2009

I don't believe in year-end summaries/'best-of' lists. Most of them are never objective, rarely fair and mostly boring. Unless it's the Bangalore Times' round-up of earth-shattering celebrity break-ups and make-ups and such. Those are always fun to read.

But this year has been interesting (Yea, yea, like any other year will be)and this blog post is an attempt to introspect, look back, look within; a deeply personal analysis of what made this year in my life remarkable. Hardly as exciting as anything Bangalore Times has to say but that's life. This is an analysis of an ordinary girl's 2009 -- all for the reading pleasure(I'm being presumptuous, of course) of random people on the internet-- that's how deeply personal this is.

Getting down to business, indulge me as I tell you of lessons learnt from the year past:


February 2009
Sometimes, life takes its course. Karma tags along.
"No man is rich enough to buy back his past, sir Robert, not even you" says a conniving Mrs. Chevely to a man she is threatening in the movie An Ideal Husband. I haven't had to buy back pasts, nothing so sinister. Or glamorous. But there's no leaving anything behind. What goes around comes back around. Even if what I'm referring to may not even be a case of that Justin Timberlake song I used to like(don't tell anyone), karmas do run over dogmas.


April 2009
Don't listen to advice you didn't ask for.
J is a lady I would have never liked if I had had a choice. She is loud, thinks she is funny, and believes exactly what she wants. And those are not even the reasons I wouldn't be best-friends with her. She eyed me rather suspiciously initially (contemptuously, if my paranoid mind is taken seriously) but seemed to warm up to me later (Joy!).

The woman did, however, think that her infinite wisdom and expert advice was due and direly necessary in the case of this young girl-at-sea. J isn't exactly the set-hearts-aflutter type. Or your stoic and graceful girl-next-door. And the day I got advice on my social life from her, I had to put my foot down, make mental notes and perhaps etch them on some nerve tissue lest they get lost.

"So are you people seeing other people?" she enquired.
Everybody at the table hemmed and hawed and made reluctant conversation on ambiguities and ambivalence(s).
"Happens. Happens" she nodded like she had personally co-authored two books on the subject herself. "When I met Y, I knew he was the one." she assured us in response to doubts we hadn't raised, calmly telling us about wisdom that comes with time and how she expertly handled social pursuits and why I(the others had politely moved on to a private conversation) should learn from her. And then she descended into a detailed explanation of her fears over dating an engineer. (Y, that adorable goochi-woochi Y, was a 'software engineer')

"You know, ever since I've been a little girl, I've hated the Science-studying, equation-drawing, geeky types!(sic)My family is full of artists. Imagine how shocked they must have been." she said shrilly, as I went ' Awww' with all the sincerity I could muster in response to details of a relationship between two people one of who I had never met and the other, I'd known for three days.

The next half hour went relatively well: I intently listened to J's worries about the possible culture clashes between Punjabis and Malyalis. "How can they eat anything with grated coconut." she exclaimed worriedly while explaining the intricacies of this coupling fixed by the heavens themselves and how marriage-oh that scary proposition- was going to be a melange of clashes as much as cultures.She was all the more worried about that strange piece of garment the Malyalis wore. "Punjabis at home will go on about the munda in a mundu" she said in a tone that I judged (with only partial conviction) as humorous.
"So how did you meet Y" I said, recalling the standard-issue question one must ask fawningly in such type of matters and she waited for me to complete my question.
"You have met, haven't you?" I demanded in mock horror as the two of us laughed good-naturedly at my clever joke, tapping table tops and covering mouthfuls of spontaneous laughter.
"I can't wait to." she said, not noticing that I'd suddenly stopped laughing. "He's coming back from Dubai next year" she said with undisguised excitement, matching glee with a twinkle in her eye for the special Orkut-friend she'd finally see in flesh and blood.



March 2009
Generalisations Suck
Must've been 2. AM when I was reading about Neural Networks and Artificial Intelligence or the art of teaching computers to think like humans. "Humans have the ability to estimate values in case of lack of information." the textbook declares, going on to discussing the challenge in getting computers to do the same. And I'm all Oh-my-god-are-you-kidding-me? Until now, I thought that was what we called the delicate act of conjecture. Of assuming what you thought was right when you didn't know better.

The last thing I want is for my dear old PC to start judging me without knowing details. Everybody else I know, has done that already. 


August 2009
Karma and the strangeness of it.
You know the problem with believing that everything we do is the fruit of past actions? It is an idea that is impossible to subscribe to when you're knee deep in shit and something you will readily agree to when good things happen. Karma hangs confusedly in balance. Because great things happened, as did nasty shit.


September 2009
Bangalore Times rocks.
This year, something important changed in my life. After seven years of undulating support and loyalty to the Benett and Coleman group's flagship daily rag, I went back to my roots and to Deccan Herald. The mornings have changed forever. No Bangalore Times. No BT interviews of Kannada stars. No BT articles on what Manoviraj Khosla thinks of the financial repercussions of the Indo-Moldovan Nuclear deal. Except for that Panorama section (Which isn't so cool anymore, in the age of bookmarking sites) and the Sports section (At least they don't have Sourav Ganguly jokes), most other pages are sleep-inducing, to say nothing of their focus-dissolving splitting of articles and unceremoniously shoving details to page-59. Please Metrolife, get yourselves a booze-loving slut or two. Then the language of the articles might improve. (Degree in journalism strictly optional.)

November 2009 
Pigs rule and donkeys work. Remember Animal Farm.

Mad month. Make or break. Priority mismatch. It broke.

December 2009
Age is not just a number
 I turned 21 a month ago. Scary 21. Thats two years gone out of what I've reasoned will be the best eleven years of my life. Shrieeeek! I haven't even done anything. Looking back on four years of college, it seems like how-ever-much one tries to experience new stuff, avoid moping and learn to walk, there will always be tonnes left to do. So much to read, so much to know and so much to see.  


This shall end with a sentiment that summarises much that can't be said (owing to lack of clarity besides lack of articulation-skills) perfectly and circumspect-ly: Ayyo!


Edit: I'm making this a tag. All of you do round-up posts too!
I shall tag Padma, Soda, Merin, Nakul, Chaitanya

Camden Town

This is an account of my visit to zany Camden town, in August 2007, that was published in The New Indian Express's supplement Expresso sometime in June 2008. Good days those. Please excuse the goody-goody tone. Earnestness has bad side effects. Although I must say I quite like this piece.

Entry into Camden Town, London is a bit of a personality test. If you are the kind that is game for experimentation, enjoys alternative genres and has a taste for the bizarre, smile, as Camden Town welcomes you with its tattooed arms wide open. Alternately, if you are squeamish about boldly dressed people, punk and Goth cultures and can’t appreciate anything out of the ordinary, run! Camden Town is definitely not for the faint hearted.

After a visit to the very prim, proper, posh and upmarket locality of Wimbledon, we traveled to Camden Town, located at the other end of London—literally and figuratively. This is your Alternative paradise. Streets here are populated by tattoo parlours; it has people dressed in bizarre clothes, sells food and tribal art from across the world and throws you firmly out of your comfort zone

We saw a performer dressed as a native American beating tribal drums outside the tube station to catch the attention of passersby. It was a sight that requited photographic importance. We took out our cameras to click a quick picture and got a loud “Oye” of protest—a term, the semblance of which, you hardly hear in overtly civilized England. “You’ve got to pay me one pound for every picture you take.” He explained “I’m working here!” This is roughly the customer-satisfaction diktat that dominates Camden Town. If there were such a rule, it would be “We can’t care less”.

I have to admit, I was bewildered and took the advice of a Hindi speaking Pakistani gentleman, who manned a nearby shack selling junk jewelry, to not bother paying up. A little shop further ahead sold some more junk jewelry and traditional London souvenirs which included little Big Bens and coffee mugs sporting the names of famous areas in London. The next shock-and-recover maneuver occurred on seeing a box of candies labeled ‘Cannabis Lollies’ on the shelf in a store. I was relieved to know that these were harmless sugar confectionary which had nevertheless raised quite a storm among concerned parents in the UK. Like the pattern goes, everything at Camden Town is meant to amuse, if not always scandalize.

People that pompously wear their profaneness on their sleeves may find some assistance in the cause with T-shirt stores at Camden. The most popular T-shirts in London are ones with the ‘Mind The Gap’ motifs, derived from the London Underground safety announcement.

Meant to caution people about the gap between train and platform, the phrase has gained attention otherwise in pop culture puns. Among the many zany and quirky Tees, we found one with a picture of Pope Joseph Ratzinger and ‘Papa-Ratzi’ written under it. Wicked or witty? Categorise as you will.

The world famous Camden Market is a busy complex filled with stores that showcase and sell cultural artistry from around the world. Shops here sell clothes as diverse as Oriental and African to all that can be described as Bohemian. Food counters offer Thai and Chinese food at very reasonable prices, and if your food options are narrowed down to vegan, you could still get lucky in this haven for all things unusual. A little bit of exploration will lead you to ingenious miniature tribal musical instruments, masks, art, books and what have you. And if you spot a couple entangled in a passionate embrace right in the middle of the market, remember, it is rude to stare.

A houseboat ride through Regent’s Canal is another option you could take into the colourful high street. If you were on the lookout for more interesting encounters, walk right up to the self-anointed evangelists lodged at street corners and talk to them about why the world is headed to damnation. Be assured, Camden Town will never be short of interesting sights or people.

The Hopes and Tragedies of Oddadammed

Odadammed is a busy place. Perhaps, the busiest in the city. The nice kind of busy, you know, with people streaming in and out of it. There is chatter of which ice cream flavors to buy, of what restaurant to choose, and if she will not look plump in that daring red dress she bought in haste. Odadammed gives you a remarkable license to scream out doubts about anything: muffin-tops or your promiscuous roommate or your sleazy boss because it wraps everything you say in a crisp layer of anonymity. Even the most gifted eavesdroppers have had to return empty-handed for all Odadammed has to offer is waves of white noise sparkled with an arbitrary frosting of unrelated words. Oddadamed is hardly a gossip's heaven. What self-respecting voyeur would be proud of intricate details concerning a sleazy, promiscuous muffin anyway.

I've snuggled under the protective comfort of Odadammed's blanket of sound too. Everybody in the city has. The square has shared many of my intimate secrets. Mostly the ones I would coo to Jane through our many walks, jostling with other passersby, and sometimes each other. I would point to her rude observations about a tourist at the streetlight, one-liner fantasies about us, jokes about somebody's hair and she would chuckle and nod. I remember winters when I've made uncomfortable admissions or felt the cold despite the jacket. I've mouthed guilty secrets on these paths. Sometimes she would be all ears. Other times, I'd have to content with the attention and kindness of Odadammed alone. Never a solitary secret here.

Today, I only wait as the white noise bounces of me. No Jane to point at the tourists and guffaw. I could describe their clothes later and share a laugh perhaps. Would she find it funny? With Jane, there's no saying. She can't usually help laughing at my 'Idiotic tourist' stand-up gig. I could greet her with one, perhaps. Will she come? With Jane, there's no saying.

I sit at Rio, the small cornerside cafe at the square.Instantly recognisable from from the thousands of tourist pictures one finds on the internet and in television travel shows. The square at Odadammed is the flame to touristic moths. And come they do, in droves. Just like the River and the Bridge. It is where everything is priced a just beyond reason. It is where artists will draw caricatures of yours for a few precious bucks. The portraits cost a little more. Ones with colour, more than that. The tourist couple posing for the colour portrait are paying good money for what their Canon and photoshop can do these days for free. They are perhaps in their early thirties? The woman looks eager. Ostensibly, this one is for the albums back home. The bloke does well to hide his impatience. Too well in fact. He looks a complete prick, Jane would have said. That is quite the same thing I would have told her. You can see he gives jack to the picture. A little less to the woman, maybe. You can see him eying young girls walking past. He may have been addicted to porn in college. And is probably flirting with a chick called Natasha in office. All, as his lady decides where in their pretty little pad this portrait will hang. For posterity, she will say with a smile to the bored artist after he is done. Jane says she hates stupid women a lot more than the philandering men they tag after.

But that is Jane. She has a thought for all the men she has met, and some of the men she hasn't. She has hated every man she has loved, she'd say.They were either too strong, too weak or too messed up. In retrospect only, I would silently hope.God knows her love isn't easy. So does the benevolent Odadammed, he after all has been in on our petty fights, our 'sweet nothings'(like the tabloids call it. We hate that term anyway) and our separate lonelinesses-- being thanked for which would have made the real Odadammed choke, roll over and die.

Odadammed, you see, was the name of a medieval warrior known and feared for the brutal ends his enemies met. Alas, he wasn't cruel, or valiant or barbaric enough to breach celluloid and have Gerard Butler play him. How was he to know the dynamics of Hollywood, poor man. He, however, caught the imagination of a pub owner, in the '70s who named a seedy little bar Odadammed's Head. A further development he wouldn't have thought much of was that the pub became a place for petty goons, hardened laborers-- hardly the sort of men he'd have befriended. Oddadamed's was a classic case of death liberating one from truths one needn't have known. For, another thing the place was infamous for was illegal trafficking of the contraband-- crack, weapons, women. The latter making the name of the pub an entirely unintentional, unenviable sexual innuendo. This, I take, would have been pretty hard hitting stuff, even for a steely, ruthless soldier who chopped off men's arms with their own swords.

The streetside artist is now finished with his portrait. The woman gushes and the man pays, not without bargaining on the price. Cheap bastard! I wonder if Jane would have liked a portrait of the two of us. Only if we were painted in neon, I suppose. I can tell she'd prefer caricatures to portraits. In art as in real life, my woman.

The closest thing we have to a portrait is a picture we took together in front of the Odadammed statue and fountains at the square. It is dark, neither of us sober, and lights of many colors illuminate our inebriated smiles as we make to take a dip in the fountains. This was years ago. It was more of a joke to us than symbolic or commemorative. We hated the statue of Odadammed. A ridiculous, ostentatious installation with too many lights and silly fountains. One would think the warrior's poor ghost had enough to resent but no! In the summer of 1987, a protesting crowd of homosexuals and transvestites had set fire to the Odadammed's head pub, prompting that iconic headline in The Daily Gazette: Gays Ravage Odadammed. It was a revolt against the oppression, harassment and bias by the local police. The incident caused much noise in the state, and before more chaos ensued, the then mayor quickly commissioned a monument in memorial to appease the gays. This gave way to the statue of a warrior atop a horse, in Roman sandals and a skirt (The sculptor erroneously thought he was Greek, when Oddadammed was actually Syrian) which now stands at the square christened Odadammed's Square (lending to the widely used, derisive schoolboy phrase 'as square as Odadammed'). Water from four different fountains coalesced at his feet. Each fountain representing, supposedly, different kinds of people. To people of different kinds, Odadammed is a relic to this day. You can see them devoutly walking around in T-shirts printed with the screaming headline from the '80s incident, in groups of twos, holding hands and taking pictures. The Odadammed Ravaged t-shirts, bearing the picture of some artist's representation of what he thought Odadammed looked like, holding another man's hands with a cheeky grin, some say, is more popular than t-shirts bearing the city's name, making Odadammed a veritable gay icon, and a universal pop-culture phenomenon.

We never bought those t-shirts. As a rule, every tourist city has a separate set of things to do and buy for the tourists, none of which is in any way connected to what the locals do. The locals, for instance, would never eat at the flashy food-joints near the bridge. it was simply something we never did. Just like Jane and I always hit the town on weekends(staying home is for the sober:Jane). Just how Jane and I never watched romantic comedies (I don't get them) or visited her parents(She can't stand their company) or wore red colored clothes (Red is too loud:J) or planned to holiday in the mountains(Bad memories of mine). As locals, we never went to the Museum of Love or visited cafe Rio. Which is what makes me uncomfortable today. Jane once spoke of how being a tourist- in spite of its obvious moronic trappings- was fulfilling. She thought tourists have no synthetic notions of what a city feels like, tastes like, where the best food is, or where the best bands play which gives them license to try new things without unimaginatively settling for what we always did. To try things without bias or prejudice. 'Being a tourist frees you from saying it's just something we don't do', she had argued, enthusiastically.

But we nevertheless considered Odadammed a place to only walk past. A means to an end. A colorful, sometimes eventful, flight to chosen destination. One never sat down at the Odaddamed square. That was what the tourists did. They ate and talked and took pictures. We always walked. It was one such walk that the fight broke. I said something about unfair judgment. She thought it was ironic. I asked why. For a man who judged indiscriminately, to ask for fair judgment was a little rich, she snapped. She was being unfair, I said. Why, she questioned brazenly. I never judge, I countered. She scoffed. I had walked off in rage. I heard a little bit about how I was the kind of man who never cared to listen to what a woman was saying because in my head, because I had already decided she wasn't smart enough. I had called her a vacuous bitch. Or something. That was the episode Jane and I had had. And the last one at that.

Now, as redemption, I do what every man hates to do. I wait. And I confront uncertainty. Possibly, rejection and heartbreak. In front of me, Oddadammed smiles a strange kind of smile. We share kinship over being misunderstood. At least you can change who they think you are, pal, he is saying to me, the skirt notwithstanding. Where I sit now, is at a table on a cobblestoned side-walk at the crossroads that lead to the monument at the square. I sit down where people always walked. Like one of the people Jane and I mockingly sympathised with. Poor geezers, we thought. He who sits at Oddadammed square having been our standard for extreme oddities. This brings me to another sorry snippet from Oddadammed's quiver. Say it fast, Jane had said excitedly, when we were walking from the bus station to the movies past Oddadammed once.

Oddadamed Square. Odd adammed square. Odd a dammed. Square. O da dammed square. I laugh as I repeat the name aloud to the bewilderment of a passing waitress. I sit at the square of the damned. Waiting with hope, where others always walked.


Epilogue:
I met Jane ten minutes later. I had hopelessly walked out of the cafe to be stopped by a bunch of tourists in Oddadammed ravaged t-shirts asking me to click a picture in front of the fountains. Just as I clicked, she tapped me on the shoulder and smiled sweetly. She was in a pretty red dress.

Interview: David A Bell

David A Bell is a Canadian professor of Electronics. He has written various textbooks which are widely prescribed to students of engineering. We interviewed him over email for the Dept of Instrumentation Technology's fest TransIT 2009. This was featured in the fest newsletter. The entire interview is presented here with minimal editing. His website is at www.Davidabell.com

1)Could you describe your engineering career from the start? How was the transition from being a student to teaching to writing texts that now serve as reference?

My first employment as an engineer was with the Shortt & Harlands in Belfast Northern Ireland where I was born and grew up. My transition from student to engineer was not difficult, in fact in some ways it was almost like a continuation of college. I shared an office with several other young recently-hired engineers, and nearby offices were occupied by older, experienced, engineers who were our supervisors. Our offices were also on the periphery of workshops staffed by technicians who constructed prototypes of our designs. The work atmosphere was relaxed and friendly.

After some years with Short and Harland I moved to Canada and worked for companies in Halifax and Ottawa. In my first engineering job we were still designing vacuum tube circuitry, because the available transistors were very unreliable. Thermal runaway was a major concern. However, reliable transistors soon became available, and then everything switched over to transistor circuits. Bipolar junction transistors (BJTs) had been introduced only in the last year of my studies, so I had to do a lot of reading to teach myself transistor circuit design. When field effect transistors (FETs) became available, more study was necessary to learn FET circuit design. Then, of course, integrated circuits became an ongoing area of study. I also attended many design courses sponsored by my employers. Obviously, continuous learning is part of every engineers experience.

As well as circuit and system design, much of my work as an engineer involved technical writing; specifications, design reports, test procedures etc. I also did some travelling to companies who were contracted to my employer, and in this case I reported on the quality and progress of a particular project.

During the first year of my teaching carreer I found myself working harder than at any time previous! This was because (in company with other new college professors) I was reviewing the subjects I had to teach, preparing lectures and tests, and writing laboratory investigation procedures. Ontario had just started twenty new Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology, and the resources we needed were not available.

2)How is teaching Electronics and Instrumentation now different from how you were taught the same subjects?

As mentioned above, the material studied has changed considerably. However, the learning process is still fairly similar; student attend lectures, study text books, perform laboratory investigations, solve problems, write tests. Practical hands-on experience testing circuits in a laboratory is very important. I have heard of colleges where students are only allowed to witness laboratory demonstrations, and I see this as quite unsatisfactory. The availablity of calculators and computer circuit simulation is a major improvement on my own student experience.

3)What is the usual process of writing a textbook?

With few exceptions, I was unsatisified with the available text books when I commenced teaching electronics. So, I always prepared student hand-out sheets explaining theory and showing problem solutions. The handouts became a major resource for my text book writing. I cannot say how long my first book took to write, because of the process of interesting a publisher in the project. The procedure was: submit an outline and six chapters to a publisher, rewrite the six chapters to incorporate an editor's suggestions, receive a rejection, and then start over again with another publisher. When I did get my first book published, and then signed a contract for a second book, the second book was written, edited, and published within a year. That was because I had all of the material for the second book in the form of student hand-outs.

I try to write exactly the way I would lecture. The material has to be clearly understandable to students. The content has to cover the items listed in most course outlines, and in each new edition I have added new material and deleted material that has become outdated or less important. Updating a book usually takes me a year of something less than full-time work in my present semi-retired situation.

4) Do you agree with the methods generally adapted to teach engineering? (in the context of Instrumentation and Electronics). If not, what are the methods you would recommend?

I tend to agree with the typical engineering teaching methods.

5) Are there any experiences that you've had as a part of your engineering career/teaching that have influenced your ideas on the field?

The following is a quote from the preface to one of my books:

I am convinced that an understanding of device and circuit operation is most easily achieved by learning how to design circuit. Circuit design is usually quite simple; much simpler than some methods of circuit analysis.

6)Everybody would love to know what you do in your free time. What are your interests apart from technology and teaching?

When my children were young we used to camp and go on canoe trips during summer, and ski in winter. I am long past skiing right now, and as I get older the Canadian winter seem longer. I have a sail boat that I sail on Lake Huron during summer. My wife is a retired elementary school teacher, and our children have all grown up and left home. We are recreational ballroom dancers, take dance lessons once a week, help out with beginner dance classes, and attend dances at least three times each month. We also like to travel. In May of this year we visited Peru, and next January we plan a trip to Egypt.