Saturday

Saturday. Boring as usual.

Say something

Some people say that I don't talk too much. Mostly when I meet new ones they will observe: 'You don't talk much. Say something'. And after hearing that there isn't really much that I can say.

May be I shouldn't give them chance to say that to me. So that I am not in a position where there isn't really much left to say. It is kind of self loop. When I don't talk much, which usually is the case, then people point it out after it there isn't much left and after that it becomes like that. I have to break the loop

So I am reading how to talk to strangers.

Forgetting names

How embarrassing it becomes when we forget someone's name some time. It happens mostly when you are meeting someone after a long time. But for me it is not usually. If I know someone's name I can recall it after long times but problem is to get it right in first trial. When I meet somebody for the first time and (s)he tells name I usually tend to observe that person and not concentrate on what (s)he is saying for name. I will concentrate more on how (s)he is speaking and all. So it is very difficult to get it in first trial. I always require to ask just after few minutes. But there are nice tips and tricks you can use to escape the embarrassment. Following is a list taken from this link.

1. Tell them your name first.
Someone is approaching you – you know the face, but not the name. Try being the first to talk, smile and say “Hello, we’ve met before – I’m Dee”. In most cases the other person will say there name too. This works perfect in situations when you only met someone briefly because there is a change they also have forgotten your name. Using this trick provides the person with your name also, without either of you having to admit you forgot names.

2. The extra sneaky tricks.
Ask the person their name and after they tell you say “No, I ment your last name.” Another option is to ask how they spell their name, now of course this can backfire if their name is something simple (like Dee).

3. Avoid saying names altogether.
There are situations where you do not want to admit you forgot a name. If it is a name you should know and the consequences are too big then starting a conversation without any names is your best bet. For example, “Oh hi, how have you been?” “Good to see you again, I was hoping you would be here”. This also gives you a chance to remember their name as you talk.

4. Use the ‘introduce a friend’ trick.
“Hello, oh have you met my friend Jack?” Jack then says hi and in most situations the person will introduce themselves to Jack. If the person merely says “Hi Jack” then you can still say “I’m sorry, I have forgotten your name”.

5. Darling so good to see you!
This trick is really a twist on avoid saying names altogether. But instead you use a substitute where you would usually say their name. Such as darling, honey, champ, sir, dude etc. Not recommended at business events but can work at parties.

6. Ask someone else what their name is.
If you are attending a party or networking event scan the room for familiar faces. If you can’t place a name to a face then ask a friend who they are. Now you know their name and are ready to greet them later.

7. Be honest (short and simple).
If you are going to ask someone what their name is because you have forgotten add an apologize. “I’m so sorry I can’t remember your name” or “I’m sorry, what was your name again?” A simple apology is all that is needed before launching into a conversation with them. Or you could try something even simplier like “Can you remind me what your name is?”

There are a bunch of sites here and here that have tips on how to remember people’s names so you’ll never have to use the tips in this post.

Mumbai

Terminal is such a good place to blog. :) You have internet, all the time in the world (if u r well before in time) and lots of activities going around you.

Anyways visa interview was just a formality it seemed. Just two min talk. No document check no nothing. Just they kept my passport. People say they trust. So this heck of visa thingy is over. Now I can put my resignation and fix date of my summer vacation. And rest in peace thereafter. For 1 month.

Even though a short one this trip was memorable like anything. Stayed at a friend's at Hiranandani and spent one whole day. Almost relived the college time. One of those days when we did nothing at room except bulla (gossips - intellectual ones). Went out only for lunch, evening snacks and dinner.

Loner

Since I am going to live more or less lonely life for next some (5?) years it would be apt to get some practice from now on.

There's nothing you can say
To make me change my mind
Goodbye

Pasta

I am enjoying self-cooked pasta right now. Thanks to quick pasta recipe.

Pastafarianism

Finally the dilemma is over. Rejected the Purdue offer. Never thought this will happen. That I will get an offer from Purdue and eventually reject it.

When I was a child I had very high regards for this university. It was one of the wow things for me. But then it happened. A little late though but it happened. Then there was fellowship at Minnesota which means I have flexibility in deciding my adviser. And energy research at minnesota looks some what more happening than at Purdue and the prof who was hiring me. Finally sent rejection to him.

I was sitting very relaxed then all of a sudden from everywhere people start telling me to start looking for housing there otherwise it will be late. Or u wont get things and all.

So all of a sudden I started looking the web and this weekend I was onto it only. But it seems that deadline for on campus housing was 15-May. This soon I was not able to find a person to share apartment with me inside univ. I dont know why but many people prefer off-campus housing.

And has been quite customary now I a alone for dinner at weekend again. Most of the people I know will go out to non-veg placed to eat. I am the only home alone left. Loner. It is hard to find company for veg dinner. My be I can cook something in kitchen. It will be a nice practice for univ days ahead. Lets try some pasta. Pastafarianism!

Purdue

Its past April, almost mid May and Purdue has come off its sleep and decided to review my application. Now is a new dilemma between Purdue and Minnesota. Purdue is a big name to reject. So is Minnesota in Mechanical. But I have a better fellowship offer from Minnesota which means I have freedom to choose professor and topic after visiting the university. It looks like flexibility versus better University tag and slightly better location/climate.

Saturday

So its saturday it is getting dull. Somehow I woke up in the morning. very morning I mean. Around 6:30 or 7. It was the maid I think at the door. Anyways it was a dull start for today.

Previously in the week I received my I-20 form from the university and then I told manager in office about the offer and about that I want to leave and go for it. Certainly there was some amount of dejection that I observed. No employer would like their employees to leave within a year. Even I also feel bad about it but thats the way things are. I think we talked at a fair length. More than half hour. But at no point he was infuriated. He looked sad though. One day or the other it had to come. I still have around 1 and half months in hyd.

Parity

There is very unique thing about nature which exists which we dont realize too often. But there are times in our life when we do realize that parity law does exist in nature. That, the things are symmetric in nature. They apply on right-handed and left-handed equally. But very little often do we realize that this parity law is violated nature too! In week interactions there are instances when parity does not hold and there nature stands stripped of its parity! They have different outcomes for up-spins and down-spins. Although nature is strictly fair for strong interactions like gravity, electromagnetic forces and strong nuclear forces.

Feynman effect. :P

Go plus

With each passing day my days in Hyderabad are closing in. In the limited days I went on a paid resort trip from my office in a group of 21 people. It was a very nice junket. It was actually a workshop where we were supposed to learn some business values. The instructor was a third party vendor and he knew the terms of trade very well. I always have respect for these kind of people who have complete control over there conversational style, the way they react and their temper of things. Control over things.

All together there were many activities which were to be performed in a group. Two groups two be exact. Several of them out door. For example the last and final activity was a game similar to rugby but to be played with non-dominant hand. Another was a plank puzzle.
At the end of the two days we became bonded with each other. It was nice to know so many people. Truly speaking I had never befriended this many people to this much extent in this much time. I will specially remember the walk on the first morning.
And the gossips by the pool side on the second night. For the first time I played crappy games like DumbC and it did not look too crappy. It looked too dumb though. :D

Ooooohty

In the last three days I traveled in 3 southern states. Alongwith a friend who agreed to accompany me to ooty we spent two days in there.
We started from Bangalore in a bus. The bus journey started with a nice fresh-after-rain weather in Bangalore. Bangalore is some place which will have this cool breeze kind of weather all round the year. Not that it will not become hot but clouds tend to stick there mostly. Whenever I am there, more often than not I have seen rain. Anyways the bus journey took around whole 12 hrs to reach Ooty, which happens to be 300 km from Bangalore. We clicked a lot of pictures in the way. I was taking the isle seat so it was my friend who did most of the clicking. There was this couple and the kid with them on seat behind us. The kido[photo] was very cute and clicked his (or her) picture after getting kind permission from the parents.
After reaching the Ooty bus stand, two of us tried to find information from local people as to what all we can do/see in there. A guy met us standing in the middle of bus stand who claimed that his 'friend' has a guesthouse logging in the Mudumalai forests. Btw this forest also has forest safaris. So this gentleman immediately wards us off on a bus to this place. But while on the bus we get down at a place in between. As soon as we got down from the bus, we searched for public toilets and started the day with essentials. After that my friend had breakfast and I brushed teeth and had breakfast. Some of us are toothpaste conservationists. :D The weather was at its best when it started to rain. This place called Pykara had two things - 1) something what people there called waterfall[photo] and (2) a boat house where we never got a boat even after waiting 1 hour.
From there we got to the much famous 'shooting point' of the Ooty. It is a famous spot for many Bollywood films. Its more like a large hillock, a very gradual one. But nevertheless a very lively one.

And eventually it turns out such that we hitchhiked around Ooty the whole of this day. More than half our hiking was under umbrella which was our only home for the day! One umbrella covering one person, one backpack and one camera.[photo]

The day ended when we came back hitchhiking in the heavy rain back to Ooty to book a weary old looking hotel room for 1500 bucks. By the time we reached all our cloths including the one on us were drenched. We had no cloths to sleep in and only single blanket. Now we did not want to get cozy in a single blanket in this state but the chill was considerable. Finally my friend sacrificed and took bedsheets instead. :)

The second day was a little less happening. We booked a tour bus for tour of Conoor and ooty which eventually ended up in only Conoor because of time constraints. We enjoyed fulsomely the freshly made chocolates of Ooty, specially the dark chocolates. With an elated joyous feeling and undying memories we came back to Bangalore by a night bus. I had one full day in Bangalore before taking a train in the night. But it was good only for sleeping. :)

Bangalore-Ooty

A nice extended weekend and Im off for Ooty! In bangalore right now. With some old friends from IIT.

Lightening

Today weather was very kind in Hyderabad. We had gentle breeze running all through evening till night. Faint showers and lightening bolts in the night.

I had my first lightening bolt shot. The first one came very quickly and quite descent. It was handheld. Hence some stray light (near the right corner at bottom) can be seen

After then I held the shutter open for long times. Trials after trials but no luck. Lightening struck but was not in my frame. Then I zoomed out to increase the field of view and probability of capturing the bolt. But then it became too small sized. Hence the cropped image below shows too much noise. Even at ISO200!

Some keywords recurring in my brain these days:

The vicious circle
Big fish small fish
Karma
Succeed in life
Drudgery in office
Home
Freezing temperatures
i20

Sunday

Today was talk on the phone day. I called up and got call from may people. Was on phone for long hours. Its a nice way to spend time. Talking on phone and standing in balcony. Seeing people passing by. Relaxing. Nice way to spend your Sunday.

This little child on the first floor in my apartment is a cute one. I love small kids. I always did. Whenever I will see him, either going downstairs or upstairs, or sometimes he will play with his nanny on the ground floor space, I will wave my hands. And he waves back. Children always love that I think. And this is one of the things the learn quite early. Waving as in bye bye, clapping, flying kisses, good morning. They will learn all of them fast.

And today in the noon when I was in balcony talking on phone, this kid was in going in car with his parents I think, though Im not too sure if he was the same kid or not because this one looked much younger, but anyway he was waving from the window and also smiling probably.

And by the way this kid is the only being I know in my apartment. I hate this particular thing about Hyderabad. Or may be it is the case with all big cities. Dont know. But I find it very disgusting. People will not befriend with neighbours. This may be part of one other disgusting thing which is bachelor hysteria. But whatever its not to my liking. People here will look at bachelors with such a loathe. They will be shunned as if fountain of malice. People will literally shut their doors on your face.

There loathing is justified in some sense too when I look around some of the bachelor class people around. They will do not-so-decent things which no one would like to happen in their residential colony. Some few days ago one young couple was involved in something on the road at night which could have brought them close to being booked under Section 294 of the Indian Penal Code.

Mr. Feynman!

I remember from the days of second year of my UG education. When I was studying electromagnetism, I went through his book - Feynman lectures on physics. I absolutely loved those lectures and was in awe of the man and his style of writing a physics book. You could understand the deep concept of physics only be reading his text, without involving complex mathematicals. And now Im reading his book 'Surely you're joking Mr.Feynman!' And the timing may not have been more apt. Just before I am going to start phd!

It is just an amazing book. About life of an amazing person. How he becomes someone who he is. One of the excerpts shown below will show what his writing style was like in 'Feynman lectures on physics' and obviously hi-lighten his deep understanding of physics.

"I often liked to play tricks on people when I was at MIT. One time, in mechanical drawing class, some joker picked up a French curve (a piece of plastic for drawing smooth curves--a curly, funny-looking thing) and said, "I wonder if the curves on this thing have some special formula?"

I thought for a moment and said, "Sure they do. The curves are very special curves. Lemme show ya," and I picked up my French curve and began to turn it slowly. "The French curve is made so that at the lowest point on each curve, no matter how you turn it, the tangent is horizontal."

All the guys in the class were holding their French curve up at different angles, holding their pencil up to it at the lowest point and laying it along, and discovering that, sure enough, the tangent is horizontal. They were all excited by t his "discovery"--even though they had already gone through a certain amount of calculus and had already "learned" that the derivative (tangent) of the minimum (lowest point) of any curve is zero (horizontal).

They didn't put two and two together. They didn't even know what they "knew." I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way--by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!

I did the same kind of trick four years later at Princeton when I was talking with an experienced character, an assistant of Einstein, who was surely working with gravity all the time. I gave him a problem: You blast off in a rocket which has a clock on board, and there's a clock on the ground. The idea is that you have to be back when the clock on the ground says one hour has passed. Now you want it so that when you come back, your clock is as far ahead as possible. According to Einstein, if you go very high, your clock will go faster, because the higher something is in a gravitational field, the faster its clock goes. But if you try to go too high, since you've only got an hour, you have to go so fast to get there that the speed slows your clock down. So you can't go too high. The question is, exactly what program of speed and height should you make so that you get the maximum time on your clock?

This assistant of Einstein worked on it for quite a bit before he realized that the answer is the real motion of matter. If you shoot something up in a normal way, so that the time it takes the shell to go up and come down is an hour, that's the correct motion. It's the fundamental principle of Einstein's gravity--that is, what's called the "proper time" is at a maximum for the actual curve. But when I put it to him, about a rocket with a clock, he didn't recognize it. It was just like the guys in mechanical drawing class, but this time it wasn't dumb freshmen. So this kind of fragility is, in fact, fairly common, even with more learned people."

His knowledge was certainly not fragile in nature.

Party

When someone invites you to his (birthday) party and you are not sure whether it was genuine he really wants you to be there or he invites you because you were present somewhere sometime when and where invitations were being called. Then what do you do? I feel bad at disappointing inviters but it is difficult for me.

Moreover Im not a party guy. I dont drink. I dont dance. I dont date. Im not someone who will engage in conversations with lot of people with furore. I feel out of place in parties. I dont mind eating together with people at some place. But as to so called 'party' I become confused how to 'be'. There is no point go there and stay there and make other people feel that Im not having their kind of fun.

Im having that bad thing in my toe in the nails which happens to everybody at some point or the other. It hurts in walking. Just waiting for it to go.

Boring

Things have been quite boring in last few says. A friend responds to this saying what happened to your blogging? painting?
Then suddenly Im reminded that Im not writing? May be I should write more? read more? and if world permits may be take up colors again?
I have ordered a print copy of 'Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman!'. But to worse I just the day after ordering online I caught hold of pdf copy and cant resist reading it during office hours. :( I will have to resist.

Futile

There are so many futile things in this world. The futility is highlighted by the fact that we tend to forget the futile chase and run behind them like miserable hopeless losers. The whole life the goals are futile, the chase is futile and then everything seems futile.