TCP/IP Protocol & Life

Ahh... the college is over now... And here am I sitting at my home at leisure. Don’t know what to do next. Lost all my hopes to join Infosys, maths giving me nightmares, my muscles telling me to go back to the gym, parents cursing me for not doing anything, etc... This isn’t funny. It’s something which I’m facing on a daily basis... :(

So finally I dared to pick up my aged textbook of Computer Networks and started flipping its pages in a jest. I finally settled down on the TCP/IP chapter. I just started reading it again. I was forced to do so in my class too... Lolz... But it was motivating. I could make out something out of it which relates the topic to my life... Read the technical stuff with patience. I know you hate them... Hehe...

For those, who hate IT guys and their stuffs, TCP/IP is a protocol used for transfer of data over computer networks. If it fails to work, then you will start cursing your Internet Service Provider because it is the base of Internet. I studied that TCP/IP uses a virtual channel between two communicating devices and uses sockets to make the connection. The data transfer takes place in form of packets. When a connection has to be established between the devices, the sender sends a packet to the destination device. Upon receiving that packet, the receiver responds to the sender with an acknowledgment packet informing that it received the packet. When the sender receives the acknowledgement packet, the connection is established and data transfer starts taking place. Now what if the receiver receives the data but fails to send an acknowledgment? To solve this problem, the protocol uses few algorithms to respond to this situation.

First, the sender waits for the acknowledgment for a particular period of time and still no acknowledgement is received, it retransmits the previous packet. If due to some reasons the sender still doesn’t receive any acknowledgment, it keeps on sending the packets. After a few attempts, it stops sending packets in no acknowledgment is received. Thus the connection gets closed and the data transfer stops. That’s when your Internet gets disconnected...

Now what this has to do with life? As I said earlier, I found the protocol similar to our lives. We have gone through it many times, but we never impede to give it view. We communicate with many people around us. I apply this theory to those who are close to me.

When two people want to communicate, they make a relationship. They name it as friends, love, father, mother, son, daughter, etc. When you want to express your feeling to them, you choose a socket, which is your heart. In case they are not your dear ones, you choose your brain. We then express ourselves to them. And when they respond to it, we say the relationship becomes successful. We start communicating with them using words and emotions and wait for their responses. Even if they don’t, we keep on trying. But what if the other person is not interested in listening to you? They may try to avoid or ignore you and may not respond you. Since we care about them, we keep on trying. But how many times? We do have our own limits of patience. And when the limit is reached, we give up and break our relationships with that person, like a divorce in the case of spouses.

We should make our algorithms, oops, I mean our ability to handle such situations better. We should not be too eager to see the result in just a short span of time. As one of friend messaged me, Life gives answers in 3 ways. It says yes and gives you everything. It says no and gives you something better, or it says wait, but gives you the best. Let the best be yours. Now what did that actually meant? Hehe...

We have to take decisions wisely as it depends how our relationship with that person is going to be. Whether you actually want to be with that person or not? Or the problems are coming due to communication gap? Or is there any reason? Don’t see how the person is responding to you, but try to figure it out why he or she is responding like that. And I’m sure; it’ll make things unambiguous... Try it...