Erode

Yesterday, I got a mail from a newsgroup with the title "India's outsourcing edge to erode - Gartner" and immediately I thought of Erode (the city in south india where I went to college) and assumed all sorts of things. I clicked the website and to my dismay, I couldnt see any mention of my favourite city Erode. Later, it occured to me that the word was "erode" as in "to diminish" and also that I didnt quite notice the "'s" in the title. For lack of better work, I forwarded the same article to my wife Shoba and my close friend Sri who also happen to be my buddies from college and asked them if they saw anything weird. They were clueless. Its interesting how brain stores and retrieves information. Apparently, brain stores data in the form of an associative memory which means that information is accessed through a tag which could be a pointer to another information. The more information we accumulate, we form a nested list of various pointers, with each pointer pointing to some piece of information that we experienced/studied. What I experienced was a collision when the same piece of information pointed to 2 different pointers. This is where context comes into picture. Context is what differentiates any random piece of information that exists in this world. A same piece of art in an expensive store versus one sold in the roadside has different connotations, driven purely by context. The same reasoning can be applied to almost every conflict that exists.

Why would anyone name a city by name "Erode" is a different point for discussion (I think it transformed from the tamil word "Eerodai" meaning 2 streams)....:)

PS: This was one of my earlier blog that I wrote a couple of weeks back. So, Yesterday doesnt really mean Yesterday...:)