Restrooms...

Well thats quite not a topic one writes about but then wats life without a pinch of comedy in it ..infact we spend so much of our life in the restrooms that they sure deserve to be written about ..

Actually when I started thinkin about this post it was supposed to about aeroplanes and their cramped seating spaces ..i actually flew to St.Louis just yest to spend thanksgiving at my cousin's place . ..got into one of these domestic airlines which have hardly leg space ..even to get to your seat you have to walk sideways ..added to that if you have a fat lady sitting beside you who just cannot fit into the space provided ..there are quite a lot of adjustments to be done ..

Coming back to restrooms ..a note of caution.if you suffer from a minor case of claustrophobia like i do ..or better put if you are a lover of free spaces ..do not use the restrooms on board a domestic flight until you absolutely need to ..there is hardly any space for you to fit into ..particularly for a country like USA which has so many obese people ..(also US is a equal opportunity employer you see !!)..i had a hard time imaginin how we would get the fat lady beside me out of the restroom if she got stuck in there ..
perhaps we could use a planning algorthim which would give us the optimal steps to take her out ..!!

Ya well so restrooms haan ..people just tend to ignore their importance ..i think back home we loose a lot of efficiency because of the lack of proper restrooms ..along with issues like primary education , poverty and health care I think our government should also tackle the issue of setting up proper restrooms ..that should we lead to significant improvement in our GDP ..:-)

Verbal diarrhoea

My dad often used to say that I have verbal diarrhoea , I may be a chatterbox but don't exaclty have verbal diarrhoea ..you mite be wondering what all this is about ..ya so this article is not about the diadvantages and advantages of me being a chatter box .:-) ..its basically about VD ..so wat exaclty is VD ..here's my definition ..using a load of words ..complex ones and unnecessarily twisted ideas to make sentenes sound erudite ..when actually the thing can be explained in a much simpler sense with far simpler ideas ...

A major part of the academia suffers from this disease ..just one look at the IEEE papers and you can easily make out that..( i will surely put in some examples here as and when I come across them ..) ..
In my undergrad there was this author I wanted to sue..coz he wrote a book using all this hi -fi language and I just could not figure out what he meant to say ..Intially I thought it was my ignorance but later on I figured out the way that book was written it was not meant to be understood ...
I read a lot of books and what I have found is that a piece of writing is even more profound if it can convey great ideas with simple sentences . There in lies the prowess of the writer ..To write complex stuff using complex sentences implies that even the author has not understood the concept in its completeness .

One more clan of people who suffer from this disease is present day teeenagers ..ya well other people too ...basically people who talk loose ..they do not value the meaning and implication of the words they use ...Abuses have become everyday slang these days ..coz thats supposed to be the in thing ..but what these people dnt realise is that words can coz a lot of damage ..actions just coz physical damages which can be recuperated over time ..but words linger for a long while ..
words are a very imp representation of oneself and thats how they should be valued ...

RSS

Due to certain unavoidable circumstances I could not update the blog on time..:-) ...last friday went to watch a documentary movie on the RSS ..( Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh)..

First thing that struck me about the documentary was that it brought back memories of India ..stayin here you get so used to the place that you hardly realise that you are away from India ..it seems like you are still there ...then we saw the roads , autos , people talkin in the bihari english ..:-)..made me feel nostalgic...

Now coming back to the movie.. .the movie basically potrays RSS as a fundamentalist Hindu organisation ..the director uses his characters in a very directed manner to get his message across...the characters opposing RSS are the high society thinking class people and the other facet is just shown by some lower income not very intelligent people who get into RSS ...so that itself makes the argument lopsided in the beginning ...

The initial part of the story shows how the people in RSS were all brainwashed to go and break the Babri masjid ..the sad part of it is that no one seems to regret it ..the argument that they use is that anyways Muslim's dnt need a place to worship ..that Babri is the sacred place of Hindus and its nthin wrong if they want to put up their holy shrine there ..so the muslim's should give the place back to the hindus..

Why dnt these people understand that its not the place but the feeling which makes the difference..whatever happened was history and lets just let it be ...
The RSS people actually think they created History when they broke down the temple and they are actually proud of it ..

The movie shows RSS leaders as preaching hatred of other religions instead of love for our own religion ..it shows RSS leaders making really degrading comments about christainity and islam ..
This is how terrorism is bread i suppose.. by preaching hatred ..rather than love ...
This is not what hinduism is all about ..it is one of the most tolerant religions on earth ..and if the RSS wants to uphold Hinduism it better concentrate on making people retain their tolerance..

The movie also shows a very human face of fundamentalism ..little children are reared into this ideology ..the children go there only to play but these subtle messages which are put into their head then stay with them life long ..

It ends with glimpses of the Godhra carnage ..which acc to the director is a organised attempt by the RSS to take on the Muslim massses..

I agree the movie is lopsided in its argument but then it has some degree of truth too..the beauty of hinduism is in the fact it is all encompassing ..fundamentalism doesnt fit into its scheme of things ..and we should all strive to keep it at that ...

Teaching

Got my mid sem papers today ..My prof wants us to redo the paper and submit it again . His main emphasis is on the fact that we should get understand the course material well ..so during the exam maybe due to some time constraints we may not have been able to solve the problem but that doesnt mean we should not be given the chance to understand it well and do it .

The education system here in the US amazes me alot ..I have seriously come to like it a lot..you dnt need to mug anything for the exam coz the emphasis is on the fact that did you understand stuff or not ..so get all the books and papers you want to ..refer to them and solve the exam ..there is no question which requires you to write pages and pages of unrelavent information ..just conceptual questions ..

The professor here take up their jobs coz they love teaching and they do make sure that they are really good at it ..

Writer's block

Days of inactivity at the blogger has created a void in me ...ppl around me are getting worried too ..that smthing's wrong with me that i m am not writing my blog ..actually i am stuffering by something called the writer's block ..so i just decided to pen downs some random stuff just to get me goin ..

So if i look around as to what is it that has touched me in the past few days ..its the camaderie of the Erie street people I stay with . Yest was Shiva's bday ..he along with the people around took so much pains to cook a lavish dinner for all the 15 of us ..even on sunday the girls cooked up really good meal for all of us ( with the spices specifically reduced for me !!!)..this act of pure selflessness is what touched me ..each one of them could have gone their own way ..saying that have work to do ..and just cooked for themselves ...these ppl smtimes make me feel like a really selfish person ..