Sunday, May 30, 2010

A smarter SmartGWT

Once upon a time, there was a sweet meat vendor in the principality of RajaPutra Sri Nada, which sat at the edge of the expansive Thar desert to its north and the banks of a great river at its south.

His name was Manda-manda Agatha, which roughly meant "slowly-slowly come". It was probably because while he had to haul his heavy wooden cart, wheels creaking, into any village, the impatient children would yell "mandam manda!"

He was not a rich man, selling sweet meats with profits just enough to feed his family hand-to-mouth. Sometimes he watched the gold-trimmed carts of merchants on their way to the great Palace in the capital city of the great Moogle empire. He aspired to be one of those merchants.

"No, no. Correction." A local village chieftain would inflectively declare, "He aspires to be one of the Rajputs lording over those merchants in the service of the great Moogle Emperor."

The Moogle royalty and nobility were enthusiastic connoiseurs of sweet meats. So much, so that the Moogle royalty had devised a special formula of concocting sweet meats - using toffee made with coffee beans and cinnamon specially imported from the faraway kingdoms of Java. All every sweet meat vendor had to do was put their own specialised wrapper around it and the concoction would absorb and fuse the wrapper with its core. And the Moogles did not make it a secret recipe but made the recipe free to anyone who wanted it. Even appointed the benevolent Lord Aapachita II to oversee to its general availability and advertised the formula as Sri-Moogle Madhura Sutra (Sweetness Formula of Moogle the Gracious). For convenience, let's just call the formula SMMS.

Incidentally, for Agatha (Arya Agatha, Sir Agatha - as he preferred to be called), he found that his sweet meat core formula was just as competitive in flavour as that of the royal formula and yet the only people enthusiastic with his sweet meats were village kids. He would expel his breath, "kimartam karma-tam?" Why, why business/activity so dark? Even though he had submitted his formula to Lord Apachita for general availability too.

Until, until he chanced upon, incidentally also, a sweet meat supplies supplier who understood all the intricacies of both Agathaa Karya (Agatha's Concoction) and Madhura Sutra. Let's just call this sweet meat supplies supplier Zamdhiji for convenience' sake.

Zamdhiji had found that Agathaa Karya could have blended so perfectly and almost seamlessly with the royal formula. What was missing was a special sauce that would stitch the two together. Zamdhiji worked tiringly and tirelessly night and day in his spare time in his alchemy chamber and months' later voila! He emerged from his laboratory, eye brow sweating, declaring to everyone - !heurekamen! - and called the combined product Sri-Moogli Madhura Sutra Agathaa Karya, SMMS-AK.

Zamdhiji submitted his concoction to Lord Aapachita too. After which, nearly the whole civilised world got excited. From Arabia and Ethiopia in the west, to Byzantine and Persia in the north, Langka in south, Java and China in the far east. Fellow sweet meat supplies suppliers from the four, five or six corners of the world made contributions to Zamdhiji's karya to further enrich it. And Agatha's business bloomed.

Then Aarya Agatha took a moment in hind-sight. "I need to send my children to the best dharma-sutra sanghas - learning centres - in Lhasa, or Samarkand, or Gujerat or Alexandria. I could feed my family better. Wouldn't it be great if I could also own one of those Polynesian hand-crafted ocean-crossing yachts? And vacation twice yearly on the beaches of Gova?"

So, he created a similar sauce and called it ... well he could not call it SMMS-AK for obvious reasons. So he called it Agathaa Karya Sri-Moogli Madhura Sutra, AK-SMMS.

That was brilliant, he thought and gave himself a pat on his back. He further declared that he is taking all of Agathaa Karya, contributions from people from all over the known-civilised world inclusive, with him. They will no longer be administered by Lord Aapachita. Instead, he submitted them to the ascetic SriPaduka Aarya Matha (the venerated meditative stall-man whose-gracious-sandals-you-are-not-even-worthy-to-lick).

What is the difference? Ooo, the difference between Lord Aapachita and Lord Aarya Matha is huge. But that is beside the point because you can read their respective philosophies and zaastras (legalities) and what their implications would entail to the sweetmeat business from world-wide antara-sangha sutras. The point is ...

Well, the point is, Aarya Agatha has appeared to the known civilised world as an immature untrustworthy greedy business partner.

There was an uproarious uproar within the known civilised world - from Arabia and Ethiopia, to Constantinople, to Baghdad, to China, to Java and Sumatera and to Langka and even Madagascar and Tasmania.

To make matters worse, he declared, "Y'all are a bunch of wimps like puppets in a Javanese wayang opera."

To which, Zamdhiji protested, "Discussing the difference between Lord Aapachita and Lord Aarya Matha and their extreme implications to our business is nothing close to being puppets in a Javanese wayang opera."

To which, Aarya Agatha would shoot back, "True, true - but, but the way y'all whine about it is like being unprofessional puppets in a Javanese wayang opera." Like as though, "y'all could have silently come to my matha (meditation stall) and we could have discussed over it with chai and English muffins, and then I might graciously consider your proposals."

Well, we never knew that puppets in Javanese wayang operas could in any miraculous ways act professionally, did we? Which is also beside the point.

OK, end of debate. Zamdhiji and his collaborators decided - to naraka (hell) with Agathaa Karya, "We come up with Samartha Karya Sri-Moogli Madhura Sutra." A smarter recipe with Moogle's sweetness. Yes, indeed, next time we would be smarter than to fall into deceitful business dealings - I guess that is why they prefixed their new recipe with "Samartha".

Though Samartha is a Sanskrit word, incidentally, people ought to know that Shmarta in Hebrew has an implication of "being watchful and observant".

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