Rediscovery Of Reading

I am a student, and I must be as any student is, eager to learn, to reflect upon learning, to derive an opinion of those reflections, and to express that opinion. A beautiful thought always comes unbidden, and it is a crying shame indeed not to be able to record and preserve it somehow.

I am travelling home at the moment, and I have been granted a seat by the window, which is well; since it offer me a chance to observe that which I always miss when I travel this route, since I have alwyas so far passed though at night, when there is too little of illumination to enjoy what the eye may perceive. It just occurs to me that this is a beautiful time at which to be traversing this route.

I am alternately reading and writing, and the tome which submits to my perusal at the moment is a classic, a masterpiece of English literature. I certainly approve the content, the plot of the story, but earlier it was just a story to me, set in very refined language; this time, after a space of four years as I read the lines, I am delighted to rediscover my love and appreciation for good literature and expressive language. A mark of a good book would be that every perusal of the book leaves you with something new to think about; something to set you little grey cells buzzing, a process which certainly leads to intellectual excercise, and more importantly, the blowing away of cobwebs that set in and build up due to an overdose if entertainments that do not essentially require an alert and active mind.

In this reading of my book, I have singled out a battery of words and expressions that I should like to inculcate in my daily vocabulary; I have rediscovered a style of speaking, writing and thinking that has to my mind, expressiveness without sacrificing brevity and clarity; and in examining the characters of the main players in the story, I have been reminded forcefully yet subtly, of those noble qualities and refinements, that I wish to have imbued in my own character.

I am grateful that Providence guided my hand to this book, when I raised my arm to choose. For it is just one more incident leading me to rebirth and rediscovery.

Lucky Me

What is luck?

Different people think of it in different ways. And everyone creates their own definition of luck. Some of these definitions sound so wise, you'd think they'd been spoken by some hotshot religious leaders. But it ain't like that. You can have your own definition of luck, but unless something lucky happens to you, you don't get it.

There is nothing called luck, actually. It is just a concept that the mind of mankind has created, skulking around looking for a solution to some random question of philosophy; a solution that cannot be called false since it does not cross any principle that has yet been established as reasonable true, and while yet lying in the realm of doubt, is comfortable enough that it may be accepted without too much discomfort. Basically anything that happens in such a manner that you wanted or expected or hoped it would happen, is taken as an instance of luck.

Logically, is this justified? Not really. Because almost everything that you do nowadays has your hand in its making, consciously or unconsciously. You get whatever you worked for. And based on your own experience, you know, consciously or subconsciously, how well or badly you performed, and what the outcome of what you did should approximately be. You would thus end up with some expectation, however slight, of the result. Human nature never talks of itself exactly; it's either always self-glorifying or self-deprecating. So when the result comes out better than expected, it's good luck, and if it's worse, then it's bad luck.

Look at it this way, and you'll be able to actually explain all those instances of 'good' luck as very favourable or pleasant logic. And then you'll see that the instances of actual 'luck' are nothing but very nice coincidence. And they will be quite few and rare to find!

But regardless of how rare the coincidence it's fun to see the consequences of it. Like when you have a certain minimum score that you're hoping to get in a test, and it turns out that you just manage to get that minimum score. The luck part of it is that you got the bare minimum you need to scrape through. And as a result, a lot of nice things happen, because life just got a little simpler with that bare minimum score.

Interesting things happen in life. You only need to keep your eyes and ears open. You'll never know what's happening otherwise.

Parallel To A Football Match

I'm watching a football match on TV at the moment. Everyone's asleep. I've never paid football any attention before.

A friend of mine just recommended this match. He seems to be a sports freak - I've only recently started talking to him. I don't know any rules of football, I don't know the playing procedure or the scoring protocol; I've never even kicked a ball before, let alone play football. But I'm still enjoying the match.

I'm on vacation, and I'm pretty bored at the moment. A vacation is supposed to be spent usefully, to take time out and do stuff that you don't normally have time to do, in the course of school, college or work. I'm not doing anything. I feel like such a lowlife, such a cheat. I'm ashamed and that's probably why I haven't called or talked to anyone. The list keeps mounting day by day.

Anyway this match is something different. I'm feeling the urge to write, so I guess this means some of the cobwebs are being blown out of my brain. I wish I had a proper writing table.

Okay, one team just scored. Both teams seem to be quite evenly matched - this team that just scored got it because it was a penalty kick awarded thanks to being fouled by the other team. I get the feeling a lot of goals are scored that way... else the way this game seems to proceed, each team will always get blocked every time they try to score! Even though the goal net is so wide, it doesn't seem to be an easy task to kick the ball in, particularly when you're being cobbled by the other team, and you have a particularly wary goalie facing you!

Anyway game's over, and one team managed to win. God, they're so happy. They have a goal to chase!

Meat!!!

For this I thank the one with whom I've been friends before birth. Sorry girl, for ripping the link off your blog, but believe me, I give you full credit for spreading the cheer!!!

They're made out of meat... by Terry Bisson 

Enjoy!!!

The Last Day in College

It's the last day in college. Of this semester.

For me, of my second year as a college student. There are so many things I've seen, so many things I've heard, and a glimpse, very vague, of the huge amount of stuff yet to come.

There are just a few hours left. Before I leave this city. Before an entire generation of people leaves forever, embarking on a journey each to his own horizon. Only a few hours I have, in which to gain the maximum I can from this generation. There are only four that I really want to know or meet. Three are easy to obtain. It's the thought of the fourth that kills me.

My character has gone through a complete apostasy. It's not visible to most, though. But where it is, people are completely shocked, though they're getting over it now. Not more shocked than myself though. It's amazing how someone can change in twelve months.

My thinking, my attitude, my behaviour, my tolerance, the rationality of judgement, the purity of my character, the sweetness of my nature, the generosity of my heart, the clarity of my mind - everything has gone through a sinusoidal shaped curve upon the axis of time. I am quite still what I was, to a great extent, and yet some things have changed, irreversibly, some things have begun, irrevocably, and some things have ended, irrefutably. I have both lost and not lost, gained and not gained.

I didn't have any idea where I was headed. Or where I wanted to be. I still don't. Time's ticking away, and it's so unreal I could just stand still and watch all the colours just swirl and spin by in fast motion, and nobody would ber able to catch me as I fall, and I wouldn't be able to comprehend what's going on around me, even though my mind is completely aware of what's taking place.

I'm actually writing all this, and will type it into the blog later. But at the moment I just realize: I have really nice handwriting.

People are amazing. And the way you can get to meet and know people, interact with them, learn from them, teach them, talk to them, argue with them, make acquaintances, make friends; it's all just so amazing. I've come to meet and know three times more people in second year than I did in first year, which is natural and logical, and yet pleasing to know.

So many events have shaped the course of thought, as it meanders over the plains of time, to join the ocean of the past.

I've had so many firsts this year. So many new things as well. So much has happened to me, both good and bad. Everything has served to teach me a lesson. Somebody once told me, nature teaches you a hundred lessons everyday, of which perhaps only two get into your head. Doesn't matter, because the remaining will continue to be taught, until they get drilled into you.

How right he was.

2.5 Diggers? I Say It's Possible!

Textbooks can say a lot of stupid things as well, besides the sensible stuff. Of course, very few textbooks actually go to the extent of giving wrong stuff (unless they're sponsored by the State Government!), but there are some priceless examples which are technically correct, but just can't be allowed all the same!

Take for example, Organic Chemistry, by P.L. Soni. It lists out the uses of paper:
1) As tissue paper
2) As napkins and toilet paper
3) As gift wrapping paper
4) Envelopes and packaging
5) Cardboard
6) Sandpaper
7) Heat insulation
8) Writing and printing books
9) Printing newspapers
And yes, they are printed more or less in this order!

More examples to follow as the process of discovery continues. Watch this space.

The Story of A Calculator

Hi. I'm just an ordinary calculator, belonging to an ordinary person and leading the ordinary life that most calculators do. I help my young lady with the stupid calculations that she doesn't have the brains to do herself and get her through her engineering exams.

People think life as a calculator can be boring but that's not true. Apart from getting to hear all the abuse and praise (yes, there is praise too!) that students heap upon their courses and teachers, I also get to see firsthand what they go through, and why they go through it. And apart from dry academic stuff, I'm also a firsthand witness to how young students behave in general, with their friends, with acquaintances and with strangers. And most of all with themselves.

I'm a dumb witness so I get to see without any pretense. Without these kids trying to be fake or trying to hide how they feel. People can be so nasty at times and so nice at others. And some people can be really so nasty and really so nice.

I got separated from my lady two days before her exams. Careless woman just left me in the classroom one day while trying to complete some class report, three hours overdue at that, and she had to call for help, and someone else picked me up after that. My lady lost all hope of recovering me, and hunted and hunted, so I heard, and was on the brink of buying another one to replace me. It's her luck that a sequence of nice young cultured gentlemen passed me on, one to another, until I landed up with a young man sitting two benches away from her in the exam hall. And he very graciously returned me to her, and I can tell you there was very sincere gratitude and genuine relief in her eyes. Which was needed, since she has begun to lose hope that there is goodness of heart and mind in this world.

The moral of the story is don't ever lose faith. Faith in what? In the innate niceness of people. It's difficult to believe people can still be good. I could very well have been kept by some unscrupulous young ruffian, or been sold by some member of the domestic staff for a little extra pocket money, or perhaps just been lying around for days in some lost lonely corner, seen by the eyes of none, my life wasted and deprived of the purpose for which I was built... but someone bothered to pick me up, maintain me and restore me to the person to whom I matter the most.

And that's why I also say: WRITE YOUR NAME AND CLASS ON YOUR CAL-C!!!

2.5 Diggers? Not Possible!

Of late, I've been fortunate enough to be reading scientific books, both the general variety and the textbook variety, and I've been reading good books. The most striking quality of these books is the way they have been written, informative enough that they grasp attention, and yet light hearted at the appropriate spots, so that they don't lose that attention. And as for the textbooks, even good textbooks are of two kinds: the kind that just drones on about the subject in a clear, complete, and concise manner, and the kind that does the same thing while ensuring it doesn't get monotonous.

There aren't too many examples I can quote here. I don't have that kind of energy. But I do want to record those few examples. I don't want to lose track of what I've realised. It's really cute when you're reading the thing with a serious mind, and then the author puts in an appropriate line to make you smile. That really allows you to enjoy the whole process of reading the thing.

Sample this for instance. This was taken from "Engineering Electromagnetics" by Hayt and Buck.
"It is philosophically satisfying to have the most general result and to feel that we are able to obtain results for any special case at will. However, such a jump would lead to many frantic cries of help, and not a few drowned students."

Another quote from the same text. "We are faced with a choice of many methods by which to evaluate this component, and we shall use but one method and leave the others as exercises for a quiet Sunday afternoon." (!!!)

And yet again. "Since one coulomb of electric flux is produced by one coulomb of charge, the inner conductor might just as well have been a cube or a brass door key rather than a sphere, and the total induced charge on the outer sphere would still be the same. Going one step further, we could now replace the outer sphere by an empty but completely closed soup can. Q coulombs on the can would produce W = Q line of electric flux and induce -Q coulombs on the tin can.
"If the soup were a perfect insulator, it could even be left in the can, without any difference in the results!"

For those who aren't exactly physics freaks, my apologies. It's amazing, the kind of things you can learn. While dealing with the physics of time, pure mathematicians (theoreticians all of them) have gone through the pain of creating worlds (in theory) where you can travel back in time. The entire story is given in "The River Of Time", by Igor Novikov, a book on quantum principles and how they affect time, for the layman. Quote:
"These worlds are generated by solving systems of equations of general relativity. It appears that the general opinion has been that these solutions have no connection whatsoever with reality, despite being of great interest for studying the structure of the theory itself. Everyone knows from one's acquaintance with school arithmetic that the formulae of a correct theory can give incorrect - 'physically meaningless' - results. It is sufficient to insert inappropriate numbers into the conditions of a problem, for arithmetic to generate an unacceptable result: say, to excavate a hole in the ground of volume 30 cubic metres in 4 days, with each digger capable of digging 3 cubic metres per day, you need... 2.5 diggers. Results of this sort made more than one pupil cry."

Thinking leads to chaos! And how! A brilliant example on how to understand entropy, given in the same book. I loved this one. I quote:

"The heat released as a consequence of 'memorizing' makes the ambient air warmer and thus increases 'chaos' (entropy) of the Universe. It is always larger than the order introduced into the storing device when information is recorded. Stephen Hawking gives the following example. If you learned by heart each word in a book like this, your memory would record about two million bits of information. This is the measure of how much order was created in your brain. However, reading the book, you have transformed at least a thousand calories of ordered energy stored in food into disordered heat dissipated into the atmosphere. This increases the chaos in the Universe by about twenty million million million million units of data. This is ten million million million times greater than the gain in order in your brain, and that only if you do remember everything in this book..."

Triumph: The Importance of Being Nice

Good afternoon - honoured judges, esteemed teachers, and dear friends. I am Saxicola rubetra, from Class 12 Science, and having been offered this platform, I would like to express my views about the importance of being nice to people. It may seem to be an unusual topic, but when I finish, I think you’ll agree that it is a subject highly relevant to today’s teenagers. 

Hundreds of books have been written about social graces, etiquette and formal manners, ranging from fifty-page self help books of the one-minute variety, to sturdy volumes that include detailed histories of manners and etiquette. Formal manners might require help from a book, but what I wish to talk about is our basic attitude and behaviour towards our friends, family and colleagues in day to day life. That is something that cannot be learnt by reading any number of books. It has to come from within.

Parents tell children when they are little, that when someone gives them something, they should say thank you; if they do something wrong, they should say I am sorry; if they ask for something, they should say please. Children mechanically obey these instructions, without really understanding the meaning behind it all. That understanding comes only when they grow older and more mature. Having understood that thanking or apologizing is an expression of gratitude or regret, as the case may be, the sincerity of that expression should increase. On the contrary, we find that basically, as students grow older, they grow ruder.

Nobody really thinks about this at all. The case could be as simple as borrowing a pencil. When we were younger, we would go to a friend, who we definitely knew had one and ask very politely, please, may I have that. Nowadays, the situation is something like this. You need a pencil, you see one lying around in a pencil case, you don’t know who it belongs to; you pick it up and use it. How many would bother to put it back where it was taken from? Very few indeed. In a lot of cases the pencil in question is just thrown around somewhere and the owner is left to find it missing and then look for it. A pencil may not cost much, which is why people don’t bother too much. But this attitude of not caring for the fact that it does belong to someone else shows how unconcerned, how disrespectful we have become. We are very fastidious when it comes to our own stuff and very casual when it comes to other people’s things.

Our basic behaviour is what others judge us upon. The way we speak and act leads people to form their opinions of what we are, and what they can expect from us. People go to a lot of trouble to make a good first impression on new acquaintances. It might help to some extent, but how long does one go on making a pretence? If one is not basically nice by nature, the truth comes to the surface sooner or later. In your own friends’ circle you will notice, that when in trouble you tend to approach a few particular people more than others. And those particular people are much nicer in their general behaviour than the ones whom you don’t go to.

A self evaluation will show us how shockingly rude we have become. We take everyone and everything for granted. We are not bothered about misusing other people’s property. We do not care about being disrespectful to our elders. We say inappropriate things, which can really offend other people. We take a sadist pleasure in seeing other people squirm with embarrassment or humiliation. The worst is when we try to justify our misbehaviour quoting the other person’s conduct as a precedent.

Being nice shows consideration for other people. It shows that you are interested in creating harmony in society. It doesn’t really take a huge load of effort to be nice. It only needs a little change in attitude. That isn’t asking for too much, is it? If we were all a bit nicer to each other, the world could be a much better place for all of us to live in.

Thanks.

I remember this occasion in my last year in school, when we had this elocution competition, and all of us high school people had to be kicked by our teachers into participating, since we were too lazy to take the initiative ourselves. I was one of those kicked into it. And I didn't get past the preliminary round into the final on-stage round. But my teacher liked the prelim round speech I gave in class and she had me prepare it and speak it on stage anyway, as a guest speaker.

And that occasion was memorable. I'm a stage fright kind of person, and I usually go bonkers at the prospect of a public performance in front of an audience. And here I was, in front of three hundred people for the first time in my life. And it was great. I didn't fumble or stammer or forget anything of what I wanted to say. The feeling I had was beyond exhilaration. It was the feeling of triumph, over my own weakness, the joy that I had surmounted, for once at least, a mountain I always dreaded having to climb. It was just that: triumph.

Blue Sky and Golden Sun

I'm sick. I'm sad. And I'm broken.

And I've missed the lecture of a screwy prof. The first lecture of the day. The first lecture of the first day of spring.

The first day of spring. It's warm again. The sun is shining again as the sun shines, golden shine warming up the green earth. It's beautiful; not blazing hot, yet sunny and bright. And I'm sad. And broken.

The first day of spring. Winter has been delightful, like it always is in these parts, but today brings the first blue sky in weeks. Bright blue, beautiful deep blue, blue in all its shades, from the eastern horizon to the western, and all shades merging together like no beginning and no end, no line and no border, reflecting the green and brown shades of the earth. I don't know why, but there is more green today upon the earth's face than there has been for weeks.

The first day of spring. Golden sun under a blue sky. I bunked the first lecture of the first day of spring. And I'm alone on the roof above the classroom where my fellow students are working their brains. While I work my senses. And above my head is the commonest sight humans ever see, but I'm seeing it in totally new light. The commonest thing people feel, but today I realize it. And I'm broken.

But I'm healing. Slowly.