Defining "Silly"

I have been tagged by Anyesha to post a silly picture of myself on my blog. Since my sister is visiting me for a few days and I don't have time to post a proper write-up, I thought of doing the tag now.
The tag, however, posed a problem. Which photo to choose? Just like Anyesha said, I also have enough silly photos to fill an album. So I started sorting them, and tried to redefine the word 'silly'. Some of my silly photos were taken at such a young age that they lie on the border between 'silly' and 'cute'. Besides, if I am made to dress like a bride when I hardly have a say in the matter, you can't really call it silly. There were some others that look silly only because the context is known to me. Otherwise they are pretty ordinary.
After going through all the photos on my hard disk, I'm sure that this one takes the cake. Although this was taken when I was about five, as far as I remember, it was taken on my insistence.
The occasion was my sister's Annaprashan (first rice eating ceremony). The flower ornaments were the ones that she had worn during the ceremony. The flute was a toy flute that I had. I don't remember what prompted my insistence that I wear them, but I have a strong suspicion that it was Ramanand Sagar's Ramayan. I really don't know what is more silly; the ornaments on me, or the fact that I'm wearing a T-shirt and shorts while posing as Krishna.

Just in case you don't agree to my choice, here's another silly picture, a recent one that finished close second. This was taken on the day of the reception of my cousin sister's wedding this June. Wearing a dhuti is obviously not my everyday cup of tea, but still, I was too eager to get a photo clicked with my uncle's labrador Stella so that I could brag about my courage. Although Stella is actually a large pup and basically harmless, she has a habit of snapping at things within her reach. So I was too worried about her tugging at my dhuti. The expression on my face says the rest (click on image to enlarge).
This was the first tag that I did since I started blogging, and it seemed like fun. I now pass this funny tag on to Abhijit, Shreemoyee and Rohit.

Death comes as the end

Today, a day that was otherwise ordinary ended with two pieces of sad news, the news of two deaths. Two deaths that were very different in their nature. Two people, who couldn’t be more different, died. One died in my family, the other one half a world away. Both deaths made me sad, but in different ways.

One was my grandmother. Well, technically not exactly my grandmother but my father’s aunt: a relative whom the English-speaking people, who know nothing of the relationships that we have in Indian joint families, would prefer to call a great aunt. However, here in India we often don’t differentiate between cousins and siblings or between uncles, aunts and parents. So she was my grandma.

Phulthamu (that’s what I called her) was the simplest person I’ve ever met, with childlike innocence. There are so many memories that I’ll forever associate with her. Like the Chandmama magazine that she regularly read. That magazine surely seems funny and outdated in this age of Pottermania, but there was a time I used to breathlessly finish any issue I could lay my hands on. And I could always find one by her bedside. She even carried these magazines whenever she traveled by train, and distributed them among us to read on the journey. Similarly I can never forget her deeds and comments that we often joked about, which were not really that silly after all. For instance, I still remember the time when we drank half a bottle of 7’Up and left the bottle on the table. Phulthamu, in her working spree, filled the rest up with water and put it into the fridge. Now any one of us would probably have done the same thing absent mindedly, especially since 7’Up looks like water, but everyone scolded her for being silly. Another time when she saw me with my earphones for the first time, she had asked me whether I needed hearing-aid for both ears. We laughed about that innocent comment for ages, but I now I feel it wasn’t that stupid coming from a person who had never seen earphones in her life.

She was old and sick and was suffering for quite some time. She died at her home, on her bed. It was the end of an era. We are going to miss her a lot.

The other person was Steve Irwin, better known as The Crocodile Hunter. He died this morning in a sting ray attack off the coast of Australia while filming a documentary on dangerous marine life for a show hosted by his daughter. I got the news of his death only in the evening.

Was I a die-hard Crocodile Hunter fan? Not at all. I hardly watched any TV. However, whoever has seen a single show hosted by this amazing man will always remember him. He used to catch hold of every kind of creatures with bare hands, kiss ugly lizards and call them his “Little friends”, and do all kinds of unimaginable things. Once, in a TV show, I saw him chase a wild boar through a marshland and finally catch it barehanded in water. And then there were the crocodiles, of course. He handled these huge ferocious wild reptiles as dexterously as a mongoose plays with a snake.

When we had to remember the names of the seven layers in computer network architecture during my college days, we used to say “Please do not touch Steve’s pet alligators” (the first letters of the words in the sentence make up the names of the layers in proper order: physical, data link, network, transport, session, presentation, application). I don’t know who made that up, but every time I said that funny sentence, Steve Irwin’s face came to my mind.

I used to say he’ll die like this one day, playing with dangerous animals. The sting ray stung him right in the heart. He must have died an instantaneous, painless death doing what he liked doing most. The news is stunning and sad because that man was so active, so alive.

Rest in peace Steve, we will never forget you.

...and I always thought I studied science!

I have been reading Richard Feynman's autobiography for some time, and today I came across a chapter which I simply must write about, because I feel it is about me, and millions of other students in our country.

A few excerpts from the book itself will make it clear. Feynman was visiting Brazil to teach at a university in Rio de Janeiro. He was teaching Physics students who were going to become teachers. He says:

Later I attended a lecture at the engineering school. The lecture went like this, translated into English: "Two bodies . . . are considered equivalent . . . if equal torques . . . will produce . . . equal acceleration. Two bodies, are considered equivalent, if equal torques, will produce equal acceleration." The students were all sitting there taking dictation, and when the professor repeated the sentence, they checked it to make sure they wrote it down all right. Then they wrote down the next sentence, and on and on. I was the only one who knew the professor was talking about objects with the same moment of inertia, and it was hard to figure out.

I didn't see how they were going to learn anything from that. Here he was talking about moments of inertia, but there was no discussion about how hard it is to push a door open when you put heavy weights on the outside, compared to when you put them near the hinge--nothing!

After the lecture, I talked to a student: "You take all those notes--what do you do with them?"

"Oh, we study them," he says. "We'll have an exam."

"What will the exam be like?"

"Very easy. I can tell you now one of the questions." He looks at his notebook and says, “‘When are two bodies equivalent?' And the answer is, 'Two bodies are considered equivalent if equal torques will produce equal acceleration.' So, you see, they could pass the examinations, and "learn" all this stuff, and not know anything at all, except what they had memorized.

And again:

One other thing I could never get them to do was to ask questions. Finally, a student explained it to me: "If I ask you a question during the lecture, afterwards everybody will be telling me, 'What are you wasting our time for in the class? We're trying to learn something. And you're stopping him by asking a question'."

It was a kind of one-upmanship, where nobody knows what's going on, and they'd put the other one down as if they did know. They all fake that they know, and if one student admits for a moment that something is confusing by asking a question, the others take a high-handed attitude, acting as if it's not confusing at all, telling him that he's wasting their time.

Isn’t this the exact scenario in Indian schools and colleges? Everybody wants to pass the exams, nobody wants to know. Getting marks is more important than gaining knowledge. And we think we are progressing? Our educational institutes are doing a great job? Why does a nation with over a billion people have to think before coming up with names of five world famous Indian scientists then? Here’s what Feynman said about Brazil in his speech at the end of his stay there:

So I tell them that one of the first things to strike me when I came to Brazil was to see elementary school kids in bookstores, buying physics books. There are so many kids learning physics in Brazil, beginning much earlier than kids do in the United States, that it's amazing you don't find many physicists in Brazil--why is that? So many kids are working so hard, and nothing comes of it.

Then I held up the elementary physics textbook they were using…and started to read: "Triboluminescence. Triboluminescence is the light emitted when crystals are crushed..

I said, "And there, have you got science? No! You have only told what a word means in terms of other words. You haven't told anything about nature-what crystals produce light when you crush them, why they produce light. Did you see any student go home and try it? He can't.

"But if, instead, you were to write, 'When you take a lump of sugar and crush it with a pair of pliers in the dark, you can see a bluish flash. Some other crystals do that too. Nobody knows why. The phenomenon is called "triboluminescence."' Then someone will go home and try it. Then there's an experience of nature."

I haven’t read a more accurate description of our education system than this.

I have often faced a situation during my school or college days where I have asked for a concrete example for the phenomenon that the professor was explaining, and I was told not to bother about examples but to learn up the things that were taught. If someone asked a question in the class, the others scolded him for that. How can we expect to achieve anything significant in science if we have an attitude like this? I know, there are naïve people around who will jump up on reading this post and try to make me memorise (that’s the only way of understanding they know) that things have changed, India is progressing; Indian scientists are doing great work, not only outside India but here as well. But unfortunately the truth is, nothing has changed yet. We are opening new schools, colleges and universities everyday, but we don’t care about the quality of teaching. There are scientists who are doing a great job, but they are doing it in spite of the system and not because of it.

When we are in a rat race, we are rats even if we win. I am an office rat now. Who has time to think about all this nonsense anyway? I myself will be executing memorised algorithms again tomorrow. Who has time for useless questions like “Why”? Even if I ask I’ll be told that it is “outside the scope” of my work.

Only problem is, I always thought I was a science student in school and college. Feynman made me see my mistake. Like he said, “No science is being taught in Brazil!” I can also safely conclude “No science is being taught in India!” As an Indian, I find that a fairly disturbing idea.

Almost Famous

[The title and subject of this post have been heavily internalised from this post by Greatbong. However, the experiences described here are very much my own.]

I think everybody has, at some point in their life, a dream to appear on TV. I was no exception (to be honest I should say I am no exception, but let’s not go deeper into that). So when a teacher walked into our 7^th standard classroom to announce that a team was to be sent to Bournvita Quiz Contest (BQC), I felt interested. Not that the name BQC meant a lot to me… no! In fact I had never heard the name before since there was no cable TV connection in our house. But the other boys in my class said that they watched the quiz conducted by Derek O’Brien every Sunday on Zee TV and it would be a nice opportunity to get oneself on TV.

Each team was to comprise two members: one from class 7 and the other from class 8. The next day I appeared in the written quiz that was conducted by our teachers to select the representatives from our school. I had not prepared for it since our final exams were round the corner, and naturally I was quite surprised when I came to know that I had been selected, along with Sharad Raj from class 8.

Just a couple of days after the exams were over, we had the actual quiz where one team would be selected from Allahabad. It was held in St. Joseph’s College, a school that we considered the academic equivalent of Pakistan (if our school can be considered the equivalent of India). Both of us were quite excited about it, but hadn’t got enough time to prepare much. When we reached there, we found that the quiz was a written one, conducted by a person from Big Ideas, the company that conducted the Bournvita Quiz Contest. There were 30 questions to be answered.

Winning was a piece of cake. None of the other schools turned up, probably due to exams. The St. Joseph’s College team managed a pathetic 13 out of 30 in comparison to our 23. Then the gentleman told us that the quiz episode would be shot in Mumbai sometime in May-June, and we would be given an all-expense paid trip to Mumbai to present ourselves for the shooting. We were suddenly stars in our school.

The real preparation started now. I don’t know what Sharad did, but in the summer vacations I studied whole day from quiz books bought by my father. But the final dates or the invitation letters did not arrive even in the second week of May. Then we had to leave for Hooghly for there were some ceremonies in our house.

We returned on 1^st June. That very day, a letter arrived from Big Ideas stating that the shooting was on 17^th/18^th June. They had tried contacting our school, but had got no response, and if they did not hear from us by 2^nd June, they’d replace us with another team. My father called them up immediately, only to learn that they had spoken to our principal the previous day, and apparently he had said he was “not interested”.

That afternoon we went to my school, my father and I. We spoke to Mr. Egbert, the vice principal. He was very enthusiastic about the whole thing and said he was ready to take me and Sharad to Mumbai if our principal gave the green signal. Then we went to meet Mr. C.V Innes, our principal. First he was reluctant to meet us, because he was busy strolling in his garden, and his guard tried his best to show us the door. Then my father told the guard to tell Mr. Innes that we had come about a TV programme in Mumbai etc. We were sure the guard will not be able to explain things to him, and sure enough, Mr. Innes agreed to meet us. Probably he felt that someone had come from Mumbai to interview him for a TV programme, and the temptation to show his face on TV was too much even for him. He must have been badly disappointed to see us!

The story pretty much ends here. Nothing more to add, except that we tried to convince him to give his consent on our going, and he kept on saying he couldn’t, citing a stupid reason like “no reservations available”. I still don’t understand why he was so adamant about not even trying, but the end result was that my first chance of appearing on TV went down the drain.

I think I should end this post with the time when I finally did appear on TV. It was Durga Puja time in … I think 2003. We were in a pandal in Salt Lake where a team from a local cable TV channel was asking people questions. One question was, “Which bird has no wings?” I answered “Kiwi”. Oh boy, then you should have seen the commotion! They adjusted the lights, the mikes and the camera, moved back the crowd, and said, “We’ll ask that question again to you, will you please answer it again for us?” So the anchor asked it again, this time in a more stylish way, adding “Amader chhotto bhaiti sothik uttor diye diyechhe” (Our little brother has answered it correctly) at the end. He also managed to stick his foot firmly in his mouth by telling my younger sister, “Kakima, ektu sore daran.” (Aunty, please move to the side a bit). While I did not mind being called “little brother” as long as my face appeared on TV (though I was in 3^rd year at the time), my sister surely did not like being called “Aunty”. If a stare could kill, that anchor would have dropped dead then and there.

The programme was aired on the local channel a few weeks later. I was away attending a wedding that day, and I think the only person in the world who saw that telecast was my maternal grandmother, who fought with everybody else in the house to keep the TV tuned to the local channel to catch a glimpse of my face.

I appeared on TV once more last December, when I was shopping at a handicrafts fair in Hyderabad with my friend Smita. It was on ETV, which is a Telugu channel available all over India. However, this time it was Smita’s interview and I was just there in the background.

Another time a newspaper published my photo talking to a Nobel Prize winning scientist, but that’s another story. In spite of everything, however, I still rue the fact that I got the chance of appearing in BQC and couldn’t make it because of somebody else’s fault.

A week of extremes

That’s the only name I can think of for this week.

It started off with my parents arriving early morning last Sunday. I had an extremely enjoyable time with them. Visited Salar Jung, Charminar, Hussain Sagar, Birla Mandir, Ramkrishna Mission and Hyderabad Central. Also showed them around Hi Tech City. (This was the reason I couldn’t write a blog post for so long.) When my office reopened on Wednesday after a long weekend of four days, I was fully refreshed.

In the meantime my project at office ran into troubled waters with our onsite coordinator returning to India due to a personal emergency of a very unfortunate kind. With the system testing phase about to end and regression testing about to start, I have been extremely busy running test cases till late in the night.

And I’m likely to remain this way for some time to come, for this week is going to be the longest week of my professional life. I had office today, and again I have office tomorrow. Which means I’ll get the next holiday on next Saturday.

Which makes it a ten-day week for me.

Apart from the work at the office, I have to look for a new flat to stay, as our landlord wants us to vacate our present flat by the end of this month. But our searches so far reveal that "all the good ones are taken, and if one isn't taken, there's a reason for it."

That’s enough for tonight. I’ll write a proper blog post in a few days. Till then, enjoy these photos.