Just Some Nonsense

Am I ready to blog about Nonsense? I guess I am. And happy to do that too!

What is there to think if I have to write about Nonsense? If it has to make sense, I might have to think and write. And as usual, I googled up to understand what Nonsense meant and found that it means:
“Nonsense is a communication, via speech, writing, or any other symbolic system that lacks any coherent meaning. Sometimes in ordinary usage, nonsense is synonymous with absurdity or ridiculous”.
I thought of writing about nonsense which lacks any coherent meaning and anecdotes which sound sensible to some and ridiculous to some.

I have had great fortune on two counts. One, to be working as a teacher, actually a lecturer in an Engineering discipline for almost 25 years, even as I was in college, and another, a wife who keeps telling me that the standard of my English knowledge is pathetic and it has steadily been coming down. I have always been arguing with her that my language suffers because of the environment in which I work, that as I am surrounded by students whose medium of instruction is not English, it might reflect in my language. This rebuttal from me would always get a dismissive retort from her: “What Nonsense!”  But, I think it is sensible. When you are surrounded by intellectuals, it will definitely rub off on you. It’s the same way reverse osmosis works.  As a fellow member pointed out, this is sensible nonsense.  

Another anecdote: A friend of mine once rushed to the railway station to see his sibling off who was going home as he was sick. Since he was late to the station, he rushed to the platform in a hurry to see his brother before the train took off. Unfortunately, he could not meet his brother as the train had already left. In a hurry to meet his sick brother, my friend had forgotten to buy the platform ticket. And as it always happens, he was caught by the railway officials. My friend paid the fine and got back home but would often worry that the railway officials would somehow trouble him for the mistake later on, and my uncle retorted, “What Nonsense, why will the officials trouble you?” This nonsense is synonymous with absurdity or being ridiculous.

And then on another occasion, in the class, I was asking students what a water pump was, the different types - they had actually studied about all these in the previous semesters and I was chiding them for not studying properly. And as I was asking them about the pumps they use in their houses, and when his turn came, one of the students came up with this brilliant answer, We don’t have a pump in our house, we have only a motor. “What Nonsense!” I retorted. And this is nonsense due to ignorance.

And for the grand finale, I have for you some nonsense which lacks any coherent meaning. I have evaluated so many papers in my life and have come up with some ridiculous answers, some really gibberish. There was once a student who had written pages about water in the different rivers of India when the question was about the specific weight and viscosity of the fluid. Krishna, Godavari, Brahmaputra, all their waters had different weights and viscosities, according to him.

There was one paper I evaluated in which the student had written an entire booklet and I could not find a way to give him even one mark. Real nonsense bordering on gibberish.

Some quotes from the innumerable answer papers I have evaluated and the nonsense they contain.

• Reactivity principle: The energy converrtion system and variable process of energy functional of the maintainable of the pressure of source of the energy is values of the producted in the process is called as Reactivity.

• Why is compounding necessary in steam turbine?  The compounding necessary in steam turbine are   The necessary compound are contancted, turning blades and and abort valve.

• What is a simple jet propulsion system? The simple jet propulsion system is defined as the   used for the jet propulsion system. This is the important process for the jet proplustion. This is used to the jet propulsion. This is called as the simple Jet propulsion system.

• Dalton’s atomic theory: The energy of atomic values need to pressure and energy contained them the measurement at the provided to factors of the atomic at station of variable values of the energy.

 
 If only Dalton was alive!

And to remain sensible after all this!

A Pound of Flesh

Am I ready to blog about this week’s theme, ‘A Pound of Flesh’!

       Well, I am not very confident, but here goes! I googled what a pound of flesh is. I also browsed through some of the posts of our group.
      I have been thinking of an anecdote to write about or post one of my thousands of photographs, some of which would qualify for this week’s theme.

I wanted to understand what a pound of flesh stood for, and picked up a few of the meanings:
_ A payment or punishment that involves suffering and sacrifice on the part of the person being punished.
_ A pound of flesh is a figurative way of referring to a harsh demand or spiteful penalty — the consequences of defaulting on a desperate bargain.
_ If someone demands their pound of flesh, they make someone give them something that they owe them, although they do not need it and it will cause problems for the other person.

And as I was thinking hard about these three, I recollected an incident based on the third quote.

I thought of something which was very sad and marked one of the toughest moments of my life. 
I had a junior colleague working with me who, unfortunately, was nasty to the students. He was very rude and I had even advised him about how he must be careful in dealing with situations because everyday is not our day, whatever be our status or position. The students were getting sick of him. When something untoward happened in the campus, they took it upon them to bash him up, took their pound of flesh and landed him in the hospital injured grievously.

The moral of the story, never stretch your limits. Someday you may be consumed in them.

Color Garnet- Theme for 2nd Week

Am I ready to blog about the color garnet, the theme for 2nd week? I guess the answer is Yes in my mind and so here it is!

Before I start, A Happy Sankranthi / Pongal to all the readers of this post. I am now on a four and a half day holiday for the festival and I had planned to do this post during this break.

Yesterday, I was telling  my father-in-law that I had also started a blog and he said, "Good but where do you get the time from, to do that?" After getting into this 52-week project, I guess you will all be the inspiration that I need and the time will be created by itself.

I started off by googling what is a garnet ? And came up with a lot of information about garnets and that they are a group of silicate glassy minerals and have been used as gemstones and abrasives. Garnet is the birthstone for the month of  January and a happy birthday to all of you born in January. From their physical properties, I found that garnets are found in many colors including red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, black, violet, pink and colorless.

The rarest of these is the blue garnet, the colour which is my niece Gundu Pilla's favourite. From the time she was a kid, she would always say, she loved the colour blue. I really wanted to post a garnet in blue. I had a wonderful photo of the blue sky with an airplane in it, which I shot sitting in a plane and as I saw another plane overtake me at a very high altitude. But the hitch was whether the blue conformed to the blue of the garnet. I also thought of a shot of the sea, another vast blue expanse. I have wonderful photographs of the sea. Unfortunately they are all safely tucked away in a DVD lying in my office and I could not use them.

I saw a lot of images of the color of the garnet and found many resemblances of all these in day-to-day life, like food, fruits, flowers, sandals, cars, cell phone covers. And I narrowed down to pomegranate seeds, derived from the Greek word Granatum, which some of our friends on The Fifty-2 Weeks of 2013 Project have used. Flowers have also been used. I also thought of using photographs of the sunset or sunrise in orange shades, which is actually my cover photo on my Facebook account. I thought of an yellow garnet, the photograph of an illuminated cave wall in the Belum caves near Banaganapalle in Andhra Pradesh which is the second largest cave in the Indian subcontinent.

And finally settled on this. Pomegranates and gemstones, both of which I borrowed from my wife for the shot.

 And as I was arranging them, I thought of a small game and I want you to guess how many stones are there in the photo. All the right answers get a chocolate each, maybe in the color of the Garnet.

 Thanks Sra and Aparna for the theme.

On New Year Resolutions

             I have never had any resolutions till now, least of all for New Year. I have always taken life as it comes, not worrying about tomorrow, be it when I was in school or today. New Year to me meant just another day. There were years when I would just go off to sleep before midnight and not worry about the dawn of the New Year. And in college, we did not even have a holiday for New Year. So the celebrations were much muted because we would go to college on the 1^st. And maybe that was the reason why New Year resolutions were not so special to me. I still think that for resolutions to be made, you don’t need to wait for any special day.

            Anyway what is a New Year Resolution? A resolution that almost 88% of the people who make fail as per Wikipedia. And what are these resolutions? Improve physical well-being, avoid junk food, Exercise more, eat properly, Give up smoking or drinking, brush your teeth twice a day and drive properly. Things which should normally be done and are not done!  

           And by the way, this year my wife has made some resolutions for me, small things which may be completed in a few days time. Setting up a blog for myself and trying to utilize my time more effectively has been one of her resolutions for a long time. Hoping that her next set of resolutions for me will be only for the 2014 New Year’s Eve.

Am I really ready to Blog ?

                 There was a time about 17 years ago that I went to SSI to learn ORACLE or SYBASE. I am not sure which one it was. I did not have much of Computer knowledge. And there I was along with a friend, actually a colleague of mine, Ravi Kumar if i am not mistaken, who was a Computer Science Engineering Graduate and who pushed me to attend the course along with him. All with the intention of going abroad I guess.

                I think I had a laptop at that time, given to me by my father in law and all that I knew about Computers was to type letters and use Word.

                I am a Mechanical Engineer, an academician by profession with a big zero in computer science at that time and a lecturer with about 5 years experience. The person who took our class was barely out of his MCA. I remember him as a sweet kid, who was awed that he was teaching experienced teachers.The first two days was theory classes and the third day was practical class. I was sitting in front of the monitor without knowing what to do. I was really dumbfounded. I had switched on the computer and I did not even know how to enter the software. The instructor came to my table and was shocked to see me sitting without doing anything and asked me why I had not started working.

               I told him that I did not know how to operate the computer and work on the lab session. He was really taken aback. He must have been shocked how a person with my computer knowledge must have come to learn a course. Gradually, I did learn and I understood the analytical part but i realised that it was not my cup of tea and gave up the course. My friend however continued the course and ended up in a lucrative software engineering job.
        
              Why did I remember this after so many years ? I got the same feeling today when I opened my blog to check whether I was ready to blog. My wife had created a blog for me. Neither did I know how to go into the blog nor .... I was just staring at the monitor for sometime before I decided to explore. And here it is. I don't know whether I will be able to post this on my own. Let us see....