Who? Me?

My name is Ashok Srinivasan Ramachandran. The official name is Srinivasan and Ashok is the alias name. But I am usually known by the name Ashok mostly and I come from Chennai, a beautiful city in the southern part of India. I was born in Patna, Bihar which is in North India but I grew up in the southern part of India most of my life. In a way I can stop only with India as my native and cannot go further to point my exact native region in it. Pan-Indian by the way and feel very fortunate about it.

Digital Moksha!

I started my journey to be a programmer through the Flash Highway and after 10 years of life in the industry working on various platforms, now I am doing my research in Computer Graphics at Montreal. I completed my Masters in Virtual Reality, Advanced Visualisation and Computer Animation during the years 2012 – 2013 at Bangor, UK .

It is quite funny when remembering the days I started and worked as a Flash Animator which was Macromedia then and Adobe now. But fortunately it did not take much time to realize where my true calling was. I should accept that Hello World never took me any step further during the days when I wanted to learn programming but without understanding it. But in a way contradicting one of my previous statement, it should be said that it is not funny to have started as a Flash Animator. Reason being as Flash Animator learnt more than just doing animations. Like a kind mother, she taught me how to organize things and prioritize objects via layers, took an understanding that there is a whole new timeline in the elements on the main timeline, Sweet isn’t it? Sometimes when I think about the way a Flash Animator works it is surprising that there are more hidden philosophies about life inside. Of course Einstein was right to introduce theory of relativity.

I started out as a Flash animator with a company called Sankhya learning ltd., working on creating animation content explaining high school mathematics to Singapore school children. Honestly wondering if every kid out there tasted the flavor of it, but as a KID then, loved the taste of Mathematics and used that as an inspiration started to learn Actionscripting. While still struggling with learning Programming in C++, Java I was unconsciously was getting paired with Actionscript simulating the mathematical concepts I was learning. Soon I realized to my surprise that I have become a programmer by doing it the Hello Pixel way rather than Hello World way.

It was a first hand realization for me that a picture represents a thousand words, and a pixel teaches us more things about computers than anything. Getting acquainted with programming helped me understand the fundamentals about the flow of compiler and that world of computing starts with the while loop the moment power button is switched on. This was an interesting learning, because it helped me understand things better and better, day after day. Today, If i am someone who can work on various platforms like Actionscript, Javascript, HTML5, Android, Java, PHP etc., or Understanding Microcontrollers to do AVR programming and confidently do my research in Computer Graphics, I owe it all to Flash for the strong fundamentals she taught me. Basically, I learnt how to learn, using Flash. Thanks to my Digital Mother…..

Faith and Religion…

My Faith is Hinduism and Astronomy my religion. Hinduism trained me to search for the truth and thus leading to the faith and opinion that the search for God is internal and personal. Astronomy is my religion and Carl Edward Sagan is my spiritual guru. Every religion has one holy scripture with different names and mine too has one is only a simple paragraph titled “Pale Blue Dot”. This one paragraph says it all. I am pasting it below, so someday it will benefit someone.

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Carl Sagan,Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1997 reprint, pp. xv–xvi

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1997 reprint, pp. xv–xvi

I wish that my learnings continue and benefit the society

  • wheresoever (Anywhere on Earth, Galaxy, Universe, Multiverse ….)
  • whomsoever (Any Species from any dimension)
  • whatsoever (Any dimensional situations)…….

Regards,

#0K Srinivasan