Indifference and Lack of interest in Academics

I see many an example of this happening around me. Infact more of this rather than not (atleast that's what I infer from what I see). An indifference towards academics. Whenever one sees a person reading more than what has been taught in the class or something totally unrelated to any of the courses he/she's taking, the first question that pops up is invariably.."Putting enthu..eh!" or "Project work..???? under whom da ??" or "Why are you unnecessarily putting fight da ?? What's the point ?? ". The last question will come up if the answer to the 2nd qn is negative. Seriously let me ask you one thing...do you chat with friends in a gumbal to practise for a GD in an interview.. (if you do.. then something's seriously wrong.. I suggest you had better visit a psychiatrist !!!).. Isn't it for one obvious reason.... FUN .. Why do everybody forget this when it comes to Acads.. Can't reading anything related to Acads be fun.. ??? Why not.. ??? Why do everybody consider Acads and fun "ends apart"... I sometimes get irked by this.. I know it's the Academic system to blame.. I can tell you that I myself don't know where I would have landed up.. if it had not been hammered into my head that IIT is the place in the world to be.. infact so much so that .. even after they (mean my parents) had given up after my failure in my first attempt to get in.. I didn't ... Most people land up here because of such hammering and not because of an real interest in sciences or engineering.. I accept it's tough to get an interest in these fields when you don't have an exposure to it before you come here... But my humble request to those who don't find this (academics) interesting is that... Please don't deter and demean others' interests.. esp hard found ones..I mean people jump over so many things before they find something like "Love at first sight"

Kannthil Muthamittal

Another one of those Mani Ratnam .. do I say classics.. Everybody played their part well.. but what I liked the most was the story and of course Simran. Never seen her act better.

Cycling alone on the road at 12.00 midnight

Ever cycled alone or with somebody at 12.00 midnight with the cold air blowing at your face.. Played football at that time.. Stayed up till 5 am on the terrace trying to capture Saturn using your Webcam.... Might sound weird to many.. but the first in the above list is something that I get to do every now and then when returning from the Library... and the others not so often (would love to) but yes.. atleast once... Was just wondering.. how many people get to enjoy such things ??? Whoah I am just enjoying my life here at IIT Madras !!!

Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics

The first article of this particular yearly Journal or Book (call it whatever you want) is usually on a historical note.. say the life of a great guy in Fluid Mechanics or some institution.. Some times the amount of work done by some people is so much that their works are reviewed in the form of a series...(e.g G.I.Taylor) This particular thing in the Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics just attracted my attention.. I was just browsing through all the issues in my Library looking for review articles on Turbulence for my term paper.. when I hit upon this.. This is likely to keep me occupied for quite some time...

Mani Ratnam

A Gem of Director.. A got a penchant for watching more Tamil movies (esp. romantic ones) last december.. and thats' when I saw Alaipayuthae for the first time.. I just fell in love with that movie. I watched Ayutha Ezhuthu again.. and then many other movies... I recently saw Iruvar and Mouna Ragam again.. and was wondering why I like all these movies.. But it was only recently (today) that I realised that all these movies were made by the same director.. MANI RATNAM I really feel ashamed to know this so so.. early.. but I guess it's OK. And Agni Natchathiram .. another movie that I liked very much... again.. Mani Ratnam.. Hats Off to this Director.. whose Nayagan got listed among the top 100 movies of the century by the TIME Magazine..no wonder..

Saarang - Day 2

Saarang Day 2 was great..

The morning events passed by without much notice.. (Sadly.. no participation.) I watched the Light Music Solo event for some time.. My friend Kumar was participating and sang the song "Ae Ajnabee" from Dil Se. One girl sang "Suttum Vizhi Chudar thaan.. Kannamma.." from Kandukondaen.. that was brilliant. Even Kumar appreciated it. Then I visited the Classical Music Instrumental.. Most of them played the Violin.. Then ofcourse "Jam".. it was fun at the beginning but became boring later on.. it's called Jam... but junta don't allow others to talk even for 10s continuously.. Then I went to watch the extempore finals in the evening.. I still can't stop laughing.. But the Shankar Ehsaan Loy show more than made up for all these.. It was partying all the way.. I still feel dizzy an hour after the show.. We hardly sat on the ground.. He made us rock till the end.. Mahalakshmi Iyer dazzled us (atleast me) with her voice.. Amazing.. the way she took her voice to very high levels.. Shrinivas came in for a cameo.. Overall as I said.. I still feel dizzy..

Saarang - 2006

I was very much against Saarang at the same time last year.. But now my views seem to have changed quite a bit.. Of course I wouldn't spend all my time.. arrange stuff and get Saarang going. (shame on me to say this staying in IIT Madras) Instead this year I have decided to enjoy it just as any guy with a 4 day holiday break.. Now that is great isn't it.. The first day in Saarang..

• I participated in Creative writing thanks to Kumar
• I visited debate prelims.. nothing much.. just saw the topics..
• Stayed in the Classical Music Vocal Solo area for the rest of the time.. Listened to many of my own friends for the first time.. My already existing interest (or rather wish I should say) in learning the Mirudangam was strengthened..
• Chalked out the plan for the next couple of days.. (Photography workshop esp..)

Mahab's visit

Yesterday I had gone to Mahabalipuram along with my friends Aswin, Arun and Dr.Suresh. The purpose of the visit was simple, to go to darker skies for Astonomy observations. Dr.Suresh had a 10" Meade Schmidt Cassegraine Telescope and a 8MPX Digi Canon SLR, a Philips ToUcam (webcam) and a laptop... and more important of all.. a resort in Mahabalipuram (one of his relatives owns it).. We went in a Tata Estate from here. Reached there by around 9.30 pm after having dinner. On the way we could see more and more stars (i.e the sky getting better) as we travelled every km. The Orion - Sirius region looked brilliant even through the car window. Then it took us around one and a half hours to get the scope in action (Aligning the telesope became a problem). We started off at 11.00 pm thinking we have atleast 2 full hours before the moon rises. Unfortunately it was not to be so and the FOG played spoilsport. The corrector plate of the Telescope was full of dew in less than 30 minutes. And then Arun came with the idea of using the powerful lamp that Dr.Suresh had to heat up the dew. We had partial success in that. Then Dr.Suresh got some tissue paper and cleaned the plate. But it was never at it's best. A lesson to learn I guess... Then we tried many objects. We tried seeing arbitrary open clusters using the scope's goto and both Aswin and Arun got a taste of what I got the other day at Dr.Suresh's home (7-8 clusters in less than 4 minutes.. impossible by any means in a telescope without a goto). We tried a lot to catch atleast one globular, but in vain (hey.. the sky was so brilliant that the Orion Nebula looked like a very Dense Globular through the "30 x 60" Bino that we had). Coming to galaxies.. we tried the Leo Triplet in vain. The best (and the only one) that we saw was M81 (a galaxy that we put a lot of fight to see through our telescopes but in vain) But the dew settled again. Now we were sort of starting to give up. Time was already 1.30 am. The moon was well up and DSO's (Deep Sky Objects) were out of the question. Dr.Suresh said we'll give a try at Webcam imaging of Saturn. So we tried. And we did get a good image (stacked later). Time was around 2.15 am now. Then in about five minutes the FOG became very intense. The visibility came down to less than about 10m very fast. We decided "THAT'S IT". We could have come prepared for the dew, but defy not for this kind of fog. This was way beyond any precautions that could have been taken. (My 5MPX Nikon Digicam couldn't take pics properly because the lens was getting covered with water). We had to give up our dream of a solo pic of each of us with the scope. We packed up and went to our room. After going to the room we decided to stack up the images and see how our only good work of the night looked like. The comp was hanging hajaar and after some time of fundaes putting by Arun and Dr.Suresh we gave up on that too. Leaving Dr.Suresh in the room we decided to pay a visit to the beach. The resort was on the shore. After about 30 minutes of Photo session (I would rate it amongst the best of the times that I spent there.. We really got some good pics) amongst us we came back and slept at around 4.30 am. We got up in the morning at about 9.00 am. It was good to see the resort in daylight. A complete contrast. It looked really beautiful. We had our breakfast by the shore (first time experience for me). Then we packed our bags and left for Chennai. Overall it was a very memorable experience. But I would like to go there again some time with better preparation against this damned dew and do some good astrophotography.

Management jobs

Something that I don't like about Management jobs and people who do such jobs. You can't fix a Hi-Funda name for every trivial thing that you do. It's not you can't, but sounds idiotic to me.

Bibtex

This seems to be a very good database for maintaining a record of the papers that one has read. I can introduce addtitional fields without disturbing the way in which the references will be displayed in Latex. I am only about 40-45 papers old, and I am already feeling a need for such a thing. I just don't understand how my profs work without this. Mama (my prof) said he used to attach notes to the papers using Gem-clips. But in this era, where one cannot afford to print all papers, this is surely necessary. I have written a small one liner in awk to convert the citations from given format of comma separated values to the bibtex format. (Has a lot of problems for instance the code wont work when multiple authors are separated by commas) awk 'BEGIN {FS="," ; RS="\n" ; x = 1} ; {print "@article{"x","} { print "title = {"$1"}," } {print "author = {"$2 " },"} {print "journal = {"$3" },"} {print "volume = {"$4" },"} {print "number = {"$5 "}," } {print "year = {"$6 " },"} {print "pages = {"$7 "}," } {print "}"} {x = x + 1} ' file.txt >> output_file.bib

All I can say is this works. It may look very untidy at the moment. You can change the Field splitter, Record splitter. You can change the order in which the entries appear. And ya most important of all, you can change the order in which the entries are read from the file. This is the most uselful part since all the citations from a particular source look the same. All you need to do is get the citations from that particular source as a text file and then allow awk to work on it after suitable modifications of the above code. The keys are numbered numerically from 1 to the last entry. You can (rather should) rename it later.

There are softwares like Pybliographer, Kbibtex, Jabref (Java based for Windows users) which can be used to update the database, write notes on selected papers for future reference, link them to the pdf's that you have for immediate reference, and most important of all export your references in formats like pdf, html, xml and so on

Springer and it's Book Series

Springer Verlag or Springer is undoubtedly the best publishing house that I have seen so far, atleast as regards Engineering and Applied Mathematics. It's just too good. I look at any "Yellow" book now a days with a lot of respect. One nice concept that they have is the concept of a "Series" on a given topic. A casual search on the series with the keyword "Computational" yielded me 56 series, 2230 books& CD-ROMS and around 107 journals. Of course I am interested only in CFD for the moment. So I have "bookmarked" only the relevant books as I considered it. My bookmarks.html is available in my website. Springer Series in Compuational Physics Springer Series in Computational Mathematics The above series are my favourites. However a large number of issues seem to be missing from the first one. (infact only the two volumes by Flectcher are listed there) The famous book by Canuto, Hussaini et al on "Spectral methods in Fluid Dynamics" belonged to this series. Another blog on some of the other books in the other field that I am interested in "Asymptotics and Boundary Layer theory" later.

Life at IIT

This is in reply to a discussion at Nanopolitan. Nope, IIT is not like school. It's not about being regular to class, taking down notes and all that stuff. It's about discovering your true area of interest. Not all (infact I can confidently say most) join Computer Science Engg or Electical Engg because they love it. You have an exposure to so many new areas. I am a student of Aerospace Enng at IIT Madras and apart from Aerospace I am also interested in Control Theory, Digital systems, Analog circuits, Operations Research, Listening to physics lectures from my friend Aswin on General Relativity, Cosmology, Quantum mechanics and anything related to physics, Differential Equations and Asymptotic analysis in Mathematics, Astronomy (infact we have an active Astronomy club) Open Source Software (yes I run Debian GNU Linux on my computer), Politics and the list goes on. All this just for the fun of it. This is one place where you have academic freedom like no other place. No worries about your future. Read what you feel like reading. Your CGPA is not everything. People went on to do a Ph.D in Political Sciences after doing their B.Tech in Metallurgical Engineering from here. Many people get into Physics, Management, IT, Economics etc. It's all about discovering your true area of interest. Some people miss that opportunity and realise it later.

Test for wardenship at IIT Madras

http://www.iitmadras.org/corner/2005/sep07/ Prof. Devendra Jalihal seems to be an interesting character. I am not able to stop laughing, seeing his "options" even after reading them over and over again. Godavari must be really gifted to have such a warden. Not that my warden Prof. G.Srinivasan is bad. He is really good. But I haven't seen him crack jokes like this.

The Indian Education system

It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiousity of inquiry; for what this delicate little plant needs more than anything, besides stimulation, is freedom. -- Einstein Well that may not have been said by Einstein, but it doesn't matter. I have always had a problem with these articles on the current education system. One guy in his article would point out the problems and faults that it has. The other guy would say how his daughter went through the stress before and after her X th board exams. What's the point in saying "Ya, there's a problem" all the time. Of late the articles turned to giving suggestions. But even them, they weren't concrete. Initially I liked reading such articles. Then I got bored. It is just like Politics you know. Saying the same thing in a million different ways. What does Bush do today. Keeps saying terrorism everywhere he goes. I formed the impression that nothing is going to change, atleast in the near future. My idea is that, the current system of education is basically to enhance literacy. No more. This system is not structured in such a way that an artist or a designer or a historian or a journalist would stand out in a crowd. And ya may be mathematicians would stand out, but even that is a rarity. Seriously I don't see any other reason why I am in IIT. That I got really interested in Aerospace is another matter, but with a good system of education who knows what I would be doing now. So it isn't worth much more than helping you develop rote memory. Though education boards are trying to change it, there seems to be a lot of inertia. The problem will obviously not be with the students, but with the teachers. I recently learnt that Kerala has introduced a radically new system of education at the primary level. The following articles are pretty good. Though the one by the CPI(M) may have political aims, it's pretty good otherwise. http://www.flonnet.com/fl1615/16150880.htm http://www.indiatogether.org/2004/may/edu-grading.htm http://www.pr.com/press-release/1128 I never thought it would come so soon. Though detecting artists, designers, historians, journalists may still be difficult, this is a welcome change.

"Is this going to work? You are supposed to teach 20 to 25 children and there is double that number in my class. I am over 40, and they expect me to play 'aana' (elephant) and the 'frog in the puddle' before a group of second standard children!"

- Teacher to headmistress at a government primary school, in the presence of this correspondent.

But such statements fighten me. I just hope the teachers don't ensure that poor results are the outcome to change back to the old system. And that the system goes through the initial inertia it might face.

General notion of the US in Indian households

My mother told me that my friend, who is an year senior to me, had gone to the US very recently to pursue higher studies. It seems that his mother told my mother that he did not study as "hard" as I did during his +1 and +2, but still ended up going to the US, and hence I need not have studied "hard". This shows that the notion in her mind is that going to US is the ultimate aim of every student and that if you are able to achieve it by simpler means then it is not worth putting in more effort. It was a similar response that I recieved my from my mother's elder sister, having "sent" both her sons to the US, when she came to know that I got an admission in IIT Madras. Even more aggressive was the response when I told her that me going to the US or any other country would depend on the field that I am going to specialise in and that if there are good professors in India who can guide me further in that field in Universities that have the required facilities, then the US or any other country would only be a secondary option for me. By saying this I presume that the very reason any body wants to pursue higher studies in the US, should be because there are not many colleges and Universities in India that can boast of facilities that are comparable to the ones that US Universities have in their field. There is nothing wrong in going abroad for higher studies if you stand to gain by education there and you help either "SCIENCE" or "INDIA" grow by doing it. My friend TJ's comments on this is another way of looking at it (will link it in another few days). But "Going to the US" should defy not be anybody's ultimate aim. This mindset of my friend's mother is, I think, prevalent among the majority of the population who's sons or daughters are in that age group. (The point is that I was awake on one particular night till about 2 a.m or so and his mother saw me "studying" through the window, and that's it, my mother was considered to be forcing me to study at odd times and that she was "torturing" me. Little did she realise that I was doing nothing more than writing an assignment to be submitted the next day at school and that I had slept for three hours as soon as I came from school)

Archanas at temples - Status show off or Belief in God

I some how feel the Archanas in the Temples today are more of a status (mostly economic) show-off, rather than belief in God. I am not debating about whether God exists or not. Whenever I go to temples (which is a rarity and so my entire statement may be wrong) , I find that the talk among women is mostly about what sarees they wore or what necklaces they wear, and among men it is about where their son or daughter has gone for higher studies or their place of work. What is more important is people talking at home about the kind of "Archanas" or "Vadamala sevai's" that the other family did and that they should also do it as soon as possible. I have overheard this in many families (atleast ten including my own). And I live in Nanganallur, which is regarded as a temple town. Is this is a status-show off or are people foolish enough to believe that they are serving "God" by doing such things. And your status in temples is judged by the amount which you tip the pujari there everytime. It is generally in the hotels that we hear of such things. Not many actually notice these things. This brings into light another question. By how many percentage points can literacy in India be increased if money spent on such things, is inturn spent on sponsoring a child's education. I say that the money can go through all corruption, bribery and all that stuff and still literacy in India can be imporoved by fifty percent.

The Hindu : Metro Plus Chennai : Small acts of blindness

http://www.hindu.com/mp/2005/09/05/stories/2005090500250100.htm This article really brings out the daily acts of kindness which are well within our reach but what we fail to do. This is true atleast with me. I realised that I don't know the name of my Security and the guy who delivers my Newspaper. I had better find that out soon.

India needs energy, and the US

http://www.rediff.com/news/2005/sep/02sg.htm A very good article. I find it amusing that when the country is ridden with so many internal problems of Caste, Religion, Corruption, Literacy the higher officials find time to actually go behind strategic interests in the region. I am not saying that what they are doing is wrong, but that they are doing a great job. It is difficult to do a good job of both at the same time. But afterall that is what stragetists and diplomats are meant to do. I would be very happy if they just brushed aside the US warnings and cared only about security of the gasline in Pakistan. It wouldn't be a very good policy to follow this, but still I have my own "hopes"

India mocks at the US

However others might consider, I see it that India is mocking at the US by pledging $5mn dollars to the US Red Cross reilef. Way to go India!!!!!!!!!! http://in.rediff.com/news/2005/sep/03katrina.htm On the other hand the same money could have spent wisely on Primary Education and all the other pressing concerns of India.

How to establish a scientific theory

I found this interesting blog on the above topic. http://chutneyspears.blogspot.com/2005/08/how-to-establish-scientific-theory.html An interesting read.