Old Black Shoe

Mama always said there's an awful lot you can tell about a person by their shoes. Where they're going. Where they've been.

                                            -Forrest Gump

I first met my shoes one fine day at school in class 11. The school administration had, for reasons unfathomable to the puny intellect of mortals, decided to stray from the standard canvas footwear that had been part of the attire of its students for quite some time then. So they had gotten all these people from Adidas to measure all our feet and supply shoes for us.

And there they were, lying patiently in their cardboard containers in wait for my feet to slip in, black with a sheen, sturdy yet comfortable, larger than average yet not too large, my transport across all land, my vehicle across all terrain, my protection from thorns and stones and cow dung, shoes yet so much more.

 Needless to say, they lasted me more than well throughout my school days, accompanying me to classes and exams and washrooms, through the best and worst of times, without as much as a tear or a bruise. In the summers of 2008 and 2009, when I was at the IOI training camp, these shoes were among the first things I made it a point to take along, and they came with me too to Bulgaria for the olympiad in 2009, sheltering my feet from the artificial cold of the plane and especially the contest hall (where I remember literally shivering), remaining witness to any and all progress in every circle I was involved in.

And of course, when college started in August 2009, they were among my first possessions to enter the campus, seeing me through the initial few days of uncertainty and unsettled anticipation, and later on through all sorts of situations from the rare (extremely rare) morning jog to sleeping through ID classes. They were here this year too, though worn a bit less frequently.

Last week, while playing football for about the fourth time in the hostel ever, the sole of the right shoe came off. I have never seen that happen before, and have no idea why it did so even without much wear. I don't think it is mend-able, and am probably getting another pair for Diwali. So I guess the time is here to say goodbye to my great old shoes, unfortunate though it might be, and move on to whatever comes my way next, as something definitely shall.

They shall be missed.

PS: Speaking of shoes, can anyone help me figure this one out ?

And then there were two..

Some random judge said, "Let there be ID120.", and there was this totally vague and pointless course.

So yeah, we have these two courses that  hardly a handful among those who do not populate the first two benches find it possible to distinguish between in their most wakeful of times. And about their nature, it would probably be an understatement of affairs to say that if a decade or two into the future a hearty old chap taps me on the shoulder in a crowded railway ticket counter queue and asks me to list the courses that I found the most futile, fiendishly loathsome and overwhelmingly anesthetic in college, I am confident of the identity of two of those. Brief descriptions follow.

ID120 - Ecology and Environment Studies or some such 8th-standard school course pushed up into IITM, supposedly after a startling revelation on the part of the Judicial elite of the nation as to the sad state of the air, water and general environment in the country. (The author disclaims vehemently any knowledge whatsoever of whatever was/is/will be taught in class.) After all, how high can expectations be of a course which is introduced with the lines, "This course is there by a Supreme Court order that all colleges should have such a course. You have no other choice but to study this. It is not in your hands.", by the Prof himself? (And ID in ID120 stands for something like Introduction to Design, I believe.)

BT101 - Biotechnology. Could actually have been a good course had it been less of  a twin of the above mentioned ecology course and been handled a bit differently, especially without cramming about 600 students in three halls and devoting whole minutes each class to proclaiming a warning against bringing cell phones to the classroom. As it is now, I shall be surprised if anyone ever bothers about what the course involves. The question arises atleast thrice each class, once when entering the class and twice in those intermittent moments when one wakes up from glorious slumber to catch a wee glimpse of the goings-on around, as to whether one is in a BT class or ID. Seriously.

At the time of entering college, some of my foremost thoughts were:
1) Hostel!
2) Trees!!
3) Finally some time to pursue interests that the past two years hindered.
4) New friends!!
5) Freedom to study stuff that was of one's interest, and those alone.

In all the above I was satisfied quite amply, except the last one; and how at that - majority of the first year courses were stuff I'd gladly sacrifice to spend time watching this. I realised how mistaken I had been in believing that one could do just the courses one was interested in, and that most of your courses are decided for you and many among those shall as a rule be so leaf-witheringly boring and pointless that it becomes, in academic respects, not much more than a school. After school I was hoping to finally learn for some purpose higher than grades, but such an aspiration is all but devastated by the nature of courses you are made to take without your choice in it.

But then, in spite of this, I feel it likely that I am at one of the better-off places, with perhaps many of the best people around. One more thing - if I had my way, I should do away with classes altogether, for they seem to serve their purpose not as well as they were perhaps intended to.

And in light of Applied Mechanics 110, a few perhaps forgotten facts - I am in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and while all the stuff about bridges and trusses is occasionally interesting, four hours a week in that 3rd floor classroom isn't exactly what I bargained for.

An aside - for any claiming that engineering is a "better" or "higher" field than the sciences (there are quite a few of these guys) I have quite a few strong words.

I had a dream.

 My attempts at remembering dreams seem to be coming out quite well. In the past three days I have remembered atleast four dreams, big or small. (Of course, since I don't record them, I've since forgotten.) I've been on it since I read somewhere that the guys who claim they don't get too many dreams just don't remember them, and actually everyone dreams.

 This morning, for instance, I remembered a dream weird as dreams go. It started with me remembering some Gemini Ganesan song which, as I remarked to myself in the dream, had always been a favourite of mine, but now I have no idea which song it was. Somehow I decide to put up on my blog a list of Tamil songs that I deemed as great or important. I remember I was sitting on a sofa with the same red cover on that used to be on the sofa at my place until some time back, and there was a door behind me to the left. Then this song popped into my head and started playing, and I remarked that I've heard somewhere that it was one of the first songs in Tamil cinema to have been inspired by western music. (Now, I do not know about the truth of that statement, but I definitely have heard something of the sort a long time back.) And that was when I woke up.

(Well, it did seem a good idea in the dream, and I actually considered it when I woke up, but later realised that I lacked a good enough knowledge of Tamil cinema discography, especially of the period between MSV and A.R.Rahman. Also, a list of my favourites should hardly interest anyone else, since more than three-fourths of the songs would be atleast 50 years old.)

The above is actually quite an improvement for me, considering the previous instance of my remembrance was when yesterday I woke up in the middle of a lecture on quantum teleportation remembering, "Bridge.", and the one before that when all I could grasp was an out-of-place isometric view of an array of farms or something.

In Surely You're Joking, Mr.Feynman, Feynman describes his interesting and rather fantastic experiments with dreams, and how he started by observing what happens as he goes into sleep. Now, that's what I should be doing. He goes on to state how he could, after a while, control his dreams consciously with the knowledge that they were just dreams. As I believe he mentions, dreams are definitely a very intriguing and fascinating show of the mysteries that abound within the brain, and how little of it is understood.

Wonder what I'll wake up from tomorrow morning.

P.S.: In case you were looking for something about a recent movie, this has nothing to do with it.

Fare thee well, carboniferous beast; thou shalt not be missed . . .

It is with great rejoice and merriment that we, on that joyous and glorious weekend in the month of April 2010, bade a cheery farewell to the final vestiges of the pterodactyl that is Chemistry, as it clumsily spread out its metaphorical organic and physical wings (who cares about inorganic chemistry anyway?), and in a not-so-breathtaking motion, pushed off the perilous cliffs of our ever so adventurous and inquisitive minds, realising finally the inappropriateness of its unwelcome presence amongst the lively and merry souls of my messmates and myself, perhaps repentant of the tortures laid upon us by its ominous glare and perhaps, just perhaps, sorry for the scars that shall remain upon our chests for years to come, caused by its diabolical talons clawing at innocent students walking their own ways, upon the journey of their lives.

 But of course, it is only the Chemistry that we have been administered in classrooms that I complain about- the subject itself is as necessary and interesting (I wonder..) as any other. (Just to put the thought into your head, people can say quite favourable stuff with a blade to their throat.)

Now, there are possibly a multitude of reasons why Chemistry did not ( ha! its 'did not' now, not 'does not') happen to be exactly my favourite among subjects, but the prime among those I consider to be something related to the sentiments of a flying pokemon trainer somewhere around Fallarbor Town, after losing rather drastically with his Pidgey against my Totodile (or was it a Croconaw by then? long time..), which went something like :

I like bug pokemon, but I'm good with bird pokemon. I guess liking something and being good at it are not the same thing.

So there you have it, mighty peers, the reason I don't take much of a fancy towards Chemistry: I'm rather bad at the stuff we do in those classes - equations, compounds, structures, properties, and all the other related blah do not figure anywhere on my list of "nice to know" priorities, as don't football leagues and  fair-weather friends. As you can see, pokemon, appear quite high.

A bit of rhyme and rhythm

Prose, trust me, is an awful lot easier to compose than a bit of poetry.

But the pleasure that engulfs you when, once your little piece is done, you sit back and skim through your work, jumping lightly at the last syllable of every line, realising vivid rhyme schemes and finding the meter fit in as solidly as the last piece in a magnificent jigsaw is proportionately enormous.

Well, I can say I tried:   http://twentythorpes.blogspot.com/

(Lets see whether you can second guess what the url is a reference to.)

In the summertime, when the weather is fine...

Warm (make that "a bit too warm") days of summer shall invariably usher in alongside them a certain gleeful sense of freedom and an utterly deceptive belief in the endlessness of free time and the non-existence of any such entity as work.

To the schoolkid lost to listlessness amidst textbooks since last June (spare the pittance passed off as Winter hols) struggling through the culmination of the past year in a dreadful set of examinations, the onset of summer presents yet another blissful couple of months of reprise, of play in the streets despite the murderous heat of the sun overhead, of endless hours of lazing around, losing time to nothingness.

And to most, the vacations of summer mean visits to faraway lands with family and friends, experiences and adventures that last long since they are encountered in memories and photographs.

And again, what is a summer without those divine drops of nectar encased in tender yellow skins, those heavenly embodiments of pure and pristine sweetness, those fruits with which trees and shops alike overflow come May, those mangoes whose sheer awesomeness have earned them such majesty, if you shall excuse the word, that the Constitution recognises them as our national fruit?

 But as with all else, practices and anticipation necessarily change with age, and as we progress along the wispy track of time that presents us with neither a vision of what lies a couple steps ahead, nor leave to take a couple steps back and stride a second time that very path, the perception of summer as a redemption of all the nothingness one missed carrying out the rest of the year fades away into an acquired dread of the heat, as we leave behind us these as but mere memories of a childhood that once existed and in which they once existed.

It is said that to sound too nostalgic too frequently is to anchor oneself to mellow reminiscences of one's past, encouraging in the impressionable mind an urge to perceive present events as inferior to those of years ago, thence leading to derivation of less than optimal pleasure and satisfaction from occasions of today. The author, while acknowledging the rather poor quality of this article, does not wish to fall into that particular trap.

So as jolly good peoples of a pretty blue and green piece of rock orbiting an orange ball of fire, let us, with all merriment, bask in the glory of divine sunshine and rejoice or lay in sloth, as you please, and relish those treasures that summer alone may bring (in spite of the heat, that is). As far as holidays go, there is none better than the dark knight of Yukon to have the last say.

P.S.: About the title, its from a certain song.

"Trisha illana Divya"

In case you are not Tamil or are Tamil and do not recognise the title (in which case you are around three-fourths of a sore loser) - there's more to this than just the title.


If there should exist a statement, short as you would please, embodying in itself the very spirit of sportsmanship, posing as the epitome of perseverance, delivering in full, yet in all subtlety, as true as the truest of words, yet not losing, in its quest to educate, its sharp sense of humour, its message of hope and consolation to the failed, defeated and downtrodden of this sad and dreary globe, then there can not, for all that I know, be a more suited example of one such than this particular timeless piece of mirth delivered by perhaps one of the most famous and renowned, not to mention comic, philosopher in the history of Tamil: "Trisha illana Divya".

Trisha illana Divya: (Tamil); "If not Trisha, then Divya."

In the realistic manner of Epictetus, the speaker instructs us to not fret too long about what is out of hand and what goals have failed to be achieved, but to move on to other aspirations, perhaps humbler and less glamorous, and to nonetheless lay on its pursuit the very same passion and dedication that arose in one in toiling towards the former. All this in three words delivered in the same breath as many other lines that have today become wayward remarks of lore (atleast my lore), a notable couple of which are a number of his renditions of a particular classic by Gene Kelly from one of his critically acclaimed hollywood musicals and his remarkable portrayal of a village don here, containing the much appreciated Tamil version of Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Hasta la vista, baby" from Terminator 2: Judgement Day.


Sadly, though not a bit unexpectedly, there do not appear to be too many who appreciate the depth of philosophical clarity displayed in this and various other seemingly offhand remarks encountered in various circumstances, often as their delivery and the situation in which they appear seem to exclude the possibility of them having any serious knowledge to get across. But of course, this particular case is perhaps but an exhibition on my part of those skills possessed by seemingly few other than your English teacher which allow one to accredit to the long-gone poet's simple piece of poetry interpretations and hidden nuances that he himself never in his wildest dreams meant for it to possess.


Notwithstanding, it seems to be true that most issues in many of our lives are a result, direct or indirect, of either some form of miscommunication or dissonance. Either we read too much into a statement, or too less, both of which are as disastrous as the other given the opportunity.


Getting back to the old not-so-serious-and-philosophical spirit, as the knight in shining armour of the laughter-ridden and the saving grace of the dreadfully bored would advise you to, the next time you come to face a "vada poche" situation, feel like moaning out "avana nee", or end up in the gutter muttering "ammae ammae", pick yourselves up with all your might, and, feet firmly planted on the ground, eyes looking up to the heavens above, remind yourself that hope is eternal, and tell yourself with all the confidence you find yourself capable of mustering, "Trisha illana Divya".


And just move on.

To sir, with love..

Perhaps the most effective utilisation of time spent in a CS110 class in all history gave rise to the following:

Of all the cows in barley farms,
Of all the rum and beer,
Of all the bees that fly in swarms,
Of wombats far and near,

Of Chesire cats and Jerry mice,
Of dogs and big bad wolves,
Of superheroes bad and nice,
Of giants, dwarves and elves,

Of wild streams that flow smooth and swift,
Of towering redwood trees,
Of leaves that in the west wind drift,
Of mountains, raging seas,

Of the pits of doom, of the hounds of hell,
Of the darkest desires of men,
Of treachery, arson, vile despots,
Of neverending tales of woe,
Of demons that roam the lands of nether,
Of evil dragon lords,

Of all the 'of's from my pen,
Of Deans, all honourable men,
Why, oh why, I ask again,
Why CS110?!
(to be read "CS one-ten" for sake of rhyme and meter, speaking of which, if they seem to be absent at a few spots, thats due to lack of sufficient consciousness.)
     
               -by the ubiquitous roommate and myself, bored to the deepest chasms of the wettest oceans.

And if my topics seem too repetitive, trust me, its only because frequency in this case happens to be a linear indicator of severity.

To cut a long one short..

    I like long sentences.

    To be more precise, I like sentences which, unlike those that you find yourself uttering all your life in most acoustic forms of communication, are generously worded, as lavishly punctuated as can be, precariously worked upon (can be compromised with skill) and polished to verbal perfection, posed to leave the casual reader lost for an interpretation, offering to him their true arguments and implications only upon atleast a second reading, holding him back and drawing his attention as less complicated wayward statements of thought seldom can, stimulating those mental faculties that, in a sizable portion of the populace, lay dormant until presented with a stimulus that to them seems vivid enough to be worthy of their consideration, the parsing of which calls for marked patience and a realisation of the oft ignored importance of every single comma and colon, and which, while not all the time resorting to pentasyllabic words or far-fetched metaphors, manage to leave the casual reader stumped for a few seconds by the sheer complexity in their structure and formulation, and at the same time are not vague rantings of an incongruous mind, but at the end of all the effort, convey to the patient (or skilled, perhaps) interpreter the precise ideas and bits of information that the writer meant them to.

    So yes, I like long sentences.

    From what I've heard, the supposedly phenomenal Ulysses, by James Joyce, has, in its last chapter, a sentence consisting of over 12,000 words. (I've heard lots about that book. Should read someday.) In contrast, my personal best happens to be a page long on a scribbling pad on the futilities of the Indian educational system (an all-time favourite topic; definitely a post on that soon).

Now, I have two theories as to why I like using long sentences:

1)  I try to cover up my inadequacies in writing in terms of lack of involving content and inability to present in a humourous or forceful manner my thoughts.

2)  The "intellectual stimulation" they provide appeals to my rarely exercised . 

   It is not for me to comment on the first point, but as for the second, I always preferred House M.D. to sitcoms, and Memento or The Usual Suspects to American Pie. Humour, of course, is a different aspect and commands importance on its own merits.

    The brain, I have often heard, is much like any other muscle in the body- it can be exercised to further its potential greatly, but the exercise is not to cease if one wishes to keep one's bean toned and up for action. Disuse begets slackening. In accord, it is essential to occasionally engage in activities that strain one's mental capabilities, reasoning, lingual or otherwise, and which are at the same time fun. Framing or even parsing "long sentences" (see definition above), for example, is one such activity. (Avoidance of anything related to the study of Chemistry is a significant other)

     These and a couple of other as wondrous and perhaps as individualistic activities such as my harmonica and some sociology fill up whatever free time I get. Trust me, its fun to be busy. :)

The Adventures of Random Walker, Episode 1: Of Individuality and Insomnia, Futility and Fumigation.

(Statutory Warning: Serious stuff coming up in a couple of lines. If found funny, pathetic reader is welcome to the club.)

Stuff happens.

The world's a big place. You meet a hundred people a day. 

You go to the market. You meet a hundred people. 

You go to the theater. You meet a hundred people.

You go to Chemistry class. You meet thirty six people. Fifty four signatures in the attendance register. 

Stuff happens.

A hundred people, a hundred minds. A hundred minds, a billion thoughts. 

None the same as the other, none much different from the rest. 

All of the very same objects, yet each as unique as can be.

All of a hundred people, all of a hundred noses.

A hundred right legs, a hundred spleens.

All the same, yet each distinct. 

All of the same, yet each truly individual.

Each to his petty obsessions, each to his pretty goals.

Each to his own corny jokes, each to his fantasies.

Each to his own Chemistry prof.; no wait, you aren't generally awake long enough to know who that is.

Each to his own Easter Bunny, each to his own Santa Claus.

Each by his own principles and morals, each by his own rules and laws.

Each with his own strengths and standings, each with his own wrongs and flaws.

Each to his own, each to his best, does anything else rhyme with "laws"?

A hundred ants scramble all around, three hundred untiring pairs of legs, scramble all around, gathering every morsel they reach, dragging every single bit back to the hill, the hill where a thousand more ants exist, all gathering, all scrambling and all surviving, only to feed their queen and perhaps feed themselves.

A hundred dogs roam the streets, barking here and barking there; barking at the post-box, at the ringing bell, barking at what you never can tell; they roam the streets, eating what they get, minding their business, and those of others. What do they do in life, where are they needed? Married men have a wife, and their word is seldom heeded.

A hundred men roam the world, and hundred thousands more. A hundred read comic books, a hundred Calvin and Hobbes. Hundreds walk the very same Earth, hundreds toil all their life. Hundreds go sleepless, hundreds love; hundreds dream dreams and thirty six literally so. Hundreds strive to be better, strive to learn more, strive to get better, strive to be fine. Hundreds work hard, hundreds work in vain, hundreds die, and thousands are born again. Hundreds learn lessons only to forget them, hundreds are sent to computer labs- these hundreds curse that unholy sem.

Hundreds live long, hundreds die hard. Hundreds exist, and I wonder why.

Told you it would be serious.

No, dear Watson, Cadbury's Dairy Milk is just not a good enough reason for the existence of humanity.

Justification for 'Fumigation' being in the title: Mosquitoes have finally discovered my room. The public health guys gas them away with this addictive-smelling white kind of gas that gases mosquitoes away.

This is NOT a sitcom. If it was, it would've been called "The Adventures of Random Walker, SEASON 1, Episode 1: Of Individuality and Insomnia, Futility and Fumigation."

Life on a Tuesday Evening

The run-o'-the-mill teenager residing in the austere premises of the forest that calls itself the Indian Institute of Technology Madras finds himself, even on the very best of Tuesday evenings, thoroughly defeated in his strongest and most sincere attempts to maintain a state of wakefulness in spite of the ongoing discussion on the fundamental principles of organometallic chemistry. Mustering all the will power bestowed upon him in blood and soul by his illustrious ancestry and peerage, your humble narrator, scarred and wounded, valiantly stages a counter-offensive against the indomitable forces of chemistry and boredom, which are no less fixated upon their motives to undermine his consciousness. War cries fill the fateful classroom, blades clash, shields are shattered, lances make pincushions of helmets, walls shudder with the voice of the esteemed professor, instilling slumber in the hearts of the forces of light, formations are broken, battalions uprooted and platoons devastated, elbows limp, vision hazes, fingers lose their grip on writing equipment (if any), eyelids droop, the head drops, and before you know it, the battle is over, and darkness prevails yet again.


But of course, ladies and gentlemen, everyone wakes up at the end of the class (with a tolerance of 3 minutes), unless you're the prof, in which sad case you're committed to stay awake the whole while. The next two dozen minutes are largely un-Tuesday-ish, involving an appreciable amount of activity dedicated to homing in on your friendly neighbourhood bicycle, followed by the tour-de-IITM, cumulating in the regular two puffs, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of  milk (neither shaken, nor stirred).

Not yet, ladies and gentlemen, have you been educated as to what essentially defines a Tuesday evening for your humble narrator. All of us, some day or the other, are bound by fate, the Geneva convention and the red herring prospectus to end up in a C-programming class. But only the unfortunate few way down in the gutters of fortune face the dread of a lab session and a chemistry class in the same evening. So there, ladies and gentlemen, was your humble narrator munching off in all glee and glory at the pathetic excuse for lemon rice that is regularly passed off on myself and my comrades in the infamous mess, when the bloke on the other side of the table (BOTOSOTT in short) makes a point.

BOTOSOTT: (candidly) Its 7:30. Methinks thou art perchance a tad delayed for thy laboratory session. (in a bit plainer English, come to think of it)
ME: (even more candidly) Yes, I am.

So off I went, off on my bike, no time to offer a lift or a hike, riding high, riding low, sometimes fast and often quite slow. Pomes apart, your humble narrator lands safe and in one piece in front of the Building Sciences Block, which happens to house the scenic computing facilities of the department of Computer Science and Engineering, which, sadly, is where the ominous TAs (Torture Administrators, for all I care) of the comp sci lab hold court.  Talk about a good room filled with computers ruined.

You'll know you're not way too high on the virtue of punctuality when you realise that nowadays your watch faces from you the query of, "By how many minutes am I late?" more often than ,"Am I late?". This revelation, ladies and gentlemen, struck your dear friend and humble narrator in the face like a crusted apple pie on the face of a feline fiend, hurled by a hunted rodent on an animated show usually seen succeeding the roar of one of the lineage of the royal family of the forest.

Minutes from the hall-of-an-eighty-machines-running-linux:

Prof: (without smile) You're late by 7 minutes. Why?
Me: (sullenly) No excuse, sir.
Mind voice: (confusedly) Hmm.. the watch informed me it was more like 10 minutes.

Prof: (with smile) You were late last week too. Any problems?
Me: (sullenly) No, sir. No problems.
Mind voice: (smirkingly) Gibbering goose-buns. If going late to class meant problems, I'd have been Bane's roomie in Arkham by now. But yes, the prof seems like a nice guy.

TA: (initially) Have you written down the programs for the assignment that you are supposed to code today?
Me: (nonchalantly) No ma'm.
Mind voice: (surprisedly) Of all the turquoise unicorns that ever roamed the plains of Andalusia!

TA: (non-understandingly) You didn't write last week either. Why is this so?
Me: (unabashedly) But ma'm, let me show you, I know how to do it. Thats why I thought there was no point in writing it down.
Mind voice: (amusedly) I'm perfectly sure I know how to input the radius of a circle and, after running a recursive algorithm with an exponential amortized complexity on the input float value, print its area.

TA: (irritatedly) No no. Rules are rules. Even if you perfectly well know how to do this, (in tone of "even if you are the President of India" ), I can't give you any sort of exception. You have to write down in your notebook a C program that takes the radius of a circle as input and outputs its radius. (note: nothing about the recursive algorithm)
Me: (protestingly) But ma'm, I've been learning C for 2 years. I assure you I can do this fine enough.
Mind voice: (even-more-amusedly) Circle? Circular queue, anyone?

TA: (even-more-irritatedly) NO. You write or I won't grade your assignment.
Me: (Resignedly) Oh, all right. I'll write.
Mind voice: (what-the-hellishly) Of all the sea cucumbers in the Baltic Sea! Just don't complain if you don't understand my handwriting.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how your dear friend and humble narrator ended up being pushed to commit the unforgivable cardinal sin of writing a piece of code on a notebook with proper syntax., as he figured that the TA (look for expansion a few paragraphs above) was but doing her job, and troubling people is actually not that nice a thing to do. After a few more such misadventures in the hall-of-an-eighty-machines-running-linux,

TA: (finally) NO. Even if you finish your programs in 15 minutes, you're not allowed to leave the lab until 9:30. And no, you're not allowed to do anything either. Just sit there and do positively nothing for the next one-and-a-half hours.
Me: (blankly) Oh...
Mind voice: (@%*$^-ly) &%*^#$@%&  &*^%*$*&% !!!


And that, ladies and gentlemen, is, for your dear friend and humble narrator, an average Tuesday evening - one unlike any other evening of any other day, one that demands extreme valour in the face of battle, one that serves you rice-mixed-with-baking-soda with a trace quantity of citrus flavouring to it, one that calls for superhuman hamstrings, one that introduces to you profs from Earth and TA's from Kerala, and beyond all, one that offers you experiences you can snigger about on the less happening Wednesday evenings.

Life, as they say, is a jumbo-sized blob of fun. Most of the time.

Thoughts from the toothbrush

For some strange reason, I don't feel like writing right up until that moment when I enter the auspices of the bathroom some time after midnight, intending to undertake the rather mundane act of brushing my teeth before hitting the sack after another tiresome day. And sadly, as Murphy would have it, on most of these occasions I'm already swaggering and dreary-eyed, loathing even the activity involved in rolling out my (rather thin) mattress, let alone sit up for another hour recording my thoughts on the vistas of life. But today being Valentine's Day and all that, I decided it was nothing less than my duty to pour out my views, etc. when I am in the mood to.

During today's instance of the perennial 'act' described above, I found floating in my mind thoughts so compelling that despite the fact that I need to be up quite early tomorrow (don't ask why), I'm still awake and keen on writing them down. But alas, by the time I found the bathroom door closing behind me and started wiping my feet dry, I found that these very thoughts had somehow fled my mind, as often occurs, leaving me desperately groping for some tiny detail of what they were about, in a disposition not too different from that in which you find yourself upon awakening from a particularly pleasant dream and finding that you can't, for all the blue barnacles in Arabia, remember any fact of whatsoever significance about the dream other than that it was particularly pleasant.

No big deal though- considering the fact that they made me quite happy, I believe those thoughts would have been mostly along the lines of what I have been talking to myself about frequently over the past few days. (Oh, and mind you, talking to yourself is by no means a definite indication of possessing a bee in your bonnet). The subject concerned in these monologues with myself happens to be the general goodness of the world around. I have noticed that these past few days, perhaps weeks, have been perhaps on the average the most pleasant ever for me.

I'm not able to put my finger on why this is so, but more often these days than ever before, I feel like going around with a smile, beaming at people I meet, generally feeling swell about stuff, and existence itself seems a tad more cheerful and fun than ever before. I don't know whether everyone goes through such a phase as they grow up, but these days I dread the very thought of wasting time, and my very definition of what passes as 'time well spent' has come to be refined by some kind of gradual paradigm shift over the past couple of months. Academics no longer occupy the top spot among my priorities, in fact I sometimes feel quite sorry that they once did. Active pursuit of what I find fun and interesting, be it the harmonica, artificial intelligence, or the continual efforts to understand the wirings of homo sapiens, seems quite more important than the grades some professor decides to assign me based on my knowledge of the synthesis and applications of arachnoboranes.

Of course, I am by no means implying that I don't care about grades or anything- when it comes to that, I want as much as any other ambitious chap in IIT Madras who has a life does, and perhaps a bit more :). Just that they are not all that important, and what I actually learn and do over here, most often outside of a classroom, is going to take me much farther than being a 10-pointer or anything ever could. (mind you, I am by no means implying that your humble narrator is, by any means, a 10-pointer)

I've been finding a lot of new interests lately, ranging from machine learning to sociology, and inexplicably, the very existence of so many interests along with the fact that I am actually working on all of them somewhat actively provides me a certain degree of what is best described as 'smugness'. And of course, I frequently find that I just don't have enough time to do all that I want to do. I'm trying to cut out as much wastage of time as I can, but when it comes to mid-sems and workshop homework (@#@$#$@!!@!@#!!!), not much seems to be in my hands. And I'm not doing too bad when you come to think of it- its been like a month since I played a computer game for any considerable amount of time, and I don't have a girlfriend to waste time on either. (lovebirds perched on park benches and coffee shops out there, spare my insolence).

Coming to Physics, I'm greatly looking forward to the NIUS programme this summer. I long for some active work in the king of the sciences, and am even currently working on a project "for fun", as my prof likes to call it, with a couple of friends.

Then there's also this wonderful feeling of constantly evolving ('growing up' would have been an understatement). Every once in a while I look back and find that I have changed so much from what I was even like two months ago, and for the most part, I find it to be for the better. Perhaps everyone finds themselves in situations like this once in a while, and everyone evolves, I don't know. I can tell you its an immensely gratifying feeling to acknowledge that you have actually done a few things right and have stood to learn from your past experiences, both pleasant and disastrous.

Finally, I'd like to mention what I believe to be the spark that ignited this spell of feel-goodness, that tipping point where bottled up emotions and treasured memories burst the banks of deprival, flooding the bleak landscape of the mind with the lukewarm waters of the wonderful sense of belonging and the essence of everlasting friendships. Oh, I could just go on and on about the joy of meeting old friends after such a long time- that one day with the alumni meeting at P.S. followed by what I will consider for many years to come as one of the  greatest evenings I have ever had, meeting so may of my friends at Vivekananda Vidyalaya, many of them after one whole year. And would you believe, the way we met again, you could never have guessed that some of us hadn't been in contact for a whole year, it was all as though we had just said goodbye the day before- such is the familiarity which I find with my friends from over there.

And yes, that evening just reinforced the strange reflection I had after a similar occasion an year ago- its worth losing touch with your friends for some time just to experience the immense pleasure obtained in getting back together.

P.S.: I've just picked up a copy of 'The Catcher in the Rye' by J.D.Salinger. After reading all those articles following his demise, I look forward to a wonderful time with the book.

The science of consideration

The bible of online information, the mecca of the seeker of knowledge, the knight in shining armour of the helpless student with an assignment due tomorrow and with no idea what its topic is about, the encyclopedia built on wikis , holds the following opinion:

Science (from the Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge") is, in its broadest sense, any systematic knowledge-base or prescriptive practice that is capable of resulting in a prediction or predictable type of outcome.

As the article goes on to mention, science, under a stricter definition, is any systematic study carried out by "the scientific method". The scientific method, as I remember reading a long time ago, refers to the process of observation and  acquisition of data, formulation of a hypothesis to explain the observations, and subsequent testing of the hypothesis by further experimentation. In simpler terms, you look at stuff and try to explain it off.


So, what "stuff" do you look at as subjects of study in the course of your mundane existence on this forlorn planet? In school, its balls and slinky toys. In college, perhaps diffraction gratings, colorimeters, or the rare specimen of the fairer gender (though with considerably less success as compared to the other topics). But what about the much more common elements, like say, the fullstop and the comma, or the throes of passion and the pleasure in humour? These are generally topics left for linguists, cognitive psychologists and other such specialists.


So, I figured, why not, with the playful curiosity of a young adolescent kid uncorrupted by 'education', explore these less frequented domains of study? Of course, these searches for the truth in each case can only be shallow, for I am neither a specialist in any of these fields, nor am I in possession of an intellect broad and magnificent enough to have an insight of any significance in anything whatsoever. Such an exercise, I believe, shall not only help understand a whole load of stuff better, but shall also serve to develop skills of reasoning and deduction, which can only be honed by constant practice


Hence, in that spirit, I propose to "publish" over here the results of a few of my exploits. (well, I need to maintain a record somewhere, right?).


As with all sciences, we start with an axiom- something that cannot be proved or derived from anything more fundamental. Following my fancy of fancy names, I call it "The Axiom of Consideration" :

Anything can be considered scientifically.

 What that implies is that one can take the scientific method, and apply it to any subject of one's choice, be it grammar, baldness or wheat fields, and actually hope to obtain some sort of an insight into either how the subject works, or how it behaves to a particular set of stimuli, or something similar to what physicists look for in particles and chemists in test tubes.


Now, it is not without some reflection that I decided to take this up as an axiom. For a lot of us would prefer that certain emotionally significant topics like friendship or love would rather be left as they are, unfathomable and mystical. I felt this myself, and I would like to mention here that rationality is quite different from insensitivity. Knowing how something works doesn't take the fun out of it, just as the knowledge that all emotions are nothing more than a few thousand electrical signals in the brain doesn't stop you from being happy or sad. (unless you happen to be a stage magician, where you're broke if you broadcast how your tricks work). So, I figured, the axiom is actually a swell idea to begin with.


I'm working on questions right now, and though not much progress has been made, I can now decorate my language with a brand new set of vivid constructs. Like, for example:

Random bloke: May I ask, when will your blog next be updated?

 Me: (with straight face) I do not know, but the answerablitily of that particular question happens to possess a non-trivial degree of temporal dependance.

Random bloke: Vada pochae...

So long then, either until I'm done on questions or until I find something interesting to write about.

Child's Play

Some day not too close in the future, I shall probably have forgetten all about Injun Joe's gold, Becky Thatcher's engagement, the dead cat, their rafting along the Mississippi and most of the other tales about the Boy Who Attended His Own Funeral, but there is one particular anecdote about Tom Sawyer narrated somewhere in the earlier parts of the book that will never fade from my memory. Tom is punished (not so surprisingly) by his aunt, if I remember right, and ordered to paint a fence (three coats, mind you, is a hefty lot of work for a boy).

He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.

So what does he do? (He can't do what he's told, no sir, he's Tom Sawyer). He sees some unpunished kid come along biting a shiny red apple. Suddenly Tom starts singing to himself (or performs some such kind of 'happy-times' activity) and makes the other guy believe that its actually fun to paint and trades some painting time for the apple. This goes on and at the end of the day wily little Tom is richer by a couple of toys, some sort of kiddy-treasures and a painted fence.

Twain ends this episode with this:

" He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it — namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain."

He goes on to say state a fact thats quite easy to accept, but the ability to exploit which has avoided me till date:

" Work consists of whatever a body is OBLIGED to do, and...Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do."

What struck me like the tang of a glass of over-salted lemonade lacking half a glass of water for the number of lemons squeezed in when I read this was the remarkable manner in which Twain had presented such a, what to say, 'interesting' (for lack of a better adjective (owing to my largely inadequate vocabulary)) observation, one that all of us experience but never think about, in such a casual manner, giving Tom, a free-riding devil-may-care kid, to say the least, insight that many of us fail to possess.

Perhaps you smirk and reconsider the degree of my naivety, thinking I'm making too much of this, for writers may write as they please, and while their characters might be juvenile, they themselves are not, and at their discretion bestow even upon a newborn the judgement of Daniel. If your thoughts are so, I ask you to consider a certain brilliant short story called "Little Girls Wiser Than Men", by Tolstoy.

This one literally left me dumbstruck, almost paralysed by the profoundness of the message he conveys, and quite more so by the degree of simplicity with which he does it. And everything he says in it is completely plain-possible, stuff like that actually happens. (In case you haven't read this one yet, I'd recommend it anytime over answering questions about your pet puppy for the sake of finding out your gangster name on a particular website)

I talk about these two particular works, for I find in them a reflection, though fictional, of one of my long time beliefs that there are certain great aspects to childhood that one should be at a major disadvantage to grow out of. Children possess with them, among others, two important qualities- straightforwardness and ignorance.

First, children can never hide their emotions. You can always call little johnny's fib about the sugar, for he always covers his mouth after a lie. They're completely transparent, and have no idea how to lie convincingly.

And second, as Robert Lynd aptly puts it,

"To children, for all we know, the world may still seem to be full of people who laugh because they are happy and smile because they are kind."

Someone said ignorance is bliss. Presumably, they didn't mean not knowing whats going on around you, but rather being unaware of the seriousness of whats going on around you. As Oscar Wilde rightly says, in his truly classic spirit,

"Life is too important a thing to be taken seriously."

I'm sure you're by now leaning back in your chair with a smug smile under your nose, ready to educate me if only I was right in front of you that these qualities. Let me finish. You definitely can't be a child in a dog-eat-dog world, with what seems like half the nation ready to hoodwink you the moment you blink (exaggeration, my dear, is a marvelous tool to the inexperienced writer). No, I'm not, as no one is, going to be like that all my life, thats definitely not what I mean. When I would be like that is when I'm with a person with whom I can have a conversation along the same lines as this:

Batman: He gave me this ring with a kryptonite stone. He said -

Superman: I have many enemies who have tried to control me. And I live in fear that someday, they might succeed. If that ever should happen -- If I should ever lose control, There would only be one sure way to stop me.

Batman: Do you realize what you're asking?

Superman: I do. I want the means to stop me in the hands of a man I can trust with my life.

You get the point? Imagine you have someone like that and now try to make sense of whatever I said before, should be a lot easier now. To have someone with whom you can be like that is, actually, bliss.

Last point I'd like to make- when I said, "Imagine you have someone like that", if you were really only 'imagining' that you have someone like that, I've got one line for you: "Go get a life."