Reprise

After 7 months, I'm back here. For one reason alone. This.

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.