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."

Now, what am I doing here?

So what does one do in instances of chronic boredom after most of the friendly civilisation is packed away in some college or the other miles away?

1. Watch TV. (duh!!)
2. Sleep off the better half of the day. (New found pleasure, this. But after a few slumbersome days I figured it was too much of a criminal waste of time :). Nice guy, me.)
3. Watch movies on TV.
4. Browse the net for nothingness.
5. Watch comedy scenes on TV. (especially the ones with goundamani punch lines)
6. Smuggle a computer game from an unassuming teenager(read "sailesh") in Bangalore to Chennai in your camera and perhaps play it till your fingers blister.
7. Watch megaserials on TV. (I did NOT do that)
8. Catch "Hari Pandian 6: Maya Ilavarasan" twice at the movies in as many weeks. (do NOT feel sorry for me- I had friends for company both times)
9. Watch a Sam Anderson movie on TV. (YES, believe me- some pathetic excuse for a TV channel has finally recognised the epitome of melodrama and the mastery of the fine art of "acting" that Sam Anderson stands for.)
10. Finish reading "Very Good, Jeeves", even if your bolsterous abdomen bursts in the offing. (On the job.)
11. Watch a movie in which the hero beats up two dozen mobsters, half of who very thoughtfully fly through a shop window on being touched by the hero and the other half do the same, on TV. (er...I am trying to convey that I watched Tamil movies on TV)
12. Start writing a blog. (Here I am!!!)
13. Pack up for hostel. (And here I go!!!)

Really, what AM I doing here? Why did I start writing a blog?

"Who cares why?" would perhaps make a more fitting (and my natural) reply, but the truth is, "I don't know".

You see, throughout these holidays, I haven't had much to interest me, and one fine day I figured, "Why not write a blog?". Many fine days have passed since that thought struck me, and today, two days before I move into hostel, I finally pick up my blocks and start writing. Who knows, maybe I could might have a few mighty jolly adventures in the next few months that I could record here.

Frankly, I do not make much of my own writing skills and would, on a sunny day with crows cawing from the tree outside my balcony, take an hour (read "atleast an hour") to pull up a right decent 200-word essay on "Steps to maintain good hygiene and cleanliness in your locality". (Trust me, I HAVE written an essay on that very topic, and that too quite a few years since I was last three-and-a-half feet tall and the sole instruments by which I voiced my opinion of the world outside were Natraj pencils). What with my literature limited to not too much more than Enid Blyton and Sir Doyle, my best appeal at humour being pretty conkish Wodehouse-ian slang, and the sarcasm of a coyote caught in a Conibear trap.

But then, as the best of mottoes goes, "Who cares?". So here I am, typing away on a sunny day with crows cawing from the tree outside my balcony, and there you are, reading this. :)