Some Arbit Stuff

Suggestions??

2009-07-13T10:23:00.000-07:00

Its been quite sometime since I posted something. Not able to think of a good topic to post on... Any suggestions? :)

Finally ITS over!!!

2009-06-15T06:30:00.001-07:00

Whew! After months of thought, weeks of terror and days of preparation, it got over in a matter of a few hours! After a night of fitful sleep filled with nightmares, the day dawned brightly, and i got up with a sense of apprehension. So finally the day is here, the D-Day! Oh how much time have I spent anticipating this day, when it will finally get over? Anyway, half-heartedly got out of bed, with a small nagging feeling at the back of my mind- "Would it have been better if this day had never come, like the old adage, tomorrow never comes?" Then I realised there was no use worrying then, because what has happened has happened, and I had to face the day, no matter how I felt about it. With that resolve, I got ready and left to the battlefield.

I received a great shock on reaching the battlefield though. Everyone there was armed with some weapon or the other, while I was the only one coolly standing there without any weapon. Was I too very overconfident, I wondered. Following my parents' advice, I'd stopped gearing up for the battle yesterday itself. Anyway, finally after a few minutes of wait, we were all called into the GRE centre(Yes, GRE is the battle I'm talking about, the weapons were Barrons and other preparation materials, and the D-Day was the day of my GRE, ie, today :) )

So coming to the point, I entered the center and went through the checking in procedures with a bit of nervousness, and as I was led to the terminal, I felt butterflies flying in the stomach. Aah here I was finally, and it was about to begin. And so I sat, facing the computer, and lo and behold, all the nervousness vanished mysteriously! I started my GRE, and was so engrossed in it that I didn't have time to muse whether or not I was doing well. In what seemed like a fraction of a second, my test was over and I was out, but it was in fact 3 hours after I'd started. The test went on decently, and except for wasting too much time over a passage and rushing through 10 questions in less than 5 minutes, there was nothing much eventful.

There was something I realised during the exam though. I'd gone to the exam without practising for the essays, thinking I could spin yarns easily in those 1.25 hours. But it was after writing those essays and going through them that I realised that it had been ages since I wrote essays, and that even an 8th standard kid could write better essays. It was then that I vowed to practise writing more (using my blog as a medium), since anyway I'd need to improve my skills atleast before TOEFL. The major problem with me is, I'm too lazy and lose concentration and focus immediately :( Hopefully I'll keep up this resolution atleast :)

Now that description about GRE session is over, its time to rewind. Lets rewind by about a month, when, after sem exams, my GRE preps started (or were supposed to start). I came back home after exams, and decided it was time I started preparing for GRE. But at that time, 6 weeks seemed too long a time, and due to my inveterate laziness, I kept procastinating the task. Then slowly after a week or ten days, I started preparing, and did wordlists at the rate of one per 3 days. A few more days passed, and then I realised that I had barely a month left and I ought to speeden up my preparation. But then, the problem was, I couldn't find any way to speeden it up, because even if I tried to do it, my rate of remembering words reduced. I kept forgetting words, but realised there was nothing I could do about it.

I neither had the time nor the patience to learn the Latin and other roots of the words, but tried to link words to whatver roots I already knew. This helped a bit. Then, as I started learning more wordlists, I adopted this strategy which seemed to help me in remembering words better. Though its nothing different, I found it productive. First, I used to scan through the list, seeing how many I knew already, and trying to memorize new ones. Some words were really easy to remember, some could be easily remembered through association, and they required no further
working on. Then, I read the list again, marking words I didn't remember then. I went through those words alone a couple of times more, and then listened to an audio recording of the wordlist while at the same time following the words on the book. Then I checked the words, and voila, I remembered almost all the words. Though many words didn't stay after a day or two, atleast some of them did, and I guess the effort was worth it. But unfortunately, I couldn't follow this practice for all the lists, as I slacked in the middle and in the end, I had to do more than 4 lists a day in order to finish all the 50. Doing 4 was a bit tough, what with my project and all. I'd heard that flashcards were useful, but in the little time I had to prepare, I couldn't prepare them and all. But in the last week before the exam, I prepared a few cards for words I found very difficult and used them to learn. They were really effective, but I had time to prepare them only for a few lists, and wished I'd started before :(

Preparation for GRE is something I'd never forget, and I enjoyed some moments of them. There are some inerasable memories like reading barrons while in lab, and gettin advice from a pg guy in lab, who asked me to prepare for GATE, as it wasn't proper to prepare for GRE in the lab :) There have also been times when my friends, who were writing GRE much much later than me seemed to be better prepared than me, which made me feel nervous. Anyway now that it is all over finally, last but not the least, I'd like to thank all those friends who've helped me in this endeavour, either by quizzing me now and then, or blessed me with their wishes :)

A Well Tried Poem

2009-06-07T09:59:00.000-07:00

Ok here goes another attempt to fill some space. This is a poem i wrote looong ago, sometime when I was in school. Found it on my comp today while searching for some stuff. It might not be much of a poem, but its worth laughing at :)

A PITCH CALLED LIFE
All the world’s a stage, said Shakespeare
The whole of life’s a pitch, I say here
The human a batsman, defending his life
With the help of his mind, better than Kaif.

The stump’s his soul, ready to fall
Due to dangers in the form of a ball
Death is lurking in the hands of a fielder
Waiting to kill him, like Osama or Hitler.

The ball’s to be deflected away from the sentry
To turn it into a successful boundary
From all sides will there be terrible pressure
And facing it straight will give one pleasure.

A friend indeed is waiting by near
To help him in times of tear and fear
By taking his place, so he can rest
And refreshed, make his side win the test.

With the help of virtue, and some patience
And a flavour of service and tolerance
Can a century be easily scored
To raise the figures on the score board

Such a man will live forever
Like Gandhi and Lincoln, whom we forget never
In the hearts of people, far and wide
Such people’s glory never can we hide.

A Nice Article

2009-05-21T09:47:00.000-07:00

Hi!
Been a looong time since I posted anything. Been kind of busy with college, and right now with project and GRE. I do intend to post now and then during these hols atlast, and I hope I do :)
For now, here's an article I found on my friend's lappy. I don't know its author, but I really like the content. Here it goes:
(Note: This was written soon after last election I guess)

"The spectacle on the night of May 18, of all these Congress leaders, many of them intelligent men and women, debasing themselves in front of Sonia Gandhi, pleading with her to lead the country, made me feel sick. If Sonia had any dignity, she would have stopped it, but she just
listened, with a slightly bored expression, right till the last Congressman and woman had wallowed in dirt before her.

And again I asked myself the question which has baffled me for 35 years, although I am myself a white man and a born Christian: why do Indians have such an attraction towards the white skin?

After reading the newspapers on Wednesday morning and seeing how newspapers such as The Times of India still root for Sonia Gandhi, with columnists such as Dileep Padgaonkar saying that her becoming prime minister would be in tune 'with the highest Vedantic ideals,' I wonder: does India, one of the most ancient civilizations on the planet, need a white woman to govern her?

I am sure Sonia has great qualities, but are Indians so dumb, stupid and backward, that they cannot find among themselves someone intelligent enough, non-corrupt enough, to lead them? And what about this craze for Mother Teresa? She may have been a saint, but nobody has harmed India's image in the 20th century so much: when you say India in the West, their
eyes light up and they answer: 'Mother Teresa/ Kolkata/ poor people/ dumb people/ starving people/ who do not know how to care after their own underprivileged/ who need a white woman to show them how to pick up the dying from the streets/ to look after orphans'!

Is this the image Indians want today? An image that is harming them, which is stopping Western investors from investing in India? Yet, Mother Teresa is worshipped here, from Kolkata to Chennai, from Delhi to Bangalore, and when she will be made a saint by the Vatican, perpetuating this colonial, superior-minded, Christian symbol of white superiority over the brown/black man, all the Indian media will rejoice in its own mental slavery and the Indian government will probably declare a national holiday!

Why don't Indians understand that brown is beautiful? White people spend hours on the beach and put on a hundred creams to get tanned. And in winter they even artificially lie under infrared lamps in beauty parlors to get brown! Why this obsession for the Indian woman to have white skin?

How come the two most popular actors in India have fair skin and nearly blue eyes? Why this craze for 'fair' brides? If you find the answers to these, you will understand why the fatal attraction for Sonia Gandhi and Mother Teresa.

Obviously, colonisation has frozen the Indian mind in certain patterns and the British made sure, through Macaulay's policies, of leaving behind an enduring inferiority complex among Indians, by constantly harping on the flaws of Indian culture and inflating them. That is why
today Indian intellectuals repeat like parrots what their masters had said before them: 'Hindus are fundamentalists/Brahmins are exploiters/Gowalkar was a Nazi/Indians are corrupt and no good.'

But that does not explain everything: most colonised countries have aped their masters after having hated them. No, in my mind the greatest factor behind India's love for the white is the absurd theory of Aryan invasion

According to this theory, which was actually devised in the 18th and 19th centuries by British linguists and archaeologists, the first inhabitants of India were good-natured, peaceful, dark-skinned shepherds called the Dravidians, who had founded what is called the Harappan or the Indus Valley civilisation. They were supposedly remarkable builders, witness the city of Mohenjo Daro in Pakistani Sind, but had no culture to speak of, no literature, no proper script even. Then, around 1500 BC, India is said to have been invaded by tribes called the Aryans:
white-skinned, nomadic people, who originated somewhere in western Russia and imposed upon the Dravidians the hateful caste system. To Aryans is attributed Sanskrit, the Vedic or Hindu religion, India's greatest spiritual texts, the Vedas, as well as a host of subsequent
writings, the Upanishads, the Mahabharat, the Ramayan, etc.

This was indeed a masterstroke on the part of the British: thanks to the Aryan theory, they showed on the one hand that Indian civilisation was not that ancient and that it was posterior to the cultures which influenced the Western world -- Mesopotamia, Sumeria, and Babylon -- and that whatever good things India had developed -- Sanskrit, literature, or even its architecture -- had been influenced by the West.

Thus, Sanskrit, instead of being the mother of all Indo-European languages, became just a branch of their huge family; thus, the religion of Zarathustra is said to have influenced Hinduism, and not vice versa. On the other hand, it divided India and pitted against each other the low caste, dark-skinned Dravidians and the high caste, light-skinned Aryans, a rift which is still enduring. Yet, most recent archaeological and linguistic discoveries point out that there never was an Aryan invasion and many historians, including the malevolent Romila Thapar,
are distancing themselves from it. Yet, most Indians still believe in this absurd theory.

Wake up O Indians: you are as great, if not greater than the white man. You can do as well, if not better than the white man. Not only did your forefathers devise some of the basic principles of mathematics, astrology, and surgical medicine, not only are your people among the most brilliant in the world today -- half of Silicon Valley is of Indian origin, 30 percent of the United Kingdom's doctors are Indians -- but you still hold within yourselves a unique spiritual knowledge, which once roamed the world but which has now disappeared, replaced by the intolerant creed of the two major monotheistic religions which say: 'if you don't believe in my true God, I will either kill you or convert you'.

Wake up India, brown is beautiful, smart and it is the future. Dr Manmohan Singh, whatever has to be said about the Congress, you have partly redeemed India's pride, and our good wishes are with you."

This article is a well-written one, but we as Indians must be ashamed that we need a foreigner to point this out too :(

Note: I don't know whether these facts about Aryans are true or not. I am not a supporter of any political party! I adore Mother Teresa for her dedication and selfless services!And i don't intend to hurt any community/group by publishing this article.

Hello World!!

2008-12-16T07:32:00.000-08:00

Hi there!!
Ok as everyone generally starts off, here goes my first post:) I dunno why I've created this blog. Maybe 'cos I was so jobless.. Created it on a whim, but don't know if I'll have enough patience to maintain it.. Let's see.. Maybe I'll blabber once in a while if I'm not too lazy..
I understand this would've been the driest entry ever possible :P But its ok :) Please bear with me :) Ciao!!
PS: Too much SMSing has taken its toll.. Am not able to type proper words.. Edited every sentence too many times to make it proper. Hopefully I'll get better at writing :P