The fraud that was, The fraud that is!
I just finsihed my first set of examinations in Sweden today. And I am not relieved but saddened by it. Its not that I performed bad and hopefully I shall pass in both of them but it is the general feeling that has sunk in. Written Examinations are a fraud , everywhere. PERIOD.
The part of the reason is that if they are too easy then you are feel sad for being let off too easily and if they are too tough then you do not do well in them and hence the sadness. They have to be done like pasta. el dente. And paper setters are never great cooks and hence never get it right.
Most of the exams I have given in India are either too simple but long or either too tough. Most of the time you are left with the feeling If I had more time I could have done better. I had thought that would be impossible in Sweden with 4 hours for the exam. But today I did not realize how 4 hours flew by. The exam I was taking was Artificial Intelligence : Principle and techniques and It was like a full day assignment to be done in 4 hours. I did it the Indian way i.e. what ever comes to the mind at first write it down. The first quesiton was a knowledge representation and modelling question and the remaining quesitons were all based on this question . So may be I will do very well or not pass at all. So not fair at all.Written exams can never check how much you know. All courses should have tough assignments, labs and practicals but no exams please. The other course I took Inbygdda System atleast had tough lab part but not so difficult a paper. So Swedish examination is not better. I would say worse because the agony is for 4 hours and not 2 hours.
The second thing is that we should not expect a lot when we go to a new place. When I came to IIT , I had heard it was the best technical university in India but some how I had expected more. They are not better in terms of teachers ( I am not talking of my department alone but in general), though some of them are really good . It is wrong of us to expect all of them to be good. IIT may be the best coz they can provide you with more facilities at a lesser price ( it is subsidized DAH). The same thing a swedish friend had told me that when he had come to KTH he had expected more out of it because it was the among the best in Sweden. But he said this great line, "
if the best feels like this to me, how would it be in the universities which are not considered to be among the best"? That is all , I had expected more, May be i still got it but not in the form i expected it to be.
Common thoughts!
I have had the most scariest thought. For a long time I thought I was different, I was unique. I have thoughts entirely different from others. I am an individual not just an entry number. But I have realized through (blogs/mails/general googling) that so many of my friends , some of my enemies or some other unknown creature have had the same thought over time or are having them just as I write this now. Everything I wish to write about, someone has already written about it and better than I ever could. So how am I an individual if I do not have unique thoughts?
It scares the shit out of me.
But it also gives me peace that I am not alone. So many of us experience the same feeling of frustration, anxiety and doubt about where our lives are heading but never tell it to some other person. The weaker of us write it down, the stronger of us share it with a closed one. The strongest of us come over it. Why do I say the weaker of us? It is because that is what is what I feel . It takes more courage to say it to the face then put it on a piece of paper.
Which brings me to the question why do we have to rethink what somebody else has already taught out. Why can not we just believe in aristotle, plato or anybody at all? Why the need of experience?
I have the answers to somebody else's questions but not my own.
And
it scares the hell out of this devil.
Some eyes to make you laugh!!!
Are you one of those who make a checklist for everything you do : groceries, things to be done and other weird activities. Now I always check if I have enough pens for an exam ( the number will not be disclosed) before an exam and this is the list of all things ever used in an exam I could come up with before my 2B1446 Inbygdda System exam
1. Reference Book (if allowed)
2. Enought pens
3. Two pencils
4. An eraser
5. A calculator
6 A ruler
7. A compass
8 Mathematical tables
9. Chocolates to eat in an exam more than one hour
10. Water/ Juice / Any Drink which works for you
After the exam i have added one more thing to the list which will be discussed after a little while. Now swedish exams are usually 4 hrs long and you have enough time. Now the exam under mention had 20 questions which required not more than 1.5 hrs to do them in IIT time. Now yours truly was on the way of achieving this time (they may not be all correct!!!!) when suddenly something fell with a DUHH! on the table before me and I wanted to scream: what is the matter with you swedes, I am trying to finish a paper here. Before the scream found a voice, I noticed that i could not see clearly with my right eye. then the realization came to me : the right lens of my spectacles had fallen out and created the DUH! Now since I can not see clearly without my glasses ( I have a power of -8.5 dioptres for those who do not know), I stopped doing the paper and started to repair my glasses. Since I can not see it was not an easy task and neither in the end was i successful. After twenty minutes of this labour, I gave up since a guy decided to hand in his paper. I started doing the paper WITHOUT my glasses. Imagine the sight of me having paper so close to my head that I could smell it better than I could see it.
The ordeal ended in 2 hr 10 minutes with this conclusion and the following item in my list
spare glasses or a spectacle repair kit.
Btw I travelled back without my glasses 45 in subway though i confused the time for next train as 11 min when it was only 1 minute. I reachedd safely home and repaired the spectacles while wearing my other spectacles.
Have a laugh at the expense of inhastajar for I also laugh when I imagine my state in the exam.
Why IIT?
"Put Harvard, MIT and Princeton together, and you begin to get an idea of the status of IIT in India."
“The IITs probably are the hardest school in the world to get into, to the best of my knowledge,” says Vinod Khosla, who got into IIT about 30 years ago.
I wanted to right about the IIT-JEE. Then I googled and thought it has already been done. God I hate Google. But the more I hate the more I love it. I will do this some other day when I can do it better than today.
But then I will put up this little question:
If this Mr Khosla is right then "How did I end up here?" with a rank in 2 digits among 2 lakh people and that too only scoring less than 60% on the exam they thought was the toughest in the world.
Over achievers or Under Achievers??
For a long time in my life I was the idle student: who did his work on time, learnt all things by heart, tried to answer all the questions in class trying to show off my knowledge. In short I got good grades or the best grades. I topped my class for 8 years straight. I was the guy who set the examples for the others. They wished they could be like me, score like me and how I now wish I was not the student I was.
It is a phenomenon. I think it is experienced by lots of toppers or "over achievers" in India. I am going to talk about those people about which people think " man , he could not have it better in life, he has the best grades". He/She is going to make it big. Many of these toppers have had unfulfilled wishes, of the things they wanted to do, the music the wanted to compose, the paintings they wanted to create , the books they wanted to read or the sports they wanted to play But they never did. Because they thought they could lose all they had : because they believed that grades are all that mattered in life. Ever taken one of those free fall rides. They take you on the top and let you go. The feeling that you get in the stomach 1 sec before they let you fall, experience that. Now think that the ride malfunctions and you stay on the top for a very very long time. Not a nice feeling. That is what it feels to be the topper. The fear of falling is so high that you never feel the joys of falling down. This is only my theory but I think you can find lots of these achievers who would validate my gut feeling: of missing out on things. I can not be alone, I am sure about this. It is the affect of society and society moulds its individuals and individuals in turn mould the society.
I had this talk with a swedish professor about 4.6ers and 4.9ers. ( they have cgpas out of 5). This guy told me he had often come across better individuals in research who were 4.6ers than 4.9ers. Now I asked him can you explain why. Now he told me the individuals who have experienced failure and have learned to respond to it are better equipped for it are the ndividuals who succeed in research. Then he said and it is usually the case that the 4.6ers have experienced more failure. But he also said that in the 4.6ers there are people who like doing a lot then knowing a lot. You could know a lot and do nothing with it. But then i asked him " How can you stand those peopl who like knowing a lot but do nothing with it.?". Then he remarked : "It is there nature they like knowing a lot, they can not help it. Why should I care then?". Meeting this man made my day.
But this is my request to all the people who belonged to this category of "over achievers" once. You must have surely missed out on some things. Start doing them now. It is never too late. If you lost contact with your old friends coz you were too busy with the books, Call them up. If you missed out on playing : start playing. DO SOMETHING, ANYTHING. You may not become what you could have had you started out earlier. But it will open upto you ways of living you thought were never possible.
What are you waiting for?
Why are we afraid?
- Why are we afraid of coming up last?
- Why are we afraid of making a fool of ourselves?
- Why are we afraid of falling in love?
- Why are we afraid of the future?
- Why are we afraid of the past?
- Why are we afraid of losing what we have?
- Why are we afraid of change?
- Why are we afraid of doing what we love?
- Why are we afraid of losing the friends we have?
- Why are we afraid of not having enough money?
- Why are we afraid of letting go?
- Why are we afraid of wisdom?
- Why are we afraid of following our intution?
- Why are we afraid of the good in people?
- Why are we afraid of the bad in people?
- Why are we afraid of finding out who we really are?
- Why are we afraid of being afraid?
Yes Yes, No Problem?
Now why i had the longest day in sweden was this : I wanted to attend the India Day at KTH ( the university I study). This is one of the nicest courses any university can come up with : basically they choose 10 students in their final or prefinal year from different disciplines and ask them to choose a country to study in terms of sweden's investment and relations with that country. Now this group (which I had met in India) christened their project :
Project India 2005. So i really wanted to listen and I also decided to help them out a little like passing out flyers and stuff ( can not help my self) . Before i forget , passing flyers in country like sweden is difficult then it seems. But i really enjoyed.
Now the group had published a book about their views on India and the book title was " Yes Yes No Problem?". which I know can mean a lot of things but if you add the Indian sideways head shaking to it, then it symbolizes the Indian eagerness to help others no matter what situation he is in. Now i thought the title was a little sarcastic but the book turned out to be true in some ways so I have no grudges against them. (Thinking about putting up article on Education in India if i can find it).
But they said one of these things :
- There are people who are in India for a day and on returning home write a book about it.
- There are people who stay for a week and on returning write to the editor of newspaper.
- Then there are those who stay for a month that on returning home they are so awestruck and confused that they choose to remain silent.
I also heard this great thing from the Indian ambassador here : Mrs. Deepa Gopalan Wadhwa about population in India : At one time we were embarassed about our population but no longer now. This is one thing that is changing. The confidence in India. Somebody even tried to give explanation for this. Because the price of knowledge has become so low, the advantage of developed countries is slowly fading away. Indians are realizing people all over the world are nearly doing the same thing. Some famous indian said on outsourcing ( i am not good at remembering names) : "we just do not want your dull boring jobs, we want your fun jobs.. the good jobs... you can send your dull jobs to china." jatte bra.
Finally there was the typical thing which said what can sweden learn from india and vice versa: this i will not go into detail cause that will be done after four months.
At night i even met a nice prof who said " There is a difference between knowing a lot and doing a lot". What a great line. More about this later.
And as Mahatma Gandhi said :
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you and then they fight you and then you win."
Longest Day in Sweden
For the first time in Sweden i have been woken up from my slumber. Just had the longest 2 days of my life in Sweden. This is a tip for all people planning to go outside for studies : Never ever take a course with a Lab component. Since nobody gave me this tip , i did 2B1146 at KTH a course known as inbygdda system a.k.a embedded system where I had to right some programs for a soft processor (NIOS II for all the nerds) and download it on the board. But the problem is that you only get the board in your own lab turn and it takes too much time to get it checked. Its not that the experiments take that much time , it is like they do not have enough people to test it. So the thing was I wanted to skip class on wednesday ( for things i will tell you shortly). So the scenario was that I had to get 3 labs signed (out of 4) on last day. So i woke up early in the morning and went to the lab. But i am not that lucky. No extra boards. So wait on. So I sit in the lab and write code for the 4th Lab ( which i have not done) . At 1 i finally get i board and start working. Now this chinese Phd student is who is supposed to sign on my sheet to say it is done is like a real pain in the arse. I am done with the lab and he asks me an answer to this bull shit question in the preparatory tasks. Can the Lab setup produce CD quality???? I am stumped and i say i think the answer is no. Turns out the answer is correct but he wants to know the reason so that i do not know. So i Google ( google is god). Lab2 done.
Lab3 i run my code and call Him again. I tell him i have some error , Can you tell me where it can be. So he goes with his set of test cases and finally after 2 minutes says : This program is not right. Shish, " You are a genius" , i say in my head I had some bug with fixed point numbers so i had to study them and correct my code. But i finally managed to figure it out and did it. The chinese fadda asks me how can the program work right now when 5 min ago it was wrong. Dah????
But the final lab i was clever and waited for the professor. They are so much nicer and he just ran the code asked two questions and was done. Then finally I went for my swedish class. Never ever learn languages for fun. They teach you too much grammar. I HATE GRAMMAR. Finally my plight over at 9 in the night , i trudge back to my apartment, put a pizza in the oven eat it and do not go to sleep. I watch a movie and then go to sleep.
Nice day.
Learning??? Who cares??? I do....
I was reading this boring book on AI when this quote appeared to make the reading a little more interesting. The quote is by Aristotle and it goes like " In order to learn to do X we have to DO X." Try to substitute X by things you want in life and this sentence makes lot of sense. For example in order to learn to swim you have to swim. Or better still In order to learn how to live you have to do only one thing LIVE.
A month in Sweden has made me realize that Indians some where in their history forgot how to live in the present. We have a habit of living in the future. If I do this now , I can do something 5 years down the line and then I will live the life of my dreams. Life is not what you desire, life is what you have. Live it. Its like feynman's explanation of where the energy in the electron comes from when it moves from excieted state to lower state. It is not there in the past or anything, It comes from the process. Its like the bag of letters for words never ends. The same is with life. Learn to live first and then you get more life back. Smile at a person you do not know. He will smile back ( if he is not a devil like me). No time in life comes twice. If it is gone, say Bye Bye to it forever.
Some people say a lot of crap but they somehow unknowlingly or knowlingly say some awesome lines. I wish I could do that. The line that make me think about this is that "To learn something new first unlearn". I don't know why we live in the future. If somebody knows i am all ears. Study hard to get into IIT, then come and study so you can get a good job, MBA or GRE.. the wants and desires are useless. And I see some people who chose to follow their desires and then i see people giving up on things they really want to do in life and working to get a life to pays well. The choice , the doubt of whether the things you really want in life are REALLY the things you want is like a spider web at the age when the person is in the incubation period of thinking about these things. The Greeks did two things for themselves - they played a sport for the physical fitness and played a musical instrument for the fitness of the soul. When did we decide to leave out the things that really mattered in life? Friends, Family and more importantly the self. So to live in a new way we have to unlearn the old way. I donot know it. But i am trying.
Swedes do not give a damn about others. They care as much about their family but for no one else. ""Me first. You never. I don't care what you think. I live the way i want to. "" Indians go this way "You first. You right. I may be wrong. I care what you think. I live the way people want me to ". One of the things i have learned that you do not have be sorry. Swedes seldom use the word please or sorry. I am my master nothing to be sorry about. But the swedes say a lot of thank you. But then they carry no debts or something. Done and said for , move on. Also if you live by yourself you need more than one chance to find the truth. And here where swedish excel. They believe in giving second chances. How many times can a swede sit for an exam . 10 times and no need to do the lectures and assignments again. Just the exam. Exams and numbers do not determine learning. There is no social stigma on failing. Fail, try again... until you succeed. But we have so many people which makes the attitude ..." You failed once, What are you good for".
You got a chance and you failed. Live with it for the rest of your life. I DO NOT HAVE TO and I DO NOT WANT TO. I want to live and experience life to the full not start living it when I am too old to live it.
thats all for today. Life calls. I venture out in the dark in the direction of the light. Wish to find you somewhere in the dark.
I don't care anymore...
First a set of warnings to the readers of this page.... - On retrospection you will not find anything new in this blog which you have not already read or heard somewhere before. So DO NOT waste your time unless you have lots to spare.
- It may get a little boring ( ok Lot boring) sometimes coz i tend to go on and on and on and on.......
- Finally it may seem to random and unorganized for I love to live in chaos and i type slower than the speed ideas sift through my mind.
So if you are ready to take the plunge take regular deep breadths and read on...For a long time in the dictionary in my head there were two words that came up in my head when i tried to describe myself in one word ( one of those questions you get everywhere). But then one day i learned this new word ambivert which you can guess is a mixture of qualities of both introversion and extroversion and that is what i am. I was not one of those who was going to share my deepest darkest feelings with every luncatic who wanted to know what was happening in somebody's life for i feared what that person may feel about me if we ever met in person. That was a fear that kept me from blogging for a long time. But now i do not simply care what others think about me. This has come about during last two months in my life in which i have had time to think about all those mind wrenching questions that people consider philosophical. I never understood that crap. The rubbish way of trying to explain life in words that no body understands but no I know that life can not be put into words. Period. It can only be experienced. I am not a well read individual but there is no greater joy than reading or hearing the write thing at the write moment in your life. For the first time in my life I am not in a race. A race to run faster, a race to run farther and a race to run for running sake. For I am lost and too tired to run. I have no destination to run to. So I sit down to enjoy the view around me and I am loving all I am seeing. There is also one more word that i can be described with ( not that i like the description very much). I am an IITian (how i would love to kill the person who coined it). Not a person or an individual but an IITian. But its the place i can both simultaneously hate and love. The place has helped me experience so much life that i love it. I hate it for the price i had to pay to get this experience. And now i am away from that place i love it even more but i also hate it even more ( to be elaborated in the future writings). This blog will also serve as a log of my days in sweden. I am going to follow somebody's advice and write the experiences as they happen instead of writing them about later after too much thought. There is one word that i love about Sweden. It is the word lagom which means not too much and not too little. In every aspects of life the word to follow - Lagom. Think about it. Finally the last word ( i promise) that describes me is Shaitan Raj. For i will not let you live in peace while i am still around and i will force the dead to come to life and live again. Also i thank the Two Great people with a lesser mortal who christened this name.More to follow from the devil in heaven..... So keep reading....P.S. The warnings indicate that i still care what other people think but now its only lagom.
