing strangers, we will get to that point later ]. If you look closely we would stand against someone because who he / she is. Mainly because we can not tolerate the definition of them, the definition we have given to them [ not necessarily the actual definition of them ]. So what is this definition ? We define people by their religion, by their ethnicity, by their inherited names with so many other things that world has created to group people [ its funny that we are talking about globalization uniting people all over the world, but on the other hand each day we find new ways to get separated from each other ]. We are proud for who we are [ of course nothing wrong with that ] and at the same time we very rarely appreciate others for being them rather we try to make them to a person based on our likes and dislikes. Bottom line is, we either "re"-define them or break them if they are not willing to do that. Needless to say that its just wrong to redefine another person based on our preferences but I am going to rather elaborate on the fact that are we defining people right at the first place before standing against them ???

Lets talk about known facts, if a person is Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist ... I have seen that people tend to just assume so many things about that person even before that person says a single word. This goes on with all other main factors as well ... such as race, etc ( So when you first read it, the impression on your face is, RIGHT ... we dont do that, thats just evil ... hmmm ... dont rush just think slowly, how many time have these factors affected our decisions in our lives. ). So it goes on to say that we define a person based on something we assume and act upon it and we rarely give the other person a chance prove who really he / she is.

And you might have often come across terms such as "Good Christians" / "Bad Christians", "Good Muslims" / "Bad Muslims". We will leave the good portion for the moment ... So who are these "Bad" people anyways ? ... If I ask you to define the term "Bad" Christian, among many answers that one might get, the summarizing answer would be that a person who is Christian and follows a very bad life style or a Muslim who has a very bad life, and the list goes on ... So how exactly can a person be a Christian and follows a bad life ? or be a Muslim / Buddhist and have a troublesome life ... Is that definition correct ? You are trying to say this is an apple and its colour is Blue.

Thus the question comes ... Does a religion define a person ? or can any other external factors such as race define a person for that matter ??? In the current society we assume it does as I was making that point earlier. Then again the question is, does it really ???

If I go along the lines of religion, religion does DEFINE  a person. However, the issue we have today is that people no longer truly follows their religion or do follow a religion defined by them selves which is very much different from the true religion. So in the simple terms, there aren't any bad Christians they are just bad people who aren't Christians. People seen in the churches aren't necessarily be Christians, people seen in the temples aren't necessarily be Buddhists or Hindus. People have found so many other reasons to be in the churches or in the temples without really being the true followers. So with people like them there is no co-relation between their religion and what kind of a person who he / she is. Its nothing wrong with the religion its what is wrong with those people. One person or group people acting weird mean that they are weird not their religion and specially we CAN NOT assume that another person belongs to the same religion is weird too.

On the other hand, Fundamentalists treat the Bible as in written for 4th Grade  students take only the literal meaning of it and creating all sort of false claims. Radicals change their own religion to justify their own cause portraying a holy picture for their wrong cause. [ aren't we all defining each terms of the religion for our own cause in some cases, justifying what we do ... that's wrong, and using it to harm others or even to force others to believe it, its even more of a grave sin ]

So if the religion does define a person, and if just being religious doesn't count it towards it, how does actually religion define a person ?? ... [ any thoughts before reading the rest ??? , of course rest of the part just gives my point of view of it ] ... I think its the conscious of the person that is defined by the religion. In this very fast moving society, we have to make decisions every day every hour ... So mind will do the cost benefit analysis gives you a recommendation ( which in most cases a materialistic decisions ) and the conscious based on what you believe in your religion will give a spiritual decision. So how often do we listen to our conscious ? Making it worse, most of the time the spiritual alternative is the hardest alternative over the rest. So the definition of a bad person / good person comes from the form of whether that person listen to the conscious or not in carrying out day to day activities.

Next obvious question is what if the conscious is wrong, well if that's the case either what are you believing in is wrong or you are not believing anything. I personally believe, how strong your faith is, to which extent you would go to prove it, are the other factors that will affect the outcomes of the conscious and of course your final decision to take. So you can't really count on a conscious of a fake Christian. If you keep on ignoring the conscious, it will one day die off. A true Christian follower should more often than not, listen to the conscious and act upon it and any other person for that matter. A true Christian is helped by The Holy Spirit to take the right path and the right decision guiding our confused mind and I am sure each religion has its own way to deal with it.

So the bottom line is, I think Religion does define a person ONLY IF that person truly follows and observes the religion. However, can a true Christian be different from any other true followers of their religion ??? Let it be Muslims, let it be Buddhists, let it be Hindus ... The Answer is, if they are all true followers, they all will love one another and treat everyone as their own brothers and sisters. So if they are same why on earth do we have conflicts based on religion ??? I guess, answer is simple as none of the people who are involved in these conflicts are true followers of their respective religion ... They have just made up their own agendas / rules for the religion and acting upon it. So the religion is only a cover up story.

So keep in mind, when you meet a person, don't judge the person on the religion after all as Christians we know Jesus told us not to judge anyone. If that person turns out to be such a jerk, do not blame the religion as religion has nothing to do with the bad behaviour. And when its your responsibility after all to make sure that you convey the message of your religion by your good living as Jesus said live by example is the best way to pass on the message of good news.

[ Leave your thoughts as a comment, so that this incomplete effort would one day make the picture complete :), God Bless You !!! ]

How to follow the butterfly ... : Catching Butterflies II

So by now you should have a slight idea ... why you should catch butterflies ... and how to correctly identify which butterfly you should catch. We'll assume now you have bunch of butterflies to catch .. then you have to follow them ... right ? They won't come to you ... You have to follow them in such way that you should be able to get close to it in each step. You should not scare the butterfly and then make it fly away .. then you will loose ... There are certain things you should do to catch it slowly and harmlessly ... You can feel the beauty of it if you can catch it without harming it so you have to careful in that as well..


That's bit of from my experience in catching butterflies ... (lol). Now we have the bunch of universities which you feel that is worth applying. Then go to their grad application which is there online fill it write a SOP and send it get the recommendation and you are done. Thank You Bye ....

If it is that easy, one thing for sure I will be in MIT (however this is far better than MIT) and it will be just a matter of picking the university you want to go and then you can assumed it is done. It is far far more complicated than this. That's why you see acceptance rates of the universities for graduate studies range from 4% to 33%. It is not 100% or even come near to half way mark. Believe me this is a tough job ... who ever can convince the selection committee that you are worth enough to pick over others then you are safe. If you can not do it, please do not apply coz they do not stand a chance there. 

Ohh is it ... ? Thank you for telling this now. I should drop my idea of getting into a grad school then. End of the story. Is it .......? Well ... you still can do some basics correctly make your self a chance unless I would not be writing this post on how to correctly pursue an university. What are those basics ... You have to submit all the documents they want with your application ON TIME. You have to write a VERY GOOD SOP to convince them that you are a worth candidate and you have to get good recommendation letters from three people (sometimes its 2). That is that in very very short terms.

This is not finished yet ... (no time to finish busy with my work ... hope to finish it soon)

How to correctly find a butterfly .... : Catching butterflies I

Again ... due to the unending questions I get on this ... thought of a putting up a post on this. So that everyone can get something out of it (if it does by any chance).

Excuse me ... do you get questions on catching butterflies .. r u nuts .. yeah can be coz u can go crazy during late  (i mean very late) nights. I do catch butterflies part time here coz I some how need to cover up my expenses ... lol 

In my previous post (which is some what mysterious) I talked about how you feel when you find the reality of your dream (now for god sake do not go and look at it now please finish reading this). Here I am talking how to achieve that goal. I mean how to correctly pave the path to that. This will be the first of the series of posts that is to be followed addressing different aspects and stages of this process.

Yeah finally I am going to talk about the my experience on applying to grad schools along with the things that I should have done while applying. Even though I am in one of the prestigious universities in the world ( lol ) .. there were lots of things that I missed while applying.

Let me first talk little bit on who should catch butterflies and why ....You have to figure out why you want to do it ... there are so many butterflies out there but do you see a point catching them .. or you just want to do it coz others are doing it ... what are you going to do once you catch it ... The life you gona spend in the grad studies is the most precious part in your life as a young adult ... you sacrifice lots of things in your life and if you feel you have lost all of these for nothing you will suffer for the rest of your life ... so there are few qualities that I see, that should be in a prospective grad student .... The most important thing is you should love and believe in research ... it means you should be able to work in something in which you do not see a solution coming anytime soon but believe in it that there can be a solution and still you should be able to accept that non existence of solution it self is a solution. You should be able to take challenges ... sometimes you get work that you never had heard of it but still you should do it ... and to be able to become a successful grad student you should be able to think differently and should see everything in a conceptual manner not in the concrete level. There will be a separate post on this topic ...


Before start doing anything you should first do the GRE and TOEFL. I know that you all have just done the GRE and you do not have to tell me the peaceful feelings you have after the GRE exam coz I too went through it. Best thing you can do is just forget about what has happened there and just concentrate on the TOEFL. TOEFL is way far easier than GRE but you have to keep one thing in your mind i.e. TOEFL is the most important score than GRE. You can still get through the selection process with out a good GRE score (like me) but you can not make it through with out a good TOEFL score. If you can get something above 1000 for GRE you are safe but I have seen people who have got into the universities even without that mark. However for TOEFL different universities have different values for it, this can range from 67 to 100 (in IBT) so if you can score above 100 (which is not that hard in IBT) you are safe. Each university has information about its pre-requisites yet you can email them and get clarify your self on them. For most of the universities, it is quite safe to just mention that you have done the exam and the score is pending in the application and instruct the ETS to send the marks to the respective universities ASAP.

Then you should move into picking up the correct university to apply (you should at least start this by now). Successfully applying to Grad schools mean applying the CORRECT university with the CORRECT approach. How do you find the correct university ... hmm that's a tricky one. How would you find a the correct university to apply ... Before selecting the university you should have the slightest of ideas of what are you going to do in the grad school .... There are couple of ways you can approach this ... You can go search the universities that do good research in your areas of research interests. You can search ACM, IEEE, USENIX .. etc for top tier conferences and workshops in the respective area of interest and see which universities have published their work in that. Most of the universities have posted so many research information on the web but if they have not published any work in such conferences, it means that they have not done any thing notable. Then why do you want to apply such a university. So do not fell into fancy research projects posted on the web unless they have some good papers published. 

At the same time some of the universities may not have all the projects posted on the web. So what can you do in such situations ? .... Well all of the universities have a list of the graduate students studying in their respective departments and mostly they have their own web page. That is a good starting point. You can get most up to date information from these sites. You can write to them and ask about it .... They might give valuable information about the projects that is being carried out but not posted in the web. Ask them about the projects that they are looking for new people to work. Then you can be bit smart .... how ? You can then write to those professors asking more information about them and how would you like to join those projects. However before doing that ask the grad student whether it is ok to do it or not ... Do not worry whether a particular project is over or not because if you have a good idea on improving that project further more, you can still write to them and they will definitely consider your idea on it.

You will always have an edge when you write to a professor with an idea what is he doing at the moment and even better if you have a idea as well how to make it even interesting (but its not mandatory). Tell him / her why you are interested in that particular project and convince him that if he takes you in, you can really shape up the current project (but do not convince him other wise like if I take this guy in that will be the worse decision in my life ..). Do not try to show off your colors , be humble. Convince him that you have a good research capacity. I will talk more on this when I talk about the SOP.

After all, please do not worry too much on the research area that you want to do before applying .. I have seen people who have changed their research interests once they came in. So there is no hard rule on that. You can change it anytime you want but when you are looking for a university just keep your options available. But when you applying for the PhD directly then this will be bit different in some universities.

At the same time there are world university rankings ... Times higher, QS university, US News, etc. You can get the overall rating and the subject wise as well. Now do not go and get the top 10 universities there and apply to those ten. Chances are really really low that you get a positive response from them. There is a catch in these ranking systems (from what I see and what I heard from people), there are certain criteria that they used to calculate the rank, so you have to be conscious that, are those criterias important to you in making your decision. I believe those ratings do not represent the full picture. There are some good universities that do brilliant research in your area of interest but not quite good in rankings, whys that ... they might not have a good medicine faculty .. or they have something missing compared to other universities which are totally unrelated to your area. However this rankings do show you an important factor before deciding to apply.

Then why do we need to look at the ratings ... There are couple of answers to this. The acceptance rate of the universities is an important factor you should look into before applying. Now you can use the ranking for that. Higher the rank lesser the chance acceptance rate because then majority of students will be applying to those universities. If you are specifically looking at US universities look at the US ratings only. Because getting into a US university which is ranked 20th in the world ratings might be harder than to get into non- US university which is ranked among top 10. At the same time, if you find a good university and that university does not even have a rank then you should think twice before applying to that university.

Now you have a bunch of universities who does interesting work in your interested research area. Then look at their ratings before deciding which to apply. I do not see applying MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Cambridge at once. I would pick only two of them to apply coz all are in same tier and for the rest I would pick some more lower ranking university which has good research work that is suitable for me. This is how I approached it, categorize your final list of universities into three categories based on the rank. Top, middle and low. Pick two most appropriate universities from each category. Then you have two very good universities, two middle level universities and two lower level universities. Then how would do you define the border ... how would take middle level ones ... is it below 50th or 30th and what about lower level ... is it below 100 or the universities that doesn't even exist in the rank. It is totally depend on you. If you are a brilliant student who has publications then I would say take middle as below 30th and lower as below 60th. But if you are on the edge ... not sure how will it go ... then you should go bit more down defining middle and lower ... so then again it is totally upto you decide on that. Finally have some fall back options as well. Apply to one or two universities knowing that for sure that you can get acceptance from them. 

There are some other factors as well that you should think before applying. You should think about how well are you going to blend into those university environment. Are the people friendly there ... are they violent ... how is weather (if you are not good at the cold conditions then you should be more concern about it). All these are important as well because you are going to spend 5- 7 years in that so you better know it before its too late. So how can you get information about them ? ... You can ask the grad students, most of these sort of information can be easily be found on the web as well.

Lastly, contact your lecturers in the university. They always know better than we do. Get their opinion on different universities. I would not have applied to the university that I am in if it wasn't for my supervisor in the university which I did my bachelors. They can guide you very far in this matter.

Final remark that I want to emphasize is, applying the CORRECT university will take you half of the way towards the goal. No matter how brilliant you are, if you apply a wrong university with an inappropriate research interests then story ends there. Make sure you pick the correct university to apply.

If you are interested in Computer Systems (Operating systems, Distributed Systems, Parallel Computing, Virtualization, ) ... then you can contact me to get more information. If you are not still you can contact me I might be able to give some guidance.

To Be Continued ... Await for the Catching butterflies  II

Dreams Meet the Reality ...

Hi Folks ....

This comes as a response to many requests I got asking to share the experience (both technical and life) with all of you out there .... and specially to help students who are trying to apply grad-schools.

Ok .. Back to the topic "Dreams Meet the Reality" ... Achieving dreams is one common goal you see in every human being in the world. So what does actually mean by achieving a dream ? Are you done with your life ... you can live happily ever after ... this is not what you expect ... of course I want more ... this is a terrible mistake ... so what ... 

Once you achieve something in your life that you were waiting for years, the instinct feeling could be any of the above. The dangerous among those is to feel that you have made a terrible mistake and at the other end of it, its quite natural to have a more higher dream once you achieve one. The same dream might affect two people differently since they might see it in different ways. So why on earth I am talking about dreams here ... Well entering to a grad school and specially to a one that I am already in, was "THE" dream of mine for sometime and I feel really "happy" about it. 

Here I am going to share my thoughts, the way I see this achievement. I am the least experienced person to talk about it and yet I am among latest to experience it, so why not ... For sure these impressions I have now will definitely get changed as I move on with this life but then I am in a different stage of life ... 

Starting way back when I was doing my undergrads in UCSC, I was not sure what to do .. where to go ... (but not the development for sure), then with the help of my "ever helpful" lecturers paved me this path. It was not a very good start, I didn't have time to look for the correct universities, contact professors ... GRE score wasn't that good and I had to re-schedule TOEFL couple of times.  Here comes the results ... rejected ... rejected ... and sometimes you have to bear the comments like this which does not make any sense "You have a strong record and have done good work, but our admissions process (as always) was very competitive this year and we had to turn away many highly qualified applicants" ... then suddenly out of no where one Friday morning (which I don't think I will ever forget that date) ... "Congratulations and welcome to the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia!  I am pleased to advise that subject to the approval of the Faculty of Graduate Studies" Honestly I still can not figure out how I got selected to this ... (as it is in life) when it is started things keep on flowing in ... another one for a Phd (by that time I have already decided to confirm the UBC offer).

Again had to go a very very rough time getting Visa ... police report ... no available air-tickets ... you basically come to a point "I don't want this" ... days are closing to leave ... you are starting to feel things you never felt before ... the care and love of your parents ... of your friends ... all the luxuries you were having being at home .... simply because you know you are going to loose them soon. At this point you start think whether the decision you took is correct ... whether you can stand alone there without them. (well I am here now !!!)

After going through all sort of hassles, I am here now ... Am I enjoying the dream getting realized ... ? Well ... Yes ... when you see what is around you ... the opportunities yes I am ... No ... I do not have enough time even think about it (when you can't even think of a time to sleep !!!) 

So where am I after getting my dream come true ... the bitter part of the dream is where it meets with the reality ... (believe me its something totally different with what you think of it is ) ...

Well I will give my views on it ... I will leave it to you to decide where you would be ... So this is I am talking having 6 weeks of experience in graduate life ... 

During first couple of weeks, everything you see ... everything around you are totally new to you and you are attracted to the fact that you have never experience such a thing before in you life ... the culture ... the natures beauty ... thinking the fact that you are on your own ( you have the full authority to your life) .. lots of new research projects ...

Then comes the reality ... you start to feel there are no one to help you out there ... its upto you to do everything which were earlier happening without even you knowing about it ... (cooking washing cleaning) ... you start to feel am I the least knowledgeable student in the batch ... how did I get here ... why did they select me ... then you try to remember the first person who told you to do the graduate studies .,... (u know just to say hello) .. Can I make it through ... Will I get failed ...

If you survive that part .... you start to think ok ... this is hell of a experience now you know everything one need to know .. to cook, to clean .. to wash clothes ... feel like being a man. Then why can't I stand among other students ... I am like them too ... Research opportunities are enormous here .. so why don't I  get maximum use of it ... (still for most part of it you will feel that you alone here ... no one is there). Suddenly you get busy as hell ... you have to study ... have to teach ... have to do research ... which we used to do either one of them at a given time .. no you have to cope with three things... and funny thing is you can not complain about it ... have to read 6 -8 (15 -10 page) research papers weekly ... this is not funny at all

Where am I now ? .....