Not to be taken lightly!

"School bags in the State set to become lighter" screamed a recent headline. That must have sounded like music to the ears of parents (especially mothers) and children considering that the fervent pleas for weight reduction had fallen on deaf ears all these years. Out of compulsion, children had to adopt a "heavy-handed" approach while going to and returning from the school in the last couple of decades. It is a moot point if children gained expertise in sifting information, but undoubtedly they became adept in lifting information!

I was wondering what would have been prompting the schools and the authorities to proclaim a "Big Bag theory" and insist on total adherence to that. Silent moments, deeper contemplations led to these Revelations:

a) The inability of a billion plus nation to bag (again!) gold medals in World sporting events in categories such as weight-lifting has been a cause of heart-burn. Now, what better way to provide opportunities and groom children than when going to school? Be it a flyweight or featherweight, lightweight or a heavyweight, it is only a question of time before these medals belong to India.

b) As the nation looks for more and more leaders, a vital attribute that is sought after is their ability to shoulder responsibilities.Precisely what this ingenious plan has been striving for with the future leaders!

c) "What is not bent at Five cannot be bent at Fifty" is an ancient wisdom. Start the bending at five, so that it is complete by fifteen!

d) Being prepared for many (if not all) scenarios is an important aspect of learning. Carrying all the books, all the note-books, all the records, all the instruments effortlessly imparts this concept to the children.

The ringing of the door bell ended my contemplative mood. It was my younger daughter and her sweet look conveyed that she was looking for something. "Dad, need a small help!" she said. "Yes my dear!" I assured. "Dad, I have brought it all the way from the main gate. Can you please help me now?", she enquired. "What is it?" was my query. Tiredness evident, came her reply, "My School bag"!

Public Works and Geography

"Not much to correlate?" was the guarded reaction of my elder daughter Maneesha, when she heard the title. I responded that it is not all too difficult and will reason out once she was through with her semester exams. Had I continued,  it would have possibly taken her attention off how cones and cylinders were to be sliced and looked at from different angles. I was aware of my daughter's aversion to such slicing and viewing much like me during my early engineering days! More importantly I ran the risk of getting admonished by high command for choosing an inappropriate time to initiate such topics for discussion.

A few days later, it was usual morning buzz at home and my daughter was getting ready for the college. Much of the workload associated with this early morning frenzy is borne by my wife - cooking, packing different kind of boxes for breakfast, lunch and snacks etc. My role in this electrifying sequence of events has been simple - to get my daughter dropped at the bus-stop before the college bus reaches there. Though simple, it involves precise execution of commands. When I hear "You may get down", I need to pick the beverage bottle, go down, take the car out and position it for departure. As soon as she rushes in, the next command would be "We can start". She would then be busy rushing an SMS to her friend who boards the bus couple of stops earlier to trace the current position. It would be a good idea if the college buses were fitted with a GPRS which could be queried! On this day, she got a response from her friend that the bus would reach in three minutes. Translated as a command, it meant that I had to employ all my driving, speeding, negotiating skills in the next 180 seconds. Within a few seconds, I had to slow down to pay respect to a huge speed-breaker and gain speed again. This had to be iterated couple of more times much to the anxiety of my daughter. At this point it was more like a tense one day cricket match - two balls to go four runs and two wickets in hand. After all the excitement we reached the stop 14 seconds before the bus arrived. As she started gulping down the milk, I enquired if she could figure out the correlation. She threw a puzzled glance at me and said, "Dad, we will catch up in the evening" and rushed towards the bus that had just arrived.

The opportunity finally arrived when we went for a drive on a week-end. Maneesha remembered that we had this pending discussion on Public Works and posed the question to me. Just then we arrived at a huge raise on the road aka speed-breaker and as always it needed utmost attention. Possibly like a crescendo? Not perhaps because a crescendo is supposed to be gradual! Just as we were getting down from this huge structure, I asked my daughters to name the second highest peak in the world. 'Godwin Austen' - pat came the reply from Reshma who was fresh from Social Sciences exam. The next .... before I could complete my question, came another one on the road - little more higher, little more longer. Phew,  we could scale it up and down fairly smoothly. Kanchenjunga, the correct answer came in chorus by this time. I then started my explanation by stating that engineers in Public Works Department are well versed in Geography and that apart they are very passionate about India. PWD engineers need to be Civil & Mechanical Engineering professionals was the obvious retort that I got. I said that might have been true in the past, but not any longer and asked them to recall the two speed-breakers that we had just crossed. There was no need for that, as a third one came on our way, no less in magnitude than the earlier ones. 'This would equate to Nanga Parbat', I stated and paused to see the reaction. I could sense that the scepticism against my reasoning had started waning. The entrance exams for jobs in PWD seem to be focusing on mountains and highest peaks and when the candidates cross that hurdle to reach the interview, the interviewer kindles their patriotism and passion for India by emphasizing that most of the highest peaks are not in India. Before I could continue further, my daughters declared in unison that the results were there on the roads to see and by then Nanda Devi was sighted!

Lost and Found

It was a few weeks away from blogging and I was back, full of energy for further writing. The dashboard pleasantly announced that I was welcome to create a blog since I did not have one of my own. Poor thing, must not have ' realized' who I was, was my initial reaction. It was the very same tool, which had helped create a blog some days ago and share a couple of thoughts. Typed out the URL directly, only to be told that such a blog does not exist and if I were the owner I could login. Oh ok, it needs another login here? We keep logging in and out of sites and servers several times a day, one more does not really matter. Providing the credentials, unfortunately did not resolve the situation. Overworking and under pressure, the software might have been 'fatigued' so as to not connect the login credentials with my blog? Two decades plus of software experience (not that it is required!) negated such outrageous thinking. A few repeat attempts did not take me anywhere. Then that sinking feeling that something is more wrong than expected set in. Not to be outdone by such events, I latched on to the ever dependable process of Googling. After an hour of intense read, courtesy the links furnished below, I learnt quite a few things - most importantly that my blog would have been marked as spam by a fuzzy logic engine! Splogs, scraping, payloads, detection, deletion .....Hmm ..... would have been an interesting read at other times. Putting aside the frustration and desperation, I executed the couple of steps that were remedial and started waiting (praying?) for restoration. A week after this, ah here I am, back to continue by blogging pursuits!

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1) Blog disappeared from dashboard and web

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/thread?tid=11493dc0a8511b08&hl=en

2) Blog locked or deleted - Cannot request review because no request review form is provided

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/thread?tid=1faa14d04fd8e5f4&hl=en

3) Why it happens?

http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2010/12/recent-problem-with-spam-classification.html

4) The attack of the clones

http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2009/11/attack-of-clones.html

5) Something is broken (A forum)

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/label?lid=0271191b4249689a&hl=en

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Grand Union

As a child, I grew up fantasizing that there will come a day when all whom I know - especially the near and the dear ones, would converge for a grand gala union. The thought process was so intense, that culmination was more a question of time than of feasibility. The meticulously drawn list of invitees, check-list of events and all the associated discussions used to unfold in the grey matter with clock-work precision. The rotation of Mother Earth at an amazing speed of almost a thousand miles an hour, brought forth newer days and equally newer nights, but still no sight of the D-day. This is what possibly prompted Vitalstatistix to thunder famously to Asterix, Obelix and the other Gauls that 'Tomorrow never comes'. The invitee list was growing for a while without any deletions. But the indomitable process of aging had its own plans, forcing people to shed their mortal coils. The invitee list was no longer a straight line going up in the first quadrant with constant slope. Soon it dawned that the fantasy may not cross the mental realm for ever.

Years have rolled by and now the Net has grown larger and penetrated deeper, the Web has become unfathomably complex, Mobile and Smart phones packed with features get unleashed at regular intervals. Communication is instantaneous and almost global. Blogs, Tweets, MMS/SMS and a plethora of tools, ways and means to communicate have ensured that people who are miles apart in geography and poles apart in personality, converge, coexist and collaborate in real-time. Is this the grand union?

The world of blogging

I had not gathered that little extra push all these days, months and years to do what has been going on for aeons (as per the current day measures!) - the world of web logging. Surprising for two reasons at least - firstly being in the thick of the IT industry for a score of years, the temptation should have arisen long back and got fulfilled and secondly having thoughts and observations sharing as an innate trait, blogging is a very natural channel that should have been explored and tapped much earlier!

It was a few days back that I tried my hands at tweeting. The length of a tweet reminded me of the archaic telegrams. Micro blogging is a pretty handy tool for quite a few things such as expressing oneself spontaneously, sharing links, gathering feedback or TIM - Thoughts in Motion (coined a la RIM) etc. It is akin to the Sutras or Aphorisms of the Hindu Wisdom - brevity to the core and focused. What I soon realized was that while tweeting is a very good option for expressiveness, it cannot be the only one. More often than not, we have a need to construct a plot with all the elaborations possible and permissible, to drive home a point. That directly led me here - to the World of blogging.