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Tuesday, July 20, 2010

I too was "a bit of an Idiot"

I watched the movie 3 Idiots just yesterday. Loved it. The movie raked up old memories. Penning down some of them here.
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Once in my pre-university class, my Physics lecturer asked me to state the Coulomb's law. I started talking about the electrostatic interaction between charged particles. She said "all that is OK, but state the law - as it is in the text book". This is something I'm really bad at. I simply cannot state laws exactly as printed in the books. She then said "how will you score marks in the board exams? Some evaluators will not award you marks if your answer is not in a particular way".

 I lost the ability to answer a question paper in a "particular way" in school itself. It was in the sixth standard that I was introduced to proper methods of learning. After every few classes, my Science teacher would ask us questions on the corresponding topics that required students to ‘think’. Since then, I never bothered about the school notes (which were nothing more than ‘parrot’ answers to the list of questions given at the end of every chapter in the text book). Reading the text book thoroughly and answering based on whatever I had understood became a habit which extended to other subjects too.

In the seventh grade, my Hindi teacher had a different approach toward notes. We had to draw a picture based on the lesson taught and answer all the questions on our own. If the picture was striking or the answers were out of the ordinary, she would write “good” on the pages. We would eagerly wait to see how many ‘good’s were in our notebook!

My History teacher in eighth standard taught so well that I listened to all her lectures with rapt attention. History was never this interesting. It was then that I learnt that the subject was lot more than wars, dates, chronological order and tongue-twisting names of some of the prominent personalities from across the globe.

Later in college, I got tired of many of the classes which were more like tapes of definitions, assumptions, laws, proofs and derivations being played multiple times. Only the classes handled by our HOD were inspiring. Bandopadhyay Sir had worked with various government organizations and post retirement, he took up teaching. Alongside preparing us for the exams, he would narrate so many anecdotes. What a raconteur he was!

Sir was not a conventional teacher to demand “pin-drop-silence” in the class. Once I could not resist looking out of the window at the fighter aircraft sortieing in the sky (our college was located near the Air Force Base) He noticed that and simply smiled. Other lecturers were not so kind.

Sir never spoke in a raised voice. Once when students were making a lot of noise, he shouted “shut up”. After a few minutes he said “sorry” for that! Unfortunately, we have lost him. He succumbed to cancer the day after our final exam of BE in 2009.

If not for these mentors in my life, I would not have been “a bit of an Idiot”!

PostScript:
In high school notes became a mere formality. I never referred to them unless I had prepared them.
HOD- Head of the department
Just to let you know – I was two marks short of a centum in Physics
The scene in the movie where Burkha clad women were being photographed – it seemed to convey a lot without any lines being spoken!
 Current Song:
Welcome To My Life by Simple Plan
Do you ever feel like breaking down?
Do you ever feel out of place?
Like somehow you just don't belong
And no one understands you
Do you ever wanna run away?...

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Bungled Distribution

A year ago, if you traveled on NH-4 from Bangalore toward Kolar, you could find tonnes of plump, red tomatoes thrown away by the roadside. The farmers could not recover their investment on the crops, so they discarded the produce and anybody could stop by and take as much as they wished.

At the same time in Bangalore, tomato was priced at Rs.20 per Kg ! Ride about 30km from the city and you had loads of tomatoes that you could just grab for no price at all! This is the pathetic state of the distribution system in Karnataka since years. No wonder so many farmers have committed suicide over losses they incurred.



Here's what a district in-charge officer could do :
- collect various crops produced in the district;
- fix a price that ensures profit to the farmers and pay them right away;
- collect data about requirements in various parts of the state/country and study it;
- send the goods to optimal places to ensure maximum profit or least losses;
- we sometimes have empty buses/trains plying between towns. How about using them for transporting the crops if dedicated transport is an issue? I know that this is on a small scale. But it can cut down some cost, isn't it?


I think we should make the officials in charge study Operations Research and the passing mark should be at least 75%!


Current Song :
Savin me by Nickelback

...Well I'm terrified of these four walls
These iron bars can't hold my soul in...
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