The Discrete Fourier Transform of life...

The other day I was sitting all alone in my room, with a book of DSP in my hand. The topic was Discrete Fourier Transform. Studying about the DFT of signals, a thought suddenly stroke my mind and I was lost thinking about it. Our life is similar to the process of DFT.!

DFT begins with the sampling of Fourier transform of a discrete signal. That discrete signal is obtained by slowly gathering the signals at certain quantized point of time. Life also portrays itself in a similar manner. But the process of DFT begins when we reach in our later stages. We spend most of our time developing the discrete signal   x[n]. Since the day we are born, we meet several people- some good, some bad, some friendly, some deceitful, some lovable, some adorable, some trustworthy, and so on… The list is perhaps endless. We select a handful of people. They become few samples of our signal x[n]. As time passes, we lose contacts with some of them. Or sometimes we learn by ourselves that they are the ones whom I need and they are the ones who need me; they are the ones whom I like and they are the ones who like me. And the other times our experience tells whom should we pick up.  The discrete signal loses some samples and adds some. This process of sampling may proceed slowly or with the Nyquist rate. Gradually we build x[n] completely. We are now with that group of wonderful people whom we admire the most. Our life revolves around them. They are our centre.

Now because they are our centre of life, we work for them and live for them. The curve stretches and we enclose ourselves in the 0 to +2pi (time can’t be –ve in real life.! ) Fourier transform of that discrete signal.

But as we move towards the later, later, and later stages of life, this curve breaks!  We now chose people from this list of favorites. We chose window functions (of course Hanning will be the best) to truncate the list. The list is modified and we are left with the Discrete Fourier Transform of life!