After coming to IIT, in between those innumerable assignments, I could hardly find time to pick up a book. This year though, is different. Over the past few months my reading frequency has picked up and I am back into the groove of finishing a book at an average of one book a week, a nice mix of fiction and non-fiction. To list the books,

1. Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
2. The Prestige by Christopher Priest
3. God of Small Things by Arundathi Roy
4. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
5. The Argumentative Indian by Amartya Sen
6. India After Gandhi by Ramachandra Guha
7. Bartemius-Ring of Solomon by Jonathan Stroud
8. A Song of Ice and Fire – Game of thrones by George R.R Martin
9. A Song of Ice and Fire – A Clash of Kings by George R.R Martin
10. A Song of Ice and Fire – A Storm of Swords by George R.R Martin
11. Dune by Frank Herbert
12. Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert
13. Children of Dune by Frank Herbert

Mom’s reaction:

My reaction:

Enough said.  :-)

Anyway the main question is how do you test for the credibility of something like astrology, existence of God and other abstract things which is militantly supported by more than a billion people?  It may be true that astrology lacks scientific evidence but there maybe, just maybe an iota of truth in it.  Maybe it is not yet good enough to be called Science.  What if the astrological “principles” are sort of pointing in the correct direction but we are not able to grasp or make a breakthrough?  The problem is that if a person dare says a word against astrology, the entire populace of India seems to find trolling an enjoyable idea.  It is difficult to argue with people who weave stories about how astrology predicted one particular event in the life of one particular person.  This is where the beautiful concept of Null Hypothesis can make the difference.

The main idea of the Null Hypothesis is that you assume a certain stance unless proven otherwise.  Or to put in more compact terms, the default position.   To demonstrate the idea of Null Hypothesis, let me take an example of a random coin toss experiment.  I assume that the default position is that the coin is unbiased, that is, there is as much chance of getting heads as there is of getting tails.  So, I toss the coin 10 times.  Now the expected number of heads that I should get is 5, assuming independent trials.  But what if I get 7 heads and 3 tails?  Can I declare “confidently” that the coin is biased?  Not really.  What if I toss the coin 100 times and I get 70 heads?  Just maybe.  What if I toss the coin 1000 times and I get heads 700 times?  Now it is more apparent that the coin is biased, but is it biased (0.65,0.35) or (0.70, 0.30)?  I do not know that yet.  I need to conduct more experiments.  Of course this is just the property of Law of Large Numbers.  The question is how many trials do I require before being say “95% confident” that the coin is biased?  There is a bit of mathematics involved in it, which I will not go into the details of.   So let me assume that in I need 70 trials out of 100 to turn up heads to declare that with 95% confidence the coin is biased.  This is termed as “Rejecting the Null Hypothesis with 95% confidence”.

Now that the tutorial on Null hypothesis is over, let’s see what can be done regarding astrology.  The main problem with astrology is that there are so many contentions regarding the rules that it becomes difficult to have a comprehensive test.  So, a manual regarding the rules of astrology needs to be prepared such that there are no evident contradictions.  If the argument is that astrology is too vast a subject to be put down into a manual, let them take a small part of it, say zodiac sign and one dominant characteristic of the person belonging to that sign.  Now we need to prove that “most” of the times the Zodiac signs and the trait in question are predictable.  So, it becomes a binary random variable akin to the coin toss experiment – heads if the person has the same traits as the one predicted by the Zodiac sign, tails otherwise.  One obvious problem is what the Null hypothesis should be.  If my thesis is that the theory of zodiac sign is truly random, we take (0.5,0.5) as the null hypothesis.  If I believe that it predicts the behaviour 60% of the times, my null hypothesis would be (0.6,0.4).

Either way, it should be an interesting experiment.  I wonder about the technical feasibility of such a project.  Well, if not the entire nation, maybe at a smaller scale inside the insti campus.

Any views?

The common part about all these resolutions is that I have succeeded in keeping none of them.  This year I have come to the conclusion that I need to become healthy, a resolution bordering on the “IMPOSSIBRU”.

After being unable to wake up in the morning for two days on the trot, I am almost on the verge of giving up. Anyway, Adhok after paining me enough has made me register for the 10k Auroville run on February 12th. Right now, I can jog a maximum of 1.1 kms at a stretch before I run out of breath. From my hostel till Elec Department. Tomorrow, my training schedule states I have to run 4kms. Sigh. Keeping my fingers crossed. The main purpose of recording this here is so that I can shame myself into running if I ever stop again.

PS: After much contemplation, I have decided that I should increase my blogging frequency, given that I hardly have anything to do this semester.   Around 5 posts per month is my current aim.  Let’s see how things pan out.

Update: Finally. Jogged 4kms. Or rather jogged for 3.3kms and walked 0.7kms. From hostel till Velachery gate continuously. Walked from there till BT-department-turning. Jogged again till the hostel. I am quite sure that I will have sore legs today. Day after tomorrow, I am supposed to run 5.2kms. OMAIGAWD.

It did lead to quite a response in a couple of social networking sites, healthy discussions in Google Plus with a professor and a more trite, bordering on savage discussion on the Colloqium Page in Facebook which unsurprisingly took a turn towards questioning the parentage of some of the moderators. I observed a couple of days back that it was the most viewed post in my blog and realized that the administration has actually taken steps to install an air-conditioner in CRC. So, I will be bold enough to claim that _MY_ blog made the administration to take notice of the plight of the students and do the needful.  So with this momentum behind me and the associated self-pluming which comes with maintaining a successful blog, I will now selflessly, with all my expertise, delve into what I think is the second major reason freshers are the way they are and hopefully something will be done about it.

To go further into this analysis, I first ought to apprise you of two kinds of torture. One, the humane way. Pull out a tooth, piss on a stove kind of torture. It is over before you know it. The second, the route taken by those bereft of either civilization or civility. Like a HS department English exam where you write furiously in no more than 5000 words what Wordsworth thought the difference between white and yellow daffodils were. Or Analog Circuits Exam where you stare at the question paper for three hours hoping that by divine intervention you can make sense of the question. The slow, painful, repetitive, time-has-come-to-a-stop kind of torture.

Belonging to the subset of the second kind of torture is the one laid down sometime in 1960s, when hostels were being built. Every morning, thousands of kids are loath to open their eyes afraid that they have to face this cruel, brutal and unrelenting beast, a beast more savage than grumkins and goblins, just the image of which would turn men into weeping crybabies. This structure built by a man long-lost in living memory and cursed by all and sundry ever since, is akin to the great sphinx of yore. It challenges you to a battle which ought to be won before it lets you pass to your destination. It is not an easy task to defeat this beast. Every day, many fall prey to it and surrender, only to face it again the next day. It is not the difficulty in traversing it that gives it the power but the constancy, the knowledge that it is there everyday unfailingly, a grim reminder of the eternal struggle to be faced before you can enter the hallowed portals of your department. I introduce to you, gentle reader, with a hint of trepidation, the monster – the upward slope from Gurunath to Cauvery hostel.

This two-hundred-metre-long monster continues to be the bane of all freshers who foolishly, being in the green of their youth try to tackle the monster armed with nothing but a newly procured creaking cycles sold by BSA at a discount(only to IITians, mind it). After a couple of months, the comfortable bed under the mild breeze of a fan becomes more seducing than the classes on the other end of the battle, and all the enthusiasm present withers down like leaves on the onset of winter. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the biggest tragedy plaguing the institute now.

Hopefully, the administration will take suitable measures to level the ground and destroy this monster. I will keep my fingers crossed. Till then, the institute bus will be my saviour.

It is interesting to note that there exists a finite set of “incidents” which have happened at school and everytime we meet, we laugh our asses off, remembering them. Everytime it is the same set of incidents. Narrated in the same style. Still it somehow seems to be funny. Always. I can recite these incidents while sleeping or dangling from a helicopter or facing a gun or all the three simultaneously and still laugh like a maniac. Let me recount one of them. We had to submit a “letter to father” in Kannada as a homework assignment. You know those fake letters in a format which no one uses. Respected-Father-How-are-you?-I-am-doing-well-How-is-mother?-Convey-my-regards-blah-blah-blah. Mundane, uninteresting stuff. My school used to start at 11:30 AM. So, I used to leave my house at 9:30 and reach school by 9:45. One of the muggu junta would turn up around 10. I, shamelessly copied the homework till the classes started. Considering that 90% of the class were copying the notes which other 10% wrote, it was a very efficient process and by the time class started everyone was done with the homework. Perfectly co-operative game. But, these things had its own drawbacks. On this particular occassion, I took the book and copied down the letter-to-father “makki-ka-makki” style. Lots of people copied from the same book. We all go smiling to the class and submit it. Next day, the teacher storms into the class seething with anger and asks, “How many kids has this…this Garudadwajan fathered? Apparently 40 out of you, 50 idiots.”

Oh, the way we laughed. I am surprised the roof didn’t fall on us that day. I miss it. I wonder how many of these incidents, I can take away from my past five years here. Quite a few, I think. An addition to these finite set of “incidents” happened two days ago.

“This is the end. My only friend.”

Damn it!! Strike that out. Tear the sheet.

Burn it. Out!! Out, you foul, filthy, defiling stench of clichés.

I started writing this article thinking that I will write spectacularly and drown the reader in that sweet feeling of nostalgia without being cloying or nauseating, but the final product turned out to be a massive junk of clichés. Damn, even saying cliché is such a cliché.

Let me tell you, gentle reader the reason behind writing this article. It is almost mandatory for every final year chap with a functioning blog to write a post describing his time in the institute. I am no different. Like every other final year guy, I tend to picture myself as a wise grand old man handing out “wisdom” to juniors. In the first draft of this article, I delved deep into the waters of nostalgia and as I found out later much to my disappointment, they are not unchartered waters. Nostalgia is a sin every man has been committing since the birth of time(or is it the time of birth?). Hence, any new articles on nostalgia can be expressed as a linear combination of writings on nostalgia of the entire human population since the beginning of time.

So, to do justice to my engineering education, which I am afraid I may forget too soon, I have mathematically modeled Nostalgia:

where,

• represents the Nostalgia vector of a person i. 

• It spans the Writing Space, where is a function which gives the number of elements in the vector .

• It should be noted that the has been integrated over time to give the vector at the present time t, for nostalgia is a sin man has been committing since the birth of time. 

• An assumption that I make is that while writing an article on nostalgia, the content will depend only on other articles which induce nostalgia.   I am neglecting other possible influences like Characteristic Writing Equation and other quirks out of it for the sake of simplicity.

• The total population of the world is N.  Assuming that a person i has had finite time to go over articles written by the total world population, we would like to define a , which takes the value 1, if the person i has read the article written by j, 0 otherwise.  I call it Nostalgia-Delta function.

• A person i is influenced to different extent by different people.  . This dynamics is captured by the matrix .  I do a summation over the entire population and integrate over time to get the nostalgia vector for person i.

• The term signifies the error.  If I neglect model errors, I can assume that this term quantifies the originality of the article.

You may be wondering why I am writing this….this…for lack of a better word… mathematics taken from a mad hatter’s hat.   To satiate your curiosity, I would like to state my objective function.  I wanted this post to be different from those millions of other nostalgia-inducing-boring-inane-silly-stupid-posts on the web.  So my objective would be to:

where,

denotes the Frobenius norm.

I hope I achieved my objective. 

You didn’t read the equations, did you? What do you want me to say? You want to read that stinking cliched article, don’t you? Meh :-/ Fine. It will come.  Soon enough.

If there exists Gods, the most powerful ought to be the God of clichés.

PS:  Don’t call an ambulance and admit me to the hospital for being a cuckoo.  I just wanted to test this script called LaTeX2WP to convert documents from LaTeX to WordPress style.  It works fine. 

Woe is mine for I can not sing.  This realization did not dawn upon me till recently.  I am not saying I sing badly.  To sing badly is to sing off-key.  Off-tune.  When I sing there is not even a faintest hint of a key.  A donkey braying or a monkey growling can pull off a tune.  My case.  No tune.  When I do try what I generously classify as singing, my thorax gives up and out comes what at best can be called an overly-dramatic speech or at worst Additive White Gaussian Noise.  When I was in first year, I sang my heart out to a couple of people I had just met.  This particular song, in front of Tifanys.

At the end of 3 minutes, they asked me if it was a recitation of a poem.  Of Kabir.  “Don’t be stupid, I think it is Premchand”, quipped another.  And they were dead serious.  As serious as one gets before Analog Circuits Quiz.  I dismissed their statements as mere trifles as I prepared to stun my wingmates and the monkeys that peep into the bathroom with my no-key rendition of the entire spectrum of thoracic noise, ranging from Talat Mahmood to Iron Maiden, from Mukesh to Marilyn Manson, from Mannadey to The Beatles.  Only recently did I realize the import of their statement, when I heard myself “singing”.  No wonder people don’t take kindly to any of my suggestions regarding songs.

This reminds me of another incident.  After 10th standard board exam results were released, I was made to run around to get admission forms from different colleges.  At that time I was a sucker for the song, “Sweet Dreams” by Marilyn Manson.  On a particularly hot day, while I was waiting in the queue to get the admission form,  Marilyn Manson descended upon me and I started singing.  This song.

I think I traumatized a couple of girls standing in the queue.  No sane person will listen to you kindly, if you start singing – “Some of them want to use you, some of them want to be used by you”.  I do not remember what happened after that.  I think they left the queue.  And I didn’t join that college.

Unfortunately, I can’t blame this on genes.  For, when I was born, the legend goes that my mother, like many mothers do, didn’t say “Mera beta doctor banega” or “Mera beta Engineer banega”.  She apparently said, “Mera beta Anup Jalota banega”.  Now, the only resemblance between me and Anup Jalota are the presence of multiple chins and a belly of roughly the same size.  It is not that they didn’t try to make me proficient in music but what can one do when one is tone deaf.  On the other hand, my dad is an awesome singer.  Not a professional, no training of any sort.  He always wins the Best Singer Prize in our apartment complex and at his workplace.  Me.  I am the black sheep of the family.  Sad, isn’t it?

Anyway, I am happy that I realized the “cup”-ness of my vocal capability now.  Better late than never.   Maybe a bad pitch in time saves nine?  :-/

I will sign off with this song. 

The answer hit me, when I was reading this book called, “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell, a very interesting read.  The essence of the book is that after a certain threshold, a delta increase would lead to massive changes.  So, I asked myself, what made me give up in the first year.  It was not internet or LAN as I didn’t have access to both.  Was it interaction with seniors?  Not really.  I was a wimp in my first year, afraid to approach seniors.  Was it because I was burnt out intellectually after two years of preparation for JEE-supposed to be one among the toughest exams in the world?  No.  I was excited.  I was looking forward to learn.  And come on, JEE is not that tough.  Was it because the professors were boring?  Even though that seems to be the most plausible answer, again my answer would be no.  I stopped listening to classes even when the professors were the best in their field (For instance, Dr. Chandrakumar in Chemistry).  It wasn’t the case just with me.  Even when the topics were interesting and professor really good, a large percentage of students preferred to while away their time doodling in their notebooks rather than listening.

I religiously followed classes for a fortnight or so.   Then, I gradually lost interest in class.  By the end of first semester, the habit of mugging up everything just the day before exam started.  The senate has a one-stop solution to every problem like this.  Limit the freedom.  So, internet was blocked for 11 hours a day, attendance requirement increased to 85%.  Freshers shouldn’t go outside their room after 10PM.  No food in campus after midnight.  Bullshit.

So, why did people stop listening in class?  The answer is simple.  My claim is that it was because the classes were held in CRC.  CRC rooms are huge with the capacity to seat around 250 people for a lecture.  Unfortunately someone in the administration really used their brains.  All the fans in the room are mounted on the wall.  These fans don’t subtend the entire hall.  Of course, they are fans made in IIT Madras.  We in IIT Madras believe in precision.  You sit right beneath the fan, you will be comfortable.  A small move by an inch would make you a constant source of salt water.  So, in Chennai where the temperature hardly drops below 30 degrees, the poor fresher is made to sit in the class profusely sweating while the professor rants about Bra-Ket notation and Hilbert spaces.  And the professors complain.  If you come early to the class, running from the mess, you may get a seat near the fan but the effect is nullified because you will be sweating so much by all the running that you just want to crash off in the class.

This is the reason I stopped listening to the classes.  I asked around a bit and most people agree with me.  If the administration really wants to improve the grades of the students, all they need to do is install fans in CRC.  I am pretty much sure, grades will improve by a considerable margin.

Among the many things that should be a strict no-no for parents, the one which tops the list and wins hands down is visiting their son’s hostel/room.  And especially, if you know my mom or have visited my home in Bangalore you will know what I am talking about.  There is not a speck of dust in my house.  It is immaculate.  You could as well use my house for manufacturing semiconductor devices.  Things are ordered and arranged and labeled.  Monica Geller is extremely messy according to my mother.  Once the much fabled great-morning-cleansing-ritual starts at an ungodly 6AM, I get rudely woken up, asked to move from place to place, dancing while I try my best to get out of mom’s way as she moves hither and thither with a broom, the vacuum cleaner and a scotch-brite, mildly resembling a superhero.  The ritual goes on for around three hours every day.  Then, to worship the sanctity of the place, I am instructed not to climb on the bed or mess up the place in anyway for at the least an hour.

On the other hand, I am infinitely messy.  Normally, half my wardrobe and all my books are on the floor.  For instance, right now next to my shoes lying in all its glory is a half-consumed cucumber, a brick to break open the lock and my tie.  So, it is no surprise that I strongly discourage my parents from visiting me here.  I was mildly successful in this regard, with my parents visiting me three times in the past four years even though they are hardly a night’s journey away.  In May, while I was just about to go to Mumbai for my internship, my mom drops the atom bomb.  She said she was going to visit me when the semester starts.  I was traumatized.  I had just stuffed whatever clothes I could lay my hands on within a two feet radius into the bag before leaving for Bangalore.  There were lots of Kurkure packets lying on the floor, a dozen bottles of coke strewn all over, cheese stains on the bed, well..I can go on and on.  So, I called up Joseph who had my spare key and asked him to clean my room.  The back-stabber refused.  Can you believe it?  He actually refused!!  I came to know that Umashankar was staying in the campus for the summer.  I asked Joseph to give the key to Umashankar and I decided to fly from Mumbai to Chennai without mom’s knowledge and clean the room.  What other option did I have?

I don’t know how it exactly happened, for it happened really really fast.  It turned out that I would be arriving in Chennai one full day before my mom.  Relief!!  So, I arrive at Chennai and the first thing I do is start cleaning my room which, trust me is a daunting task.  After three hours of intense cleaning, I felt like a warrior just out of the battle.  And the first thing my mom said when she visited me was, “Eeeek!!  How can you live in such a mess?” and proceeded to start the cleaning.  The area was cordoned off and I was banned from my own room.  The cleaning lasted for all of five hours(Note that my room here is 8X8 feet in area).  Much to my chagrin and my wingmates amusement she had got curtains, scotch wipes, table cloth, small pillows for the bed and many more things to beautify the room.  After vehement protests from my side and lots of negotiations a compromise was arrived at.  The table cloth can stay, but everything else had to go.  Finally, around 5PM, it was done.  I went back with my mom to drop her off at the hotel.  My wingmates were wonderstruck at the transformation, my room had undergone and have taken photos.  Well, I am not complaining.  My room is right now, I am proud to say is the cleanest in the entire campus.