Excerpts from Ramayan's battlefield

Stanza recited by Vibhishan to Shri Ram: "Navi kund sudha bas jake, Nath jiye Ravan bal take". Means the Naval of Ravan contains the Elixir of his immortality. Ram pierced it with his arrow and brought the mortal life of Ravan to an end.
In Ravan's death bed, Ram told Laxman this verse: "Uttam Vidya leejiya jadapi neech pe hoye, Sona apaawan thour pado tahu na tajiye koye" which means: Take good knowledge from the worst person in the world because it is like precious gold lying in a dirty place!
We must know, Ravan was a great devotee of Lord Shiva and an extremely wise/knowledgeable person.
Dying Ravan's words of wisdom to Ram/Laxman when they bowed at his feet for his knowledge. 
Three lessons shared:
1. Subhashya Shighram: Things that are bad allure us and we run towards them impatiently. But things are good for fail to attract us and we find excuses to justify our procrastination in taking them up.
2. Never to underestimate one’s enemy
3. One should not reveal one’s secret to life/happiness to anyone in the world

Sita at Ashok-Vatika

Cruel king of the Asuras, Ravan, had forcefully abducted holy mother Sita the consort of Sri Ram and kept her in house arrest in Ashok Vatika of Lanka. Ravan was very displeased to find Sita's utterances always praising the glory of Ram! 

Ravan threatened to put Sita's life to an end, if she did not portray Ravan at a higher stature than Ram in her praises within the next day! After seeking forgiveness from the almighty for her act, Sita, next day, uttered the following stanza: 'O mighty king Ravan, your glory is like the bright full moon while Sri Ram's glory is like the waxing crescent'

Ravan got intoxicated in joy hearing these words of his praise coming from Sita. However we must realize that Sita had actually praised Sri Ram. Full moon's brightness gradually reduces and finally gets obliterated. Waxing crescent progressively gets brighter into full glory! Ravan, though a very strong and knowledgeable devotee of Lord Shiva, was so full of himself that his evil-glory would soon be ebbed by the rising virtuous-glory of Sri Ram!

Lessons:
1. Words properly put save lives
2. Seeming superficial praises may conceal a deeper criticism in its womb
3. Pride and ego always causes one's virtues to get overshadowed

Then and Now

I recently happened to stumble upon a You-tube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK5qG6bKLCM. This brought me face to face with a theory i had been toying around for a long time now in my mind. I have read the 'Bhagavat Geeta' and seen all the mega-soaps like 'Ramayana' and 'Mahabharat' on TV growing up. I used to find the war very interesting, with great warriors shooting arrows at their enemies. These arrows had amazing fire-power ahead of their times. Lets step back and look at the time lines. These Hindu texts were written Centuries before the modern industrial revolution. Then how is it possible that the warriors commanded such fire-power? 

I have an answer, i am sure civilization/man-kind had reached a higher state of scientific advancement at the time. For some reasons, due to socio-environmental shift this advanced knowledge of science was lost and mankind had to begin its quest afresh!Lets look at some examples. The ruins at Mohenjodaro-Harappa, the sunk city of Dwarka, the 'Ram-Setu' joining modern India and Sri-Lanka. These are a few examples of the architectural advancements man had made centuries ago! Lets look at Yoga, a science to train the body and mind and tune it for 'higher' tasks. Lets look at the mummies for example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy). Mummies are proof of human advanced knowledge of human anatomy. Lets look at the scriptures which talk about ancient sages, learned beings, who could time-travel and look into the future, another kind who could meditate upon the stars in the Galaxy and long before the Hubble or super telescopes of modern times, these sages meditating upon the night sky, concluded that not only were there other galaxies in the sky but also some of them had twin starts in their solar system.

I truly find this extremely intriguing and wonder if the advancement in science and technology of our modern times would be lost in the cycles of time!

Tableau Correlation and Regression

Trend Lines: A trend line can provide a statistical definition of the relationship between two numerical values

Graph: Profit over Sales. Where profit is a dependent measure based on Sales measure. Each circle represents a Store.

Rt. Click on Trend Lines > Describe Trend Model

Smaller the p-value, the more significant the model and higher the correlation.

Customized Trend Lines:  Rt. Click trend Line > Edit Trend Lines

Correlation Coefficient:

The correlation coefficient is defined as:

Where ‘n’ measurements of X and Y are written as Xi and Yi (i = 1, 2 .... n) and X Tableau equivalent formula (Link:http://community.tableausoftware.com/thread/111548)

WINDOW_SUM((SUM([Sales])-WINDOW_AVG(SUM([Sales]))) * (SUM([Profit])-WINDOW_AVG(SUM([Profit])))) / SQRT(WINDOW_SUM(SQUARE(SUM([Sales])-WINDOW_AVG(SUM([Sales]))))*WINDOW_SUM(SQUARE(SUM([Profit])-WINDOW_AVG(SUM([Profit])))))

Multi-Regression: Graph below shows the linear regression of Profit over Sales for each of the Regions. Based on the Coefficient of Correlation we can analyse the following:

• East is highly positively correlated (profit grows as sales grows)
• West is highly negatively correlated (profit declines as sales grow)
• Central, South and North are in order of correlation. With least correlation for North

References/Detailed Articles: 

Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_and_dependence
Tableau: http://kb.tableausoftware.com/articles/knowledgebase/statistics-finding-correlation
Trend: http://onlinehelp.tableausoftware.com/current/pro/online/windows/en-us/trendlines_significance.html

My New Love: Tableau as a BI Solution

Let me introduce you to the latest love of my life, Tableau (Link). With my creativity at an all time high, it has met its perfect match in Tableau. This BI and Analytic tool claims to make data beautiful. So true! and its so easy. You could build visualizations, complex trend-charts, box-whisker plots, dual axis graphs, filled Geo-maps. This calls for the attention of the BI community. I agree with Gartner BI products 2014 evaluation. They have placed Tableau as a leader ahead of Cognos, Microstrategy for a good reason (click Link for more on the BI Gartner magic-quadrant).

Without much ado let me share a viz i created with Tableau for fun on dummy retail data.

If you are interested in hiring me to help you out with building awesome BI solutions, please reach out to my email: ojoswi@gmail.com or visit my LinkedIn profile and leave me a message (LinkedIn)

"The Last Leaf"

This decorative plastic plant in the front yard of my neighbor reminded me of O'Henry's "The Last Leaf". For those of you who do not know who O'Henry is and whats this all about, here is the context.
O Henry was a famous American writer of the late 1880's (Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O._Henry) known for his short stories, "The Last Leaf" being one of them. 
The story revolves around a young lady who was unwell and had her mind set on this wrong notion that as the last leaf of the ivy vine growing on the fence of her house (that she could see from the window, laying on her bed) would fall in autumn, her life would come to an end. An old painter used to rent the basement of the same house. He came to know of this silly association of the lady's well-being to the 'last leaf'. On a cold, rainy night went out there and drew an ivy leaf (the last leaf) on the fence as if it were part of the ivy vine. Finding the leaf never fell, this lady got inspired, got better with time and one day ventured out into her yard for a walk, only to find that the ivy leaf was a fake drawing. Soon she realized, went down to ask about the old painter. The chambermaid of the house informed that the old painter was found frozen to death the next morning of the night he was out painting his 'masterpiece'.
This decorative plant, with all fallen maple leaves around, standing proudly green out there in the cold, reminds me of this short story!

Selling Photos

Now that I realize Photography is an expensive hobby, i am open to make extra cash by selling the photos I have clicked. Need to put this towards my next full-frame camera.

If you like the photos and are interested in buying High Quality copies.

Please let me know (ojoswi@gmail.com) and I can email them to you.

            Price for Exclusive rights: 100$ per photo.

            Price for High-Quality copies: 15$ per photo

URL: https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/105086239461723821899/albums/6077566371137607153

Love - Life - Losses

It is Human nature that we do not treasure something or someone as long as we have that as ours. The value becomes ever so evident once we have lost it? We take it for granted that these loved ones and objects would be around for us for ever.

One recently learned lesson - the only constant thing about life is change. When you loose something that you have loved for so long, there comes this void and no matter what you try and what you do, this void remains. So make the most of your blessings, treasure the gifts you have and the people you love!

My Love Story!

I was born into the Gen X of the 80's. Heavily influenced by the romantic-comedies in HBO I grew up watching. All the romance, kissing, steamy-raunchy rated scenes proliferant in Hollywood movies, had a deep impact on me during my making years. I grew up believing that boys were to woo girls and the fairer gender were to succumb to their charm eventually. As if destined, I grew up into a teenager who looked upon all beautiful girls around as potential date and a few among them as the heroine of my very own 'Love Story'.

Things were warming up as early as high school. Working on my love letter writing skills, heading for the movies, taking girls out for dates - had to wait till college tough. All thanks to the newly found freedom of movement that residential college brought with it. Private coaching a few local high school students towards competitive exams was a good source of income in my college days - so money was never a problem. Looking back, I had a lot of fun and very little luck. The dates ended in movies and dinner - things never matured into anything more interesting or rewarding. Having a steady girl-friend was hard to come by leave aside getting into a relationship.

Four years of college just whisked by and there I was - hopelessly single, virgin to the extent of never having touched a girl romantically. Professional life was no different and this time I could not be so explicit with my romantic advances - it was no longer college! All the pretty hotties I knew were either taken or married. Soon I was 30 and the situation was very grim. The sands of time had run out from the 'fun' side into the 'get serious' side of the hour-glass. I had to give in to my parents' wish of getting me married. I was then in Canada on an assignment and my parents believed technology could bridge the gap of distance.

What followed was torture. Every week-end I was glued to my laptop, sifting through profiles and photos of prospective alliances, short-listed by my parents over the week. It was nerve-wrenching to say the least. Nothing seemed to work - most of the profiles were lame. This went in for 8-9 weeks. I could not take it anymore. On the verge of a mental breakdown, I backed out from the bride hunting marathon which clearly was not going anywhere. Having given up the responsibility of finding an alliance to my parents entirely, I started parting even harder as I had realized that soon my fate would be written off with an 'average', 'down-market' girl - profiles of whose were swarming across all the matrimony sites.

Later I was told, when my parents realized the hopelessness of looking at profiles over the matrimonial sites online, they decided to post an advertisement in the local newspaper's matrimonial section. Alliances poured in and this time a few of them caught the imagination of my parents. Horoscopes were tallied with the short-listed candidates and lines of communication were established. One Sunday, during a Skype call with my parents, I was enlightened about the movements that had happened over the weeks. Photos along with the profiles of three short-listed girls were emailed to me soon after. And this time I found one of them worth taking a look at. Emails went out and numbers exchanged between guardians - eventually passed on to me with a Skype video-conferencing set up between the prospect and me.

It was an awkward mix of nervousness and excitement. I knew this was the real deal, decision taken now would change the course of my entire life. The week went by in a flash and it was Saturday, the day I was to Skype Piali and I had no clue of what I was supposed to ask her or even talk about! The call came in and I took it. What followed was a conversation unprecedented in my entire life. We were an hour into the conversation and it seemed like minutes. I was very comfortable talking to her - on my preferences, hobbies, profession, short and long term goals - pretty much everything under the sun was talked that day! After the call, parents were given the 'go codes' - things were moving at a crazy pace. I took an unlimited India calling plan. We Skyped every week-end, talked over the phone for hours. It seemed as if I were a call center employee - with the microphone ever attached and I talking away to glory.

 It was during these days that I stumbled upon a discovery - Piali was an amazing singer! One day she sang to me over the phone and it seemed as if I had transcended to another dimension of eternal peace and poise. I was mesmerized, swept off my feet and hooked on to her singing. Everyday she used to sing to me over the phone before hanging up. But the song she sang to me the first day ever remains close to my heart! And after our marriage (this post is a tribute to our 1st marriage anniversary) I have convinced her into recording that song - 'Main Tainu Samjhawa Ki'. So here is a toast to my 'Love Story', our marriage and her song!

Original Song Link 

On Evolution

It was 13.5 billion years ago that chaos gave rise to the universe, 5 Billion years ago earth was born. 4 billion years back ours was literally a lonely planet without life! 6 million years back we lived on trees and looked much like Chimpanzees. 6 years before Christ, we believed Earth was flat. In mid 1500's man challenged the idea of Earth being center of the Universe. So less happened in so much time - few and far away grains of events in the hourglass of evolution. But winds of change ushered in with the Industrial revolution only a 100 years back - each day was pregnant with an invention that would change the way of life. 100 years of technology versus 13.5 years of evolution - so much in so less, imagine the road ahead!