The Prodigal CV

Then I said to myself, "What happens to the fool will happen to me also; why then have I been so very wise?" And I said to myself that this also is vanity. For there is no enduring remembrance of the wise or of fools, seeing that in the days to come all will have been long forgotten.

-Anonymous

Sometimes you have a chance encounter with a picture of yours from a different era, and it is like being introduced to your Neanderthal twin from a different world. An emaciated look, sallow eyes, with the only thing worse than your hair-do is your sense of dressing, when wearing oversized tee shirts or tooooo-low waist jeans were in vogue. You look at yourself from the past and wonder, who is this obnoxious creature? I guess it is okay to make fun of oneself publicly. I had one such chance encounter, but not with a picture of mine from the past. Well, it was a picture sort of, but more of my academic achievements, or the lack of it. It happened one day that the TnP in-charge of my branch, Gaurav Choudhary, sent a text asking to prepare a CV and then e-mail it to him within two days. As ordered, I sat down to write, or type, my first ever written Curriculum Vitae (CV), and it was like having a glimpse of the outdated, backdated, anything but the glamorous past.

So......it was the first time I was making CV for myself. Maybe, it’s an indication that I will be out of college soon and will need to fend for myself. The dreams for a lucrative and money-spinning job have just started to take shape, and an impressive resume seems like a good idea to make initial contact with the aliens. Yeah, the feeling is something akin to that. The only trouble was, there was nothing much impressive for me to show off. Not a very rewarding summer internship, no fellowship, no real research experience. However, something had to be written, and that was what I did. Over the next few hours, I took a ride into my past and dug out everything, every single pettiest thing that I ever did and blotched it all over my resume. After continuous hard work, I was finally able to write a quasi-decent and quasi-presentable resume. All the facts about my life, which I had brought to my mind from the hinterlands of don’t-ask-me-where, were all there. For the next few hours of my life, I sat there wide eyed; looking at the wreckage from a disaster movie, my blotchy and mottled, a catawampus CV.

It started with a very confused and baffled-looking picture of mine (who gives their pictures in CVs?) with that desperate look on my face, as if begging the HR to recruit me. What was I thinking, they would take one look at my “handsome” face and let me in? Then came the information no one cared about... Address, Telephone number, Father’s name, Ancestral property’s location, Name of the first pet. (Some of these are exaggerated of course, but I will leave it to you to figure it out.) What, were they going to write me letters? The next “ahem” part was, well, “Sex: Male”. I am impressed I did not mention caste, mother tongue native language, and the name of ancestral village.

Then came the “Biographical Information”, which was fine I guess, but for the parenthesis that said, “In reverse chronological order”. Yeah, as if the order mattered, and more importantly, as if it was rocket science to figure out what order things were in. Of course, every institution I attended had to be listed with the “marks obtained”, because how can one trust the transcripts of my great university, assuming the transcripts reached them on time? Then started the actual meat of the CV thankfully, institutions attended, random projects undertaken, with the mention of everything, from holding a shovel in the lab to ramming a core-cutter into the soil last week. Even things like “had 95% attendance in class”, “recited nursery rhymes 18 years ago”, “sung a song on Teachers’ Day”, or “could eat during class without getting caught” found an apt place in the CV. Then there were awards and accolades. “Stood 7^th out of 120 innumerable students in my school”, “won awards in debates and collages” (who cares?), or “sat through boring seminars” would find a place as well. If this was not insult enough to my academic achievements (or the lack of it), there would be a separate section dedicated to extracurricular activities, because being a house captain, an indispensible member of the Cancer Aid Society, playing Santa Claus for play-groupies on Christmas, standing behind on stage holding the Tricolour on Bapu’s birth day, anchoring soporific events should also count, or giving numerous super boring paper presentations continuously. Not to mention learning gazillion words from Barron’s, or the ability to gobble 50 gol-gappas in a minute.

Whether I like it or not, this will be an indelible part of what I was. It might take years of grooming, feedback, and doing some fruitful experience to build my credentials in the field, and to evolve as a professional. To put it differently, the present me is because that was the past me (though the college in between has metamorphosised me a lot positively, but still........12 years of schooling and 3 years so far for college; do the math!!). I looked at my CV with a mixture of both love and hatred. Is this who I used to be? Desperate to get recognition even for a seminar I attended and slept through? Or being exceptionally good at “plagiary” when it came to writing a test? Was I hoping my experience with being a part of a cancer club, or being a good counter-strike player was about to get me recruited in my dream company?

Yeah, I know we all have to start somewhere, and build from there. Just that early men did not have that polish doesn’t mean they were any less successful in their environment. However, call me smug, arrogant, thankless, whatever, but it doesn’t hurt to make fun of thy own once in a while. Except that 10 years down the line, I would be reading my CV and laughing again. “Went to XYZ dam for an inspection and got the Project Engineer suspended”. (my batch-mates will understand this ;P) Who cares?

Inventorying the INVISIBLE

"We don't know one percent of one millionth about anything." - Thomas Edison

Forgive my philosophy here, but after a long time the philosopher in me is awake and wants to write something. Don,t frown if you don't get the gist or have no idea on what am I talking on, after all the thoughts are intangible or I would have given you the option to mould it as you like. But you can't, as you can't see it in the first place........it's all invisible, isn't it!!! but still I hope you'll read it full, I say you'll enjoy it....

So the question is, what is invisible? There is more of it than you think, actually. Everything, I would say, everything that matters except every thing, and except matter. We can see matter. But we can't see what's the matter. As in this cryptic sentence I found in the Guardian recently. "The marriage suffered a setback in 1965 when the husband was killed by the wife."


So we can see the stars and the planets. But we can't see what holds them apart, or what draws them together. With matter, as with people, we see only the skin of things. We can't see into the engine room. We can't see what makes people tick, at least not without difficulty. And the closer we look at anything, the more it disappears. In fact, if you look really closely at stuff, if you look at the basic substructure of matter, there isn't anything there. Electrons disappear in a kind of fuzz, and there is only energy. And you can't see energy.

So everything that matters, that's important, is invisible. One slightly silly thing that's invisible is this story, which is invisible to you. And I'm now going to make it visible to you. I heard it in one of John Lloyd's talk. It's about an M.P. called Geoffrey Dickens.

The late Geoffrey Dickens, M.P. was attending a fete in his constituency. Wherever he went, at every stall he stopped he was closely followed by a devoted smiling woman of indescribable ugliness. Try as he might, he couldn't get away from her. A few days later he received a letter from a constituent saying how much she admired him, had met him at a fete and asking for a signed photograph. After her name, written in brackets was the apt description.....horse face. "I've misjudged this women." thought Mr. Dickens. "Not only is she aware of her physical repulsiveness, she turns it to her advantage. A photo is not enough." So he went out and bought a plastic frame to put the photograph in. And on the photograph, he wrote with a flourish, "To Horse Face, with love from Geoffrey Dickens, M.P." After it had been sent off his secretary said to him, "Did you get that letter from the woman at the fete? I wrote Horse Face on her, so you'd remember who she was."

I bet he thought he wished he was invisible, don't you?

So, one of the interesting things about invisibility is that things that we can't see we also can't understand. Gravity is one thing that we can't see, and which we don't understand. It's the least understood of all the four fundamental forces, and the weakest. And nobody really knows what it is or why it's there. For what it's worth, Sir Issac Newton, the greatest scientist who ever lived, he thought Jesus came to earth specifically to operate the levers of gravity. That's what he thought he was there for. So, bright guy, could be wrong on that one, I don't know.

Consciousness. I see all your faces. I have no idea what any of you are thinking. Isn't that amazing? Isn't that incredible that we can't read each other's minds. But we can touch each other, taste each other perhaps, if we get close enough. But we can't read each other's minds. I find that quite astonishing.

The laws of physics: invisible, eternal, omnipresent, all powerful. Remind you of anyone? Interesting. I'm, as you can guess, not a materialist, I'm an immaterialist. And I've found a very useful new word, ignostic. Okay? I'm an ignostic. I refuse to be drawn on the question of whether God exists, until somebody properly defines the terms!!!

The stars by day. I always think that's fascinating. The universe disappears. The more light there is, the less you can see.

Time, nobody can see time. I don't know if you know this. Modern physics, there is a big movement in modern physics to decide that time doesn't really exist. Because it's to inconvenient for the figures. It's much easier if it's not really there. You can't see the future, obviously. And you can't see the past, except in your memory.

One of the interesting things about the past is you particularly can't see, my younger sister asked me this the other day, he said, "Brother, can you remember what I was like when I was two?" And I said "Yes." And she said, "Why can't I?".  Isn't that extraordinary? You can not remember what happened to you earlier than the age of two or three. Which is great news for psychoanalysts. Because otherwise they'd be out of a job. Because that's where all the stuff happens........ that makes you who you are.

Another thing you can't see is the grid, on which we hang. This is fascinating. You probably know, some of you, that cells are continually renewed. You can see it in skin and this kind of stuff. Skin flakes off, hairs grow, nails, that kind of stuff. But every cell in your body is replaced at some point. Tastebuds, every 10 days or so. Livers and internal organs sort of take a bit longer. A spine takes several years. But at the end of seven years, not one cell in your body remains from what was there seven years ago. The question is, who, then, are we? What are we? What is this thing that we hang on, that is actually us?

There is so many things that -- Light. You can't see light. When it's dark, in a vacuum, if a person shines a beam of light straight across your eyes, you won't see it. Slightly technical, some physicists will disagree with this. But it's odd that you can't see the beam of light, you can only see what it hits. I find that extraordinary, not to be able to see light, not to be able to see darkness.

Electricity, you can't see that. Don't let anyone tell you they understand electricity. They don't. Nobody knows what it is. You probably think the electrons in an electric wire move instantaneously down a wire, don't you, at the speed of light when you turn the light on. They don't. Electrons bumble down the wire, about the speed of spreading honey, they say. Galaxies, 100 billion of them, estimated in the universe. 100 billion. How many can we see? Five. Five, out of the 100 billion galaxies, with the naked eye. And one of them is quite difficult to see unless you've got very good eyesight.

And I've come to the conclusion because you've asked this other question, "What's another thing you can't see?" The point, most of us. What's the point? You can't see a point. It's, by definition, dimensionless, like an electron, oddly enough.

But, the point, what I've got it down to is there are only two questions really worth asking. "Why are we here?" and "What should we do about it while we are? And to help you, I've got two things to leave you with, from two great philosophers, perhaps two of the greatest philosopher thinkers of the 20th Century. One a mathematician and an engineer, and the other a poet.

The first is Ludvig Vitgenštajn who said, "I don't know why we are here. But I'm pretty sure it's not in order to enjoy ourselves."

And secondly and lastly, W.H. Auden, who said, "We are here on earth to help others. What the others are here for, I've no idea."

India....a parody (Part II)

SPORT-

The game of Rioting was a joint venture between India and Pakistan. The tradition now is that once any cricket match is over, everyone must riot and burn down a stand. This also keeps the youths in the country employed. Pakistan is India's long time rival in both games, cricket & rioting, of which India has won all. The Indian Football team is in contention with Brazil and England, to win the next Football World Cup, with the master striker, Bhaichung Bhutia expected to come out of retirement any moment. Bhutia is regarded as the God of Football in India. He was the star player for England's top team, Bury F.C., and he got thrown out after one season for undiagnosable reasons. He almost beat Ronaldo to the Balloon D'Orc, the award for being the most over hyped, out of fashion, overpaid footballer.

The captain of a losing Indian cricket team is sacrificed to a Hindu God of public's choice. The case in a way is different for a winning captain. He would be allowed the privilege of choosing the God to be sacrificed to.

Another famous sport in India is the famous, "Train Riding", its something like the mechanical rodeo bull, but more dangerous. It's a tradition since trains ever appeared there, the game consists in holding on the top of the train as long as you can. This attracts many tourists, as you can buy easily a ticket on the train interior to see the game, since almost everyone prefers to see the action from the outside.

FOOD-

Indians eat spice. They drink spice, smoke spice, sweat spice, fart spice, and even shit spice. Sometimes if you order it specially you can get food intermixed with the spices, but you must insist on it while ordering on public restaurants.

Indian food comes in two different dishes, basically containing the same ingredients, curry, Spice and oil. Combined with the 2 375 different flavours of spice though, an indian dinner can be combined in 10 ^ 87 different ways, giving more tastes than there is atoms in the universe and indeed taste buds in the mouth. This makes all indian food ending up in tasting curry anyway, since all the taste buds can detect are that they are exhausted. Indian food is also well known by going into your mouth and heading straight to your Colon.

ECONOMY-

Economically, India is very large, as large number of people have to live economically. Indians have been trying to deal with the growing population by buying cars,increasing the speed limit, and removing crosswalks.

The primary export of India is India ink, which is produced in massive quantities by the Indian held megacorporation India Inc. for worldwide export. This makes India one of the world’s most powerful countries.

Some profane minds that fancy eating beef have conjectured elsewhere that the reason behind this phenomenal explosion of the cow population in India is because of the fact that Indians do not eat cows. That's like saying that the reason behind the exponential growth of humans in India is because of the fact that cows do not eat humans; or too busy taking calls from mindless, frustrated Americans; or too busy building the digital cow milking machine for future generations or too busy breathing in and out.

A large part of the Indian economy is dependent on Mumbai and Bollywood. Founded by Robin Hood, wherefrom eponymous clones like Hollywood, Lollywood, Tollywood, Pollywood and many others 'woods' originated, Tiger Woods, in the year 1976, slapped a law suit on the Indian Government for infringing upon his Intellectual Property Rights. Robert Frost has simultaneously contended that the names were actually inspired by his famous poem, Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening...when, in reality, they were inspired by the morning wood people (usually male people) experience after watching late-night midnight songs.

Although there are talks of changing the national language to Java, the HRD Ministry of India believes that C++ would be a better choice. Currently, talks (read riots) are occurring all over India to resolve this issue peacefully. It has also been suggested that India is more of a mindset or hologram than a real place. Which means that I never wrote this -- you just imagined you read it. It also means that i never came here: you imagined I did.

BOLLYWOOD-

Bollywood is a very popular film industry and is as popular as Hollywood and is known all over India. They make the worst films in the world. No one watches them except for prudish high school girls and over-sized, middle-aged housewives. The only reason for the continuation of the boom in the cinema industry in India is that it's cheaper to pay to sleep in the cool confines of a cinema hall than to pay to sleep in a hotel.

Bollywood is also a pastime, for several Indians. It was invented by Dansi Engardhan, a woman who was born hard of hearing in Calcutta and who sold postcards in Mumbai until she was 14. In 2800 BC, she went to Babylon to fellate Roscoe Born and this experience had a profound effect on her creative insects. It is believed that she asked her rich uncle for an ice cube for her 18th birthday but instead got enrolled in an academy for Visual Arts. Somehow she learnt something there to some way return to Mumbai to sometime start Bollywood.

According to a famous film critic, who says this on the condition of anonymosity fearing murder, Bollywood thought sex did not exist until 2002 AB. Any and every intimate scene, if ever it passed the Censor Boards, was depicted by two flowers rubbing against each other. The censored rape scenes involved thunder and lightning or huge tidal waves hitting the rocks. The unofficial reason was to go back to the good old days of Shakespeare where every act in a play was left to the imagination of the audience.

Then, stalwarts like Rakhi Sawant came onto the screen and rediscovered the "dare to bare" philosophy. Of late, explicit scenes have become the norm, so much so that the Censor Board is contemplating including porn in its archives. In fact, a compelling need for an award, on the lines of the Oscars, to be awarded to the most endearing of sluts(male & female), has been felt across all sections of the film fraternity and the viewing public.

India....a parody (Part I)

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"Moooooo”

~ Indian holy cow on India

“People of India, people of the Rainbow Nation, people of the world [..].”

~ Ravi Shastri doesn't want the audience confused to who he is talking, just bleeding at the ears.

“It smells like shit and the people look like monkeys.”

~ Major Archibald Stiffy on his adventures in India

Location....

Facts and Figures.....

Capital--- New Deli

Previous capital-- Deli

Official Languages-- Sanskrit, Hindi, Telugu, English, Marathi + 10^100 other languages

Unofficial Languages-- Bambaiyya, Bhojpuri, Gulti, Inglis

Worst Language-- Malayalam (it means the same even when read backwards)

Most Deadly Language-- Classical Tamil

National Heroes-- Me, Amitabh Bacchan, Sachin Tendulkar, Ashoka, Clement Attlee, Mr. India, Krishh, Gandhi, Buddha

Religion-- Everything known to man

Declaration of Independence-- still trying

Population--

India is an imaginary place far, far away, home to Outsour Singh (OUTSOURCING), Bollywood, and a gazillion people. The very name means "the wrong side of the river" given to it by those posh downtown Persians who used to stare at it down the ravines of the Hindu Kush.

India is also the Manhattan of Asialand. It is the big huge melting pot where everything that ever enters it melts down to an ever increasing experience of cultural madness and confusion.

This strange complementary yet totally non-unitable features has made India the universal home of mysticism and ludicrousy.

HISTORY

This is presented as C because all educated Indians are computer programmers. All the uneducated ones are people like you.)

The History of India is an iterative function with the following structure:

char History_of_India(int residents = Dravidians) {

int intruders;

char Indian_history[ENDLESS];

wend{

intruders = Hindukush::read_stack();

if (intruders==0, Intruders = British Empire);

working_their_way_down_the_ganges(intruders);

Indian_history += Squabble(residents,intruders);

residents += intruders;

}while t==1

return Indian_history

}

Unfortunately this function - as with all other kinds of Indian logic - hangs up in an infinite loop.

MODERN HISTORY

The Europeans saw India and decided they wanted it. Then, one bald man said that we must not fight for independence. His idea was that this would confuse the British, even though he was employed by the British. This plan worked, and ended up not only confusing the British, but Indians and the rest of the World

Later, after the population in India exploded, each each person was allotted 5 triangle meters of space for living. Here's an interesting fact: Seven years ago, every 7th person in the world was an Indian, today every 6th person is an Indian and in 10 years every 5th person will be an Indian and very soon 'everyone will be an Indian'. This is a very ingenious idea to attain world domination.

There's more.......to be continued......

A Little Laugh

Well, if till now you've been thinking that the theologists and philosophers are the people who've forgotten to laugh then this is gonna change your mind.....I present a few jokes which I stumbled upon recently while roaming in the 'Brobdingnagian' world of internet......have a laugh

"A philosopher," said the theologian, "it is like a blind man in a darkened room looking for a black cat that isn't there."

"That' s right," replied the philosopher, "and if he were a theologian, he'd find it."
--------------- on exam. qs and ans.------------


How many philosophers does it take to change a light bulb?

1) "Hmmm ... well this is an interesting question isn't it?"
2) "Define a 'light bulb' ..."
3) "How can you be sure it needs changing?"
4) Three. One to change it and two to stand around arguing over whether or not the light bulb exists etc.

---------- an interesting aspect of philosophy----------

Don't 'look' at anything in a physics lab.
Don't 'taste' anything in a chemistry lab.
Don't ''smell' anything in a biology lab.
Don't 'touch' anything in a medical lab.

and, most importantly:

Don't listen to anything in a philosophy department

----------- laws of philosophy-----------

The First Law of Philosophy
For every philosopher, there exists an equal and opposite philosopher.


The Second Law of Philosophy
They're both wrong.

Question:- What do you get when you cross the Godfather with a philosopher?
Answer:- An offer you can't understand

Here's an old chestnut :

By all means marry: If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher - Socrates

Here's another one :

One day the great Greek philosopher Socrates (469 - 399 BC) came upon an acquaintance who ran up to him excitedly and said, "Socrates, do you know what I just heard about one of your students?"

"Wait a moment," Socrates replied. "Before you tell me I'd like you to pass a little test. It's called the Test of Three."

"Three?", exclaimed the student.

"That's right," Socrates continued. "Before you talk to me about my student let's take a moment to test what you're going to say. The first test is Truth. Have you made absolutely sure that what you are about to tell me is true?"

"Oh no," the man said, "actually I just heard about it."

"All right," said Socrates. "So you don't really know if it's true or not. Now let's try the second test, the test of Goodness. Is what you are about to tell me about my student something good?"

"No, on the contrary..."

"So," Socrates interrupted, "you want to tell me something bad about him even though you're not certain it's true?"

The man shrugged, a little embarrassed.

Socrates continued. "You may still pass though, because there is a third test - the filter of Usefulness. Is what you want to tell me about my student going to be useful to me?"

"Well it....no, not really..."

"Well," concluded Socrates, "if what you want to tell me is neither True nor Good nor even Useful, why tell it to me at all?"

The man was defeated and ashamed. This is the reason Socrates was a great philosopher and held in such high esteem.

It also explains why he never found out that Plato was having an affair with his wife.

A philosophy professor walks in to give his class their final test . Placing his chair on his desk the professor instructs the class, "Using every applicable thing you've learned in this course, prove to me that this chair DOES NOT EXIST."

So, pencils are writing and erasers are erasing, students are preparing to embark on novels proving that this chair doesn't exist, except for one student. He spends thirty seconds writing his answer, then turns his final in to the astonishment of his peers.

Time goes by, and the day comes when all the students get their final grades ... and to the amazement of the class, the student who wrote for thirty seconds gets the highest grade in the class.

His answer to the question was- "What chair?"