back to blogging

Posted by insane inanities ,

Few days back I stumbled upon a blog by a chemical engineer, and although generally this type of accident rarely happens it made me to recall that I do have a blog and somehow chemical engineering seems familiar. After 4 failed attempts to type the right password I clicked on the ‘forgot your password’ link. As it turned out the last post I made was on 27th June, 2009 and a lot has happened since then, Obama became president and Berlusconi got impressed with his tanned skin, Michael Jackson left for heavenly abode entertaining kids over there (assuming they have vast balconies to hang kids by their legs), MF Husain kicked out of the country and last known through gossip columns by writers like Shobhaa De he’s busy finding his muse among burqa clad Qatari actresses, Sania Mirza became second wife of another loser and planning to settle in Dubai (what is it in Middle East that attracts all the loser Indians?), Prometric screwed dreams of many Indian MBA wannabes as if they are already being spared by rotten system infested by reservation policies, Himesh Reshamiya gave up his headgear due to global increase in the prices of made in china caps (consequently he’s blaming Ben Bernanke and lehmann brothers for his exposed tresses), on a personal front regarding CAT i failed to get an IIM call, screwed up MDI interview (will post it on some other day, in case I don’t forget the password again), my girlfriend Miss Venezuela Stefania Fernandez became Miss Universe, number of hair per square cm of my scalp decreased and most importantly I managed to scrape through 2 semesters and consequently I’m 2 months away from dreaded chemical engineering course.

Of all these things I’m unable to decide ki kispe likhu, ab blog hai to likhna bhi padega na yaar warna public padhegi kya. Although it is another fact that most of the hits to my blog or rather statistically speaking more than 400 of 450 hits to my blog are being made by me. Rests are done by those people who were forced to read my blog after I posted the link on their orkut/facebook profile with catchy titles like, “isey padhein aur apni sex life interesting banayein”. I don’t know how successful they are in their pursuit but I think my writing is equally interesting if not more, than ad banners of cheap local aphrodisiacs (can’t give the names, manufacturers like them read bloggers like me aakhir talent match jo karta hai) which rely more on visual stimulation than anything else. Talking about visual stimulation, I got enough of it on my recent visit to Marine Drive, Mumbai. Mumbai enthralled me on my first visit to the city in early Feb this year and may be couple of days aren’t enough to completely understand the woes of people regarding this city (and I found many dissenters of the view that Mumbai being an interesting city to live in) but I found the rush of the city to suit me. And now as I’ve been placed in Mumbai for Teach For India from July onwards I’m looking forward to squeeze all the fun I can have out of hectic schedule of TFI that’s awaiting me. In days to come, as I’ve now noted down the password of my blog trusting little on my memory, I’ll write about Teach For India and may be about my departing college and classmates but as of now it is the movie ‘Dan in real life’ that’s awaiting me.

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how i met with an another way to kill time

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I’m not much of a TV buff, especially these soaps bore me like hell, but there was something with ‘How I Met Your Mother’, that made me sit back and see the complete first season in a single sitting, and as a matter of fact I don’t have anything else to do. The book I was reading has been finished and I’ll soon write its review, besides I couldn’t bring myself to go to the library and issue another one so I just got this season one from a friend and on a not so hot afternoon of yesterday with gallops of shrikhand as my lunch I totally enjoyed this comedy. Barney Stinson is the real entertainer, his one liners and dating strategies are the real fun of the show. Humourist to the core, every time he shows up on the screen there is something or the other that’s in the store that will tickle your ribs. Lily and Marshall are a cute couple, been there together for nine years and the magical romance still there, is something which is quite touchy. I’m lost for words for Cobie Smulders who is playing the role of Robin Scherbatsky, a reporter and an on off love interest of Ted Mosby. She is one of the cutest girls I have seen on the screen, she is obviously a no match for Penelope Cruz, but she is definitely beautiful, especially in the first episode. But among all, it is the character of Ted Mosby which enthralls me the most, he is oblivious to Barney's way of seeing people or rather girls, he is quite unlucky that he is not able to find his true love like Lily and Marshall and he is obviously not so ‘casual’ as Robin. A completely simple guy, being funny at heart, he epitomizes a real ideal guy, but the only thing is he’s smitten for a wrong girl. Robin is not the right girl for him, and he knows this too but he is not able to come in to terms with it even after a string of affairs. I think further seasons have in store the right girl for him, the girl whose kids he is narrating the story. But sincerely how come a dad narrates a story to his kids with all those one night stands description, Barney’s fundae and all, may be in US. All in all it’s a relationship drama with Ted running after girls to find his soulmate, Barney bringing him to senses in his own terms and Lily-Marshall’s lovey dovey talks. And yes their all time chatting in the bar with that big mug of beer, is there so much of free time in USA? May be yes after this recession and all.

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forthcoming exam or IBM puzzle, okay i choose sleep

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Today I Just screwed up my exam big time. I can't recall any exam that I messed up so sweetly. I've no desire to take this exam again and I'm just hoping that my border line case just land up on the favourable side of the rope. Next one is on Monday and I just got up from a nice kip only to go for a night out. And now I think it's time to get back to the work for I do not want to post something like this on Tuesday too.
By the way checked out IBM's puzzle of analog watch and was flirting with the ideas when I fell in this slumber. This month's puzzle is easy, just a day after it is posted atleast three people around the world have already cracked it. Already half way through to crack this one I'm expecting to be in the top ten people who have cracked it, let's see how things unfold.......time to study.......to mug.

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Sorry Steven I'm not going to listen to you today

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After some half an hour of continuous strenuous study, the maximum stretch as far as I can recall since my school days, I got this idea to take a break and write something on voting as today it’s a poll day in Ahmedabad for Lok Sabha Elections. BJP is the favourite over here in Gujarat and rightly so for the CM Narendra Modi has put Gujarat at the forefront of development in the last 6 years. And the best part in Gujarat is that here people don’t cast votes on paltry issues like casteism, cheap incentives, pseudo publicities, etc. unlike in my home state Uttar Pradesh. With few exceptions it is the development issue which rules the roost here and that’s why this part of the country is on the highway for speeding development.
Some time back I read an article by Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame on voting and the hype surrounding it. According to him the importance been attached to the individual making a big impact is nothing more than a farcical point of view. He stated a study done by Patricia Funk, "A rational individual should abstain from voting." According to her study the odds that your vote will affect to the grand outcome of the elections are very very very slim. This was documented by the economists Casey Mulligan and Charles Hunter, who analyzed more than 56,000 Congressional and state-legislative elections since 1898. For all the attention paid in the media to close elections, it turns out that they are exceedingly rare. The median margin of victory in the Congressional elections was 22 percent; in the state-legislature elections, it was 25 percent. Even in the closest elections, it is almost never the case that a single vote is pivotal. Of the more than 40,000 elections for state legislator that Mulligan and Hunter analyzed, comprising nearly 1 billion votes, only 7 elections were decided by a single vote, with 2 others tied. Of the more than 16,000 Congressional elections, in which many more people vote, only one election in the past 100 years - a 1910 race in Buffalo - was decided by a single vote.
And according to Steven Levitt the reasons why people cast votes are:
1. Perhaps we are just not very bright and therefore wrongly believe that our votes will affect the outcome.
2. Perhaps we vote in the same spirit in which we buy lottery tickets. After all, your chances of winning a lottery and of affecting an election are pretty similar. From a financial perspective, playing the lottery is a bad investment. But it's fun and relatively cheap: for the price of a ticket, you buy the right to fantasize how you'd spend the winnings - much as you get to fantasize that your vote will have some impact on policy.
3. Perhaps we have been socialized into the voting-as-civic-duty idea, believing that it's a good thing for society if people vote, even if it's not particularly good for the individual. And thus we feel guilty for not voting.

Whoa! What thinking he has, although I love his writing and Freakonomics is one of my favourite books but on this issue I totally disagree with him. What if everybody starts thinking like this, and do not cast their vote? The so called intelligentsia will refrain from voting, buying this line of thought and the fate of our country will fall upon idiotic ruffians who in fact are already sitting in the parliament. Had there been no exam tomorrow and my voting card available to me (things like voters id, driving license, passport, etc are as easy in UP to get as stray pigs in Ahmedabad), I might have gone to Kanpur to cast my first vote, and no matter how many awards Steven has got including flashy degrees from MIT and Harvard, no matter how sincerely I like his works I’ll still not listen to him today, because it’s the future of my country that’s at stake and I know individual vote counts.

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my second Brand Equity Quiz

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Yesterday I went to Economic Times Brand Equity Quiz hosted by Derek O’ Brien, and it was a nice outing altogether in the evening after being almost boiled up from unendurable sun. Attending quizzes have always been my favourite spin and when it’s a Brand Equity or a Tata Crucible, the fun part gets incremented astronomically. Last year it happened in the month of March, I think it was 13th March 2008, I remember it because it was the day of the technical symposium organized by Chemical Engineering Association, and since I don’t find these technical symposium a tad interesting I left my college a bit early only to find retreat at the Sports Club of Gujarat, the venue of Brand Equity Quiz. That was a lucky day for me because as an audience I got the chance to be called on the stage for I answered a quiz question which teams failed to answer. That question involved identifying the name of the music band which composed the jingle for a commercial. Why I’m saying I was lucky is that because I didn’t know the answer of the question either, although I identified the voice of the singer and that was Bono, hence the answer U2. I raised my hand to the limit for I was sitting in the last rows, I thought Derek couldn’t see me but he did and called me up on the stage:
Derek: Yes, you over there, the guy in the black shirt, come over to collect your prize, the lady (the girl who was distributing the prizes) won’t come to you, you need to come to the lady.
After reaching the dais.
Derek: so what you do?
Me: I’m studying engineering.
Derek: you have just won a suit length from Digjam worth 4000/- bucks, what will you do with this?
Me: ummm I don’t have any clue right now.
Derek: okay I’m giving you four options
1) Give it to your dad.
2) Use it for yourself
3) Forgotten what the third option was J :?
4) Sell it.
I thought to take the fun ride and answered;
Me: option 4 sell it.
Derek: good so shall we start the auction right here itself?
Me: yeah okay.
Derek: okay before that I need to ask you few questions, turn around and have a look at the names of our sponsors, you’ll be given only 5 seconds for that.
(At this moment I got a bit nervous, I knew Derek has a feat of pulling people’s leg and on that evening he was in his sarcastically best form, not leaving even the professionals from the teams, leave alone obscure audience. Well finally I turned around and trusted my little bit of presence of mind to save me from being reduced to a public comic)
Derek: okay now you tell me who is the main sponsor?
Me: Idea
Derek: spell it backwards
Me: aedi
Derek: okay who is our media partner?
Me: Times Now or was that NDTV profit (don’t remember right now although I gave correct answer at that time).
(He then asked me few more questions on the sponsors and fortunately I answered all of them with élan, although I don’t remember them now)
Derek: so we return to auctioning of your suit length. This costs 4000/- bucks, so for how much amount will you sell it?
Me: ummmm greater than 4000/-
Derek: you better stick to engineering!!!
And with that I saved my ass and my prize too.
This time things were different as far as luck coefficient goes, of all the answers that I knew, I wasn’t given the chance to answer any of them. But all in all it was a great quiz, especially as far as prize distribution was concerned. Sponsors were too generous on the Brand Equity quiz and Derek was too generous on the audience. The theme of the quiz was “Ignorance is the complete Darkness”, the words of Louis Braille commemorating his 200th birthday, yesterday. The venue was an open air amphitheatre so by the time finals started it was totally dark and I couldn’t write any questions, still I think somebody must have got the questions and sent it to Rohit Nair’s blog.
Defending champions Triton Communications won the show again but were given a tough fight from Gujarat Gas team till the last question. Nice outing, good quiz, humourous quiz master (although he got a bit disparaging in the beginning of the finals), cool weather was all there to skip my semester exam preparation and I’m glad I did so.

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believing

Posted by insane inanities , Labels:

“Yes, your viva is over; just find out how you will find the VLE data for a homogeneous mixture of acetone-water assuming they aren’t forming any azeotrope under any temperature?”, and with that my couple of minutes of viva was over. This was my shortest viva ever; it was different in more than one way as the concerned prof is one of the most intelligent in chemical engineering faculty. Well after about half an hour I got the answer that acetone can’t be titrated normally (my little education has told me that acetone is weak Lewis Base as it has two lone pairs on oxygen, the logic was rightly rebutted considering even water has two lone pairs on its oxygen!!). The answer to the problem lies in Carl-Fischer technique of titration (absolutely no idea what the hell it is, got the answer from my Chemistry prof and later puked it in front of MTO prof and now doing it on my blog). So finally when I returned conceding my half knowledge regarding acetone (all I can tell about it is that, it’s what nail-polish removers have in abundance and well its molecular weight), I found that the two of my classmates were still ducking the slew of questions mercilessly fired at them, ironically one of them was a class topper and the other is a topper from the bottom of the class. Seeing their condition I thanked my school days when I didn’t gave a hoot to chemistry and consequently have this messed up fundas of Lewis Bases, but the line of the day or better line of the semester was just around the corner, “You have an analytical and R&D brain, best of luck for the next sem and produce something interesting”, wow! I couldn’t believe my ears; I thought I’ll get a decent 3rd degree upon my confession but he later asked me about my next seventh sem’s minor project and on the cue I started boasting about how mathematically intensive my project on SAFT (Statistical Associating Fluid Theory) is. Finally I was asked to leave as there were few of my batch mates who were standing outside waiting for their turn and fuming over time I’m taking over frivolous talks. Well I’m roaming in the heavens right now as I was completely unprepared for the viva and I know it’s a big beautiful A that I’ve just got engraved against my roll number on the MTO viva sheet. The only regret I have is that I never paid attention to his class. Still, if you are reading it sir then let me tell you in the next sem I’ll pay complete attention in your class, I’ll NOT sleep, talk, yawn, play chess, read fiction, ogle girls, read newspaper, solve Sudoku or crossword, copy assignments, scribble on paper/desk/wall/bench, day dream, mark proxy, etcetera etcetera. All I’ll do is to pour my brains out in your subject, and make sure that I attend all of your lectures and do all the assignments on my own (okay this last one is a bit too much of an asking, I hope you’ll be contend even without it).
Thank you Pareen Sir for believing in me.

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When Capillarity Saved Me

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Today I had my first viva, the subject was Hydrocarbon Technology and it’s a true blue mugging typo subject. And as my disinclination towards this kind of subject goes I wasn’t prepared beyond my lab file experiments today. The scheduled time was 12:00 but my turn came only after 3:00 P.M. , and as expected the first two questions that were thrown at me were refuted very politely by a slight nod and a ‘sorry sir, I’ve no idea about why Pensky-Martin differs from Cleaveland method’. Fortunately the next few questions were about capillarity and viscosity and their interdependence and here I went with full throttle, strewn with hypothetical examples I made sure that I blew my prof off the hook. He was completely taken aback of my transformation from a back bench sleeping beauty to James Braddock kinda Cinderella Man, knocking every question with a formidable answer. Some 25 minutes later when the viva was over I couldn’t help thanking my luck. Surely it was one of the best of vivas I ever took. And as I write this I’ve to prepare for tomorrow’s viva which is of Mass Transfer Operations, a big subject for chemical engineering students. It’s especially a tough nut for me as the concerned prof has to level several scores against me as I used to have sweet forty winks in his class, and when I wasn’t sleeping I made sure that I’ll make appropriate use of my time by writing assignments or playing chess sitting at the last bench. So I’m logging out for I need to fetch class notes, get them photocopied and burn mid night tubelight so that I can at least utter the names of the chapters in the syllabus tomorrow when my mental torture begins.

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