APC Roy

This little nothing is for one really great guy, who was born 150 years ago, and I am not talking about Tagore

He was a real genius, but I suppose we all know that. We have all heard of his great achievements in Chemistry, and of how fiercely proud he was of his country and his people. In fact his greatest books are titled "A History of Hindu Chemistry". He was researching on his people and their history, at a time when he could have been unraveling mysteries of Chemistry, and earning the glory. He could have stuck to worshipping goddess Saraswati, and reaped accolades, but he went on to create one of the earliest commercial ventures by a Bengali, namely “ Bengal Chemicals”, to show that we Indians lack in nothing.

But this we all know

It’s not our knowledge that is lacking, but our memory, and the fiery “something” that does not let you rest, the stuff some people call passion.

The reason why I sat down to write this out is because a newspaper article was lamenting the other day about how we should pay him our homage, and how his belongings should be preserved. All this is fine for a historian, and perhaps also for a renovation specialist. But it becomes of paramount importance to the people at large, only when they give up all hope of ever being close to the great genius of the person in question. Consider Netaji. His house is a great relic to his life and times, and that is all that we have preserved, not his ideals, not his opinions, just his slippers. I am sure if Netaji would have been around he would have beaten us all up with those very slippers.

And the worst thing with our memory is not that we have forgotten his achievements, but that we have forgotten his legacy. Just take one look at the pics of this genius on the net, and even a blind guy will point out the down-to-Earth humility, gentleness and the sharp mind behind his features. In a day and time, when we have finally accepted, that being humble is stupid, being down-to-Earth and gentle are signs of weakness, and the “complete man” is the one who flaunts the most expensive suits around, I really miss that guy. He wanted the nation to discover herself, but when we have finally “found” ourselves, I have a hunch that we are somehow more lost than we ever were.

It is thus that I believe that the dilapidated state of his house is some sort of poetic justice. If we can’t remember him in our actions, we don’t have the right to worship his image and his belongings. He did what he did not to get awarded a “cult” of divinity, but so that we can learn from his life and experiences. We have not, so we better show some guts and accept that we have let him down. Compared to finding excuses, and playing a blame game, that would definitely be worth the effort.

They say, that rather than just finding faults we should give suggestions and solutions. I am nowhere near being great enough to do that, but I don’t think that I need to. If we can just search our roots out a bit, and are open-minded enough to appreciate what we see, we will find plenty of lessons. How long it takes us to do THAT introspection, however, is the real question.


“Bhagaban tumi juge juge doot pathayechho bare bare
Dayaheen sangsare.
Tara bole gelo 'kshama karo sabe', bole gelo 'bhalobasho''
Antara hote bidwesh-beesh nasho.
'Baraneeya tara, smaraneeya tara, tabuo bahir dware
Aji durdine phiranu tader byartha namaskare”

- Rabindranath Tagore

Minds

Statutory Warning: If you are a self-confessed intellectual in search of an overly cryptic writing, or an obsessive, modern-day version of Romeo/Juliet looking for some emotional atyachar, please press the red coloured box at the top-right corner of this window, and see what happens!

Also, if you totally hate mathematics, you are forewarned ! The following article can cause severe headache, and a string of profanities at some inopportune moments.

Others may scroll down.

I once heard of a city-bred genius, who told his more rustic companion, that once you have seen one field, you have seen them all. In other words, nature can be quite boring. The friend replied, that perhaps he had never seen a field in his life.

Now, make no mistakes, I really love nature. But I also happen to be an insufferably analytical person. I just could not get the logic of the village guy. I mean, most of the fields do look the same, right? Could he just have been bragging?

It was only a few months back, that I got the solution to this irritable problem. I was studying a topic on probability, called Ensemble Averaging, and they talked about “realizations” of a random variable.

Unlike normal averages, where you add up a number of variables, here they considered just 1 variable. Now, what the hell is that? I was quite frustrated, till my usually-cryptic-but-kind-for-once prof gave me a hint. To quote him, say 1 hen lays eggs over 10 days, you have 10 eggs, and the average weight can be easily found. But what if 10 hens lay eggs on the same day? what then?

Once I got the hang of it, i realised what the village guy meant. There is just 1 field, but what if a hundred people look at it, all at different times?. Some see it drenched in sunshine, others see it under a rainbow. Stilll others enjoy its beauty with 'kids' of all ages playing their hearts out in the mud. Not to mention those mindless jerks like me, who might stare at it, without enjoying any of the above. According to mathematics, they are just looking at different "realisations" of the field.

It is all about your mind.

Now, How many millions of times have we heard that people change, people leave, people stop caring, blah, blah, blah...?

But what you have inside your mind is never going to perish. The class-bunkings, the first cigarette, cheating in the tests, a truly romantic date which was spent taking a walk on a very badly pot-holed road, they are all there in your mind. What about those memories? I mean, the people might have all changed, but your mind has preserved the best of their realisations for you to enjoy. Won't the world be a much better place for us all, if we could let everybody live their lives, not trying to change anyone, but spending time with those people that matter the most to us, in those avatars, that we hold so dear?

I don't wish to offer free advice here, but let's face it. Whether one is in pain, grief, happines, content, whatever, it is all in the mind. This doesnot make these feelings untrue, but when we understand that we can actually choose whether we are happy or sad, I think it helps.

A real damn lot.

Seminar!!

This post is specially dedicated to those of my friends, who have elected 'Control Systems' to be their final year elective. Don't ask me why they did. Don't ask me why I did. We just did.
As any self-respecting Electrical engineer will tell you, the most mathematical and thus the most abstract topic inside Electrical engineering is Control Systems. Here, things are not seen, nor even visualised, it is pure imagination. And it is way less fun than what it sounds like. But let me get to the point.
There is a project that every one must do, and a powerpoint presentation that all must "present", once every Saturday. Today was the first such presentatation, and this post is dedicated to that, ...ermm.., memorable experience.
It started off happily enough. In a small room with enough Gizmos to put Darth Vader to shame, and 2 AC's freezing people to death, 3 profs started to call us forth. The first few to go up had no presentations and the regular 'be ashamed' talk flew thick and fast. The fun started from the third person. This friend of mine was planing to work on "Chaos Theory". Sounds good. He should have been left at that, but alas. Apparently, the profs couldnot make out the meaning of a particular signal, and started questioning him. Thanks to some quick thinking by my friend, and a good-mood prof, the guy was saved.
Another of my friends got it pretty rough. He had an extremely informative presentation, which is another way of saying that he had taken all that he could, from books, papers, journals et al, and copy-pasted it on the slides. "To JU, from the students, with love..."
Only, the profs didnot find it quite so funny. The cross was pretty unfair, if you ask me. How can you ask someone to explain a diagram, that he was seeing, maybe the second time in his life? Or if the original painter was stupid enough not to have put labels every where, how are we responsible?
Their were other moments too, when one guy was told that he was giving the presentataion, as if he were reading the Sacred texts(he was oscillating like a mechanical cuckoo, :\ ), and another, when a friend completely lost it, and tried to define the 'Earth frame of reference', resolutely denying that there was any earth in the vicinity.
But the last guy took the cake. When asked to finish the presentation in 5 mins, armed with around 10 slides, he could reach only slide 3, before 30 mins were up. Worse, he started the presentation with a pdf, not even a powerpoint presentation. Being called a plagiarist was only half his problems, when he started to condense around 2-3 months of effort into 10 slides. He was supposed to speak on underwater vehicles, but it was the presentation that was left gasping for breath.
What a day!
But make no mistakes, I dont blame any of my these students, though I might sound sarcastic. This course is supposed to be the first and last in BE, where we do something on our own. But that's the theory. In reality, we are given a host of topics, things that we are hearing for the first time in our lives, and asked to come with ingenious things overnight. In 1-2 weeks, we must get papers pertaining to the topic, application areas of the subject, and be ready to answer questions that sound more like Greek, and less like engineering. But the worst part is none of these.
The worst part is, the aim of this course is not to do someting on our own, but verify other people's models. And if the verification is succesful, ... voila..., you just did it. And all of this,when we are bogged down by coursework, right up to our neck.

In short, we are drugged, tied, gagged, hung upside down, and then they wonder why we cant come up with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony just like that. Now isn't THAT supposed to be a cakewalk?

And people actually exist, who believe we are wasting taxpayer's money, when we leave engineering for good. I don't think that they know what it feels like to chuck away four year's of your toils worth right out of the window. Many of my friends and seniors do. Hope someone will take note, before it is too late.

Life@College

I do realise, folks, that I could have thought of a less boring topic than this, and definitely a better name to represent my post. But this happens to be my blog, and I get to torture you here, no regrets attached. Happy reading!

I happened to be reading a story a few days back, where a woman's belongings were stolen before a great war, and at the end of it, the lady traced back her stuff. The weird part was that she could no longer stand the sight of her stuff, and basically ran away from the scene. I thought it a strange way of being thankful to God, for getting back one's belongings. But when you think deeper, you realise, that the woman's belongings were associated with a happier time and place. Getting them back now would have stolen away her memories, the last refuge of a life that she cherished, but one that she had to give up. So, I think what is great aout something, or some place has not got too much to do with the place, but the memories we associate with it.
JU for most people is just another place with a large field, a place to smoke pot, a place where 'antels', 'batels' and such like come together, and so on. I can't blame them for taking it like any other place. But after spending a bit of time and a lot of life inside it, I humbly wish to stand out.

Many of my friends believe that I am a better narrator, when I am not narrating at all, not directly at least. Digression and sarcastic humour are more like me. So let me digress a bit. It is widely known, that I was once a student of Meghnad Saha Institute of Technology. Frankly speaking, I never played lots of games, nor was I an active participant in the college fests. But I just Loved the place. I dismissed my happy memories as just another lucky coincidence, before I met another guy from MSIT, who asked me about my impression of the place. I was roughly 27.5 nanoseconds into my lovely recollections, whence I was cut off in mid-sentence by the other guy. "Jaaygata puro *** chhilo". Well, I had not seen that one coming. 'What the hell?' thought I.

It took me a while to realise, that this guy had done everything that makes college life the great, hyped up extravagaza it is supposed to be. Games, fests, pranks, smoking up, and so on.
It was then that I realised that my impression was better attributed to my state of mind when I was there. I was preparing for a no. of competitive exams, was working my back off, and in general I had a strong sense of purpose. These are the things that I associated with MSIT, and my experience thereof was different from that of my friend.
My point is, that a place is just a place, but your experience of the place has got more to do with YOU than with the place. SO I thank JU, not for a beautiful campus, or lots of books, or saintly professors, or student blogs that sound like university propaganda.
I thank it for gifting me some awesome experiences that I could associate with the place. Debates where I sucked, drama presenatations which were a nightmare, workshops with seriously outdated technology, profs who can brag their way to the moon, friends that can REALLY make your day, people with whom you can have the simplest talks and still feel weirdly rejuvenated. Juniors that are nuts, juniors that drive you nuts, juniors that are sissies, and juniors that actually believe that their seniors know a lot more than them. Placement sessions, where one guy gets a job, and half the class make him prepare for it, and then lose no time in jumping with him once the results are out. Supple-s that are supposed to instill some shame in us, but end up putting in a lot of hatred, and a cheesy sense of humour. A society in itself, where you walk in with a lot of assumptions, and leave with many more, but in between, you grow up, atleast a little bit.

Yesterday, I saw someone complaining that we have grown up too fast, and the 'final year' and 'campussing' crap should have happened later. That is the essence of JU. An insulated world, where we know what happens when we move out, but we are still free to dream, each our own way. Where the mindless self-centredness has not become all powerful. A 'glass palace' which we all must leave, soon, but one where we are still living bits and pieces of our dreams.

Thanks, JU. Hope you had as much fun as we did.

A Trip to Remember

Listening to people speaking eloquently on topics of poverty, dreams of working in huge workshops manufacturing giant machines, thoughts of taking random walks through the countryside with friends-- all of these seem to take on a new meaning, when your back is getting roasted at 50 degrees Celsius.

It all started with my decision of interning at CLW, one of the 'finest' manufacturing units of the Indian Railways. And thus began my 'mis'adventures.One day at the place, and the infrastructure forced me to stay at Asansol, a full 1 hour's ride in rickety old buses, on a pot-holed road. In fact it is pretty surprising how the regulars on this route manage to retain the shape and number of their bones!

Other than the extreme boredom, total lack of energy among the workers, the fiery heat and sense of wasting one's time when one can put it to better use, interning at CLW can be a nice experience. Chittaranjan is actually a decent place to go around, and a small tourist destination, as long as you can put up with the elements( man-made and god-made alike). And no need to take the "No Photographs Allowed" posters too seriously-- the authorities don't.

However, the worst part about the whole exercise, I feel, has got nothing to do with the infrastructure(i.e, the lack of it) or the heat. It is the way people take their work. I mean, if everybody were lackadaisical and escapist, one could still just write the place off as one moving to the doom, and be done with it. But when you see certain people, who love their work, know their stuff, are helpful in general, and are hopeful that CLW would actually be what it claims to be today-- our collective pride, then it hurts. It is quite clear that all we have done is to convince these people that their contribution does not matter, their talents are not required, and in general their dedication is best kicked out. But when you see, that in spite of all this, they are working to the best of their abilities, holding out against all odds, and in general doing what they are supposed to do( quite a rarity, really), you feel ashamed. Irrespective of who you are and what you are doing, you feel ashamed.

Quite a memorable trip, really.