“chal intro suna”, all over again!

Yup! That’s right. I bet the number of people in my league is even fewer than the number of happy investment bankers and employees of Jet Airways combined. I dropped a year and yet didn’t join India’s biggest brand after the Taj Mahal – IIT, or the Institute of Infinite Tension, as uncyclopedia.com puts it.

Now, the place where I am studying is located in one of the remotest villages of India, which happens to be the birthplace of one of the famous Birlas. And so, as soon as I came here I was greeted by all the species of insects named in the Encyclopedia Brittanica with more enthusiasm than that shown by Manmohan Singh for pushing the nuclear deal.

And finally, for the second time in my life, I had some “positive” interaction with my seniors, better known by a word that begins with r. It wasn’t much, though. In fact, it was lesser than that at NIT Trichy, which is surprising for an institute in north India.

So here I am, fighting insects, handling surprise quizzes consisting of Irodov like problems, actually eating chappatis (not jeans) in the mess and listening to some decent english from my lecturers, unlike the ” i demo cutting, you real cutting” I was getting used to. Here I am, in BITS-Pilani, and it sure is rocking.

Fanning the winners

This one is based on a recent comment by a friend of mine that those people who started watching the English premier league about 7 years ago (or earlier) are mostly Liverpool fans whereas those who joined later are mostly Man U fans. The point he was trying to make  was that the new fans are fans just because Man U wins.

I would not disagree with him. My observations have also been similar, especially in the field of football. Most people are Brazil fans because it wins. Next on the list are Italy and France. Brazil, I can understand, but frankly, Italy does not play with a quarter of that style and beauty and I find it pretty sick that any non Italian should support this team.

I know it is pretty useless to debate on this but the attitude of the masses is worth noting. Contrast this with cricket where we are constantly looking forward to Australia’s loss. What makes us fan the winners in one game and boo them in the other?

One of the deciding factors might be the fact that India occasionally faces the winners in cricket and gets beaten frequently, which generates a desire to see the Aussies lose, no matter against who. This being impossible in football (at least presently), the loyalties, I suppose, are decided by victory or defeat. I, personally, am an Arsenal fan because it was a great team when I started watching EPL. Although I do not know why the Liverpool fans became so, whether the loyalty of Man U fans stays even when it starts losing, time will tell.

Ancient Indians and the theory of relativity

@dharmaj – this one is specifically for you.

There was a widely held belief in ancient India (it still is believed by some) that one moment in heaven is equal to many earth years. Although this surprised me as a child, I now know that this is quite possible.

As wonderful as the possibility of this fact is the fact that this was known to ancient Indians. But since there is no ancient Indian text containing the theory of relativity, it is extremely likely that our ancestors did not understand the phenomena, but merely knew it. Now the belief is most likely based on the legend of an Indian emperor who left for heaven while he was still alive to help the Gods in a celestial battle against the devils and returned only to find that more than a century had passed on earth. This can mean two things, as I have reasoned below.

The dilation could have been caused courtesy his speed and the (apparently) large distance between heaven and earth. Something similar to what happens in the twin’s paradox. This would imply that heaven is just an ordinary planet like the earth.

An alternative explanation is that the dilation occurred mainly due to a specialty of heaven rather than the travel. The specialty is, of course, that the gravity in heaven is very large, either due to its own parameters (mass, radius) or due to its proximity to a high gravity celestial body, e.g., a black hole, a neutron star.

The second explanation makes our ancestral belief true but the first, which, personally, I consider more probable, indicates that our ancestors were not so smart after all. They were just lucky to know a fact that would take millenniums to be proved. In that case, how the emperor managed to make the trip is a different story altogether.

@dharmaj again – i came across this music video recently. try it out.

New IITs, IIMs

Being a student myself, I can understand that the students all over India preparing for IIT-JEE/CAT must be elated that there are more IITs and IIMs coming up. But where is all this heading to? The 3 new IITs have nothing as of now but people  are wild about it.  This is just like adding water to milk to increase the volume of milk.  From a different point of view, I feel that  this is in some ways similar to the recenr Reliance IPO.  Excites everybody only to pull the legacy of IIT terrifyingly down.

Perhaps India is the only country in the world which has so many institutes sharing the same name. 10 IITs, 10 IIMs, 18 NITs. All of them designed to meet the needs India had in the 70s. If nothing is done to stem this rot, 20 years from now, private institutions will own all the space in the hearts of aspiring engineers. IITs might then get a new full form – Institutes of Infinite Tension.