ThePanda

How much space do three years of your life and half a lifetime occupy? How do you pack all of that into boxes, ready to be crated away to people and destinations unknown, imagining people’s reactions as they read your comments along the books margins, as some unknown person somewhere flipped through the most intimate of your academic memories, trying to put a price on the paper contained therein, imagining how people some years from now would react while flipping through your old scraggy computer books, and thinking about opportunities lost (an invite to the GYLC, and to the Summer@Brown program in 2002).

I was sorting and packing a very small part of the last three years and half of my lifetime into pretty big crates earlier today, clearly marking those pieces of my history which I wanted the school to have, those that I wished to preserve (lots of things, including but not limited to my stamp collection, my autographed Ruskin Bond, my Feynman’s Lectures in Physics, my copies of The Art of Computer Programming, Dirac, and Neumann ), those that I wanted to give away to targeted people, those that I couldn’t care less about (essentially those which my parents would be distributing, to keep their commitments to society and social welfare) and those that should sold of to the kabadi wallah. For those who don’t know about kabadi wallahs, well they are a uniquely Indian solution for recycling things, these guys go around collecting paper and stuff, pay you by the killo, and then sell those papers off. They earn a lot more than they pay you for such things as magazine (especially imported glossies, things like Vogue), and books, and make a pretty decent profit on waste paper. Either ways four boxes (two of which are filled with waste) and one table down the line, I have begun wondering about the number of boxes which would fit in all that lines the two rooms that I seem to occupy, and I have been reminiscing about all those interesting times I spent with the books that are now going to go away, and all the fun and the hysteria, the sadness and the trouble that those books have been, and I am somehow saddened by the entire prospect of packing all of those things up.

Don’t get me wrong on this, but somehow this entire packaging and cleaning operation that I seem to be running, is the only visible sign of my impending departure, and I have a feeling that one of the main things I would start missing when I am gone from here are the myriad of books and papers that seem to line my rooms, the books and the magazines which cover half of my bed, and the memories which they contain. Earlier today I ran into this collection of sanskrit essays written by my sanskrit tutor during his time as a student, and I suddenly started wondering about him. He was a wonderful teacher, sadly he disappeared, fell off the face of the Earth, I haven’t talked to him in eons, and he is one of those rather interesting guys who keep going off to foreign lands, weird places, staying and building friendships with absolute strangers. Oh well times change, things change, and while I am moving on, moving forward into newer better times, I am going to be giving away a huge chunk of what built me, a huge part of my life, and the one thing which defines my house and me for a lot of my friends. Ask around and people would tell you about huge piles of books thrown around carelessly, piles from which people don’t expect you to locate anything of value, but piles which on a whole have more value than any single person can judge at a glance. I read what I could, and perhaps someone else should begin reading those books now, perhaps it’s time that the books, some of which are second hand, went onto live with newer people and at new places, time that someone else learnt all that I did, and time that someone went through the few things that I did write on those books, time that someone else enjoyed what I once did.

Hope that my books have a good time, a better time than they had with me,, for they have served me well, they have always been loyal to me, and I am what I am because they never rebuffed me.

Ze Panda

P.S. If anyone needs a 2001 Princeton Review SAT 1 thingee, I have one in pristine condition lying with me.

Ask anyone who’s reasonably famous and you’d know that fame has a price, hell everything including success has a price. College successes to flight enquiries, all take a toll on you, though it is on days like today that you actually feel the burden, it is on days like today when the term “balance of payments” takes a truly new meaning. And while I am truly happy about getting through at Brown, it is on days like this that I wish that no one else knew about my getting through, or at least not the people who landed up today.

Ah well but then again it all begins with a social obligation, a repayment for a debt accrued or payment for a favor procured, a complex web of favors and returns, of deceit and help, of bureaucratic red-tape and a corresponding scissor. It actually began with a rather innocuous little order issued by the Government of India to prevent tax-evasion, especially by all those guys who somehow own a lil villa, or an island in the Caymans or the Caribbean, an order which requires that you have an income tax clearance before you fly out on a one way ticket, which is all very good and right, after all I see no reason why some poor bugger can’t be bothered about filing in tax returns when my parents are always so concerned about getting theirs filled in on time. But, and this is a big but (no I didn’t miss a t), I don’t pay taxes, never have, after all it’s not as if I am employed, and well getting an Income Tax clearance for someone who doesn’t pay taxes is kindda hard, after all how are the poor little buggers at the IT department supposed to know about your history, especially since the databases in different departments of the Government of India don’t network. Umm well either ways it is cases such as this which remind you of six degrees of separation, and it is in cases such as this that your father’s friend’s, friend’s, relative’s, friend is handy, but then not only do you have to pay your father’s friend but another one of his friends also, a few more relatives, and everyone else who your father’s friend deems as a beneficiary of your payment policy.

What a complex web of deceit we weave, I had my father’s friends, friend, and his son in today trying to get me to spew out tips on how to “crack” the June 5th SAT (I don’t know any tricks and tips) and that was followed by general questions on how to get through to a college, preferably an Ivy, or MIT, or Stanford (short of writing good, well thought out essays, and praying like hell, I don’t have any tricks for this either), and a myriad of other problems, which eventually went into the realm of ROI (return on investments) on an American education. Now this is my second encounter with educational ROIs in as many days, and having gone through the entire point twice over, I guess it’s high time I made my stand on this clear. I love studying, I love knowledge as a whole, and I truly love doing what I love doing, and that is the only kind of ROI I am looking at right now, yes maybe somewhere down the line I am going to have to start thinking about money (I sure do hope not, I like it the way it is) but at present all that I am looking for at college is an environment that lets me learn and enjoy learning. Sadly of late everyone seems to be asking me about how much money they’d get back for their 40k a year, and while I am pretty sure not too many Ivy grads are paupers, I don’t have exact figures on how much an average Ivy degree is worth monetarily. What is really sad about this entire prospect is that there are people like me out there, people who need financial aid, but people who are absolutely unconcerned about the ROI, and at the same time we compete for college spaces with people whose only concern seems to be earning money from their education. Now I am pretty sure you can earn money from an education acquired in any college, in any part of the world, yes I know Brown Alumni Magazine’s publisher, most Ivies and a lot of other people present data which shows that Ivy alumni represent one of the richest most powerful group of people worldwide, the Ivies also tell you about the insanely large number of people who end up as scientists, or doctors, or animators, some of whom are rich, yes, but people who do what they do because of the conviction that their task changes the world somehow, people who do what they do because they enjoy doing it. Maybe the level selectivity at the Ivies makes it more likely that you’d succeed, maybe the Ivies help you with building a network, maybe others at Ivies teach you something about how the world works, maybe there’s a cross pollination of ideas, but most of these activities are a result of living among people who enjoy doing what they are doing, a result of living among people who aren’t thinking about the ROI values on their education. Probably a certain percentage is thinking about the ROI on their education, but well I am not one of those, and I have no idea about how much I am supposed to gain in terms of monetary wealth out of an education, and people who ask me weird questions about things such as this bother me, they scare me about the consequences of running into a ton of similar people, and they scare me into thinking about the true aims of my education.

The only thing I have know all my life is that I want to be a scientist, maybe as a result of spending a li’l too much time at my father’s lab as a kid, but that’s the only thing that I have always known. I know I love physics, math and cs, but then there are other things I love too, I love anything (other than chemistry) which gives me knowledge that I enjoy, anything which gives me food for thought, and that is all I am aiming for right now, and as I sit here dreaming about the place I’ll be calling home for the next four years, I continue to wonder whether all that I have aimed for is a wistful dream, and I think here wondering about how much of a difference does the Ivy tag actually make. A long time ago I had learnt about Brown from a TV series, and the one thing that had drawn me to this particular university, one of the main reasons why I even tried finding out more about this, was the fact that this teacher in this particular series who had passed out from Brown had a very strong sense of character, an independent streak, and an I give a damn attitude, something which allowed her to express her individuality in a way that most of the other teachers in that series weren’t able to. And while this was a work of fiction with actors playing out these rolls, there had to be a reason for this particular sketch of a Brown graduate, as a quote on the Brown part of the DailyJolt so succinctly puts it, being in a majority at Brown is an insult, and that is the kind of environment I am hoping for, a place where my individuality is not questioned in the name of the common collective, and I don’t see how people who think about ROIs on their education could actually form such an environment, and that is why I hope the number of people actually calculating ROI values on their education are a minority rather than a majority (there I insulted a lot of students at Brown, a lot of future students too, me included).

Ze Panda

I don’t copy ideas for the blog, usually not. I rather enjoy going crazy and coming up with my own, it’s so much more fun, and it saves me the effort of acknowledging an idea, a title or some other tid-bit which isn’t common knowledge and has instead been taken (inspired) by someone else’s work. I got my visa yesterday, and there was a lil thing I needed a confirmation about and that took all of today (the US embassy at New Delhi is staffed by brilliant people, way better than those who man the visa section at the canadian high commission). Umm anyways now with a visa and a ticket lying right next to me (literally) my departure seems pretty imminent. Which is where inspiration comes in, a few days ago my friend ran an entry entitled “The Days before Departure” a description about his woes as he prepared to leave for New York City (Times Square on an Emirates flight nevertheless), and that kindda inspired me to do this entry on my experiences months before departure. I may follow this up in later days, weeks and months, with such moving entries as “The Weeks Before Departure”, “The Days Before Departure”, “D-Day”, “The Day After Departure”, “The Weeks After Departure”, “The Months After Departure”, and probably “A Year After Departure”, but then again I just might get bored and do nothing beyond this.

Now there are exactly 2 months 24 days for my departure from Delhi, and with everything in hand the feelings beginning to sink into me, finally, my parents on the other hand have long accepted that fact and moved on to phase two of what is begining to look like a skewed attempt at packing the entire house (at least my part of the house) and sending it behind me, or at least making a pretense of packing up the entire house and sending it with me. For one there’s the entire luggage issue, my parents have an uncanny feeling that I’d exceed the 20 kg luggage requirement by carrying, umm 4 pants, 3 t-shirts, 4 shirts and 8 more pieces of clothing, and my convincing them to the contrary has lil effect, but then again as my father has been (patiently) trying to explain they are scared about the fact that I am going to be traveling alone for the first time in my life and simultaneously at the same time taking my first international flight ever, leaving the country for the first time, and God knows how many other firsts. Oh well I hope my explanation has some effect on that part of the entire planning, packing, boxing operation that seems to be running out of my home of late.

Then there are friends, most of my friends, the truly good ones at least, are pleased as a punch that I am leaving, in fact at times they seem more excited than I do, weird as it may sound, especially considering the fact that at least one of them is going through a particularly rough patch of time. It’s at times like this that you really appreciate having friends and the fact that someone out there, someone not related to you is actually happy about the fact that you’re moving on, even though in the very act of progressing and moving on you might become more distant, you might not be a phone call away anymore, and that you might just lose touch, and it is times like this which convince me that humans are good, humans are compassionate and that chimps haven’t yet infected everyone. But then there are the awkward introductions to Brown, especially for those people who catch me on IM, on the phone, or in real life, basically people who have to be told about Brown, people who cannot be redirected to Brown’s website or the Wikipedia article on Brown. Conversations with these guys are awkward and weird to say the least, but I guess that’s what you’d expect when your University’s name is a color (it’s a bloody good university and I love it, so any comments on this rather weird statement might not be taken kindly). Umm either ways the conversations almost universally head off along this tangent (my answers not included)

Brown where’s that?
Providence what’s that?
Rhode Island, is that a city?
Oh it’s a state, where?
Ah Connecticut and Massachusetts are separated by a tiny state?
OK then why’s it called an island?

The conversations with strangers are sad, but then again I don’t enjoy talking to too many strangers either ways. Oh well that’s what pre-departure’s like right now, I’ll tell you more about it, when more comes into being.

Ze Panda

On a day when the chimps have started striking back, aiming most of their attacks at my friends, on a day when some chimpish organization handed out grades way below what my friends deserved, and on a day when my belief that this particular chimpish organization follows a policy of giving out grades which bear an inverse relation with ur abilities and intellect, on a day when I bought Apple Care, and on a day when almost no one seems to be online, I have exactly one question….

Firstly there’s this ad for Emirates (the airlines) on TV which tells u abt some NYC saying abt how ud run into everyone in the world if u simply stood at Times Square. Now I have never been to the United States, much less to NYC or Times Square, but well I have heard about the legendary crowded status that Times Square seems to enjoy and while I can believe that if you stand in Times Square for any length of time, you’d run into all sorts of people from a helluva lot of countries, I am still not convinced you’d run into the entire world. The advertisement shows no bushmen from the Kalahari, and they are pretty much a part of this earth, I am pretty sure there aren’t too many Innuits, Pygmys, Mogolian tribesmen, and other such groups standing on Times Square simply waiting for someone to look at them, and since these people aren’t represented on Times Square, how can everyone in the world be represented there. Hmm the way to actually accomplish any of this Emirates hooplah is to somehow collect every plane on the face of the earth, stuff people into these aircrafts (obviously at emirate’s expense) and fly them to New York so that they could actually stand at Times Square, and so that you could actually meet everyone on the face of the earth.

Oh what the heck, this is obviously one of those entries which puts my sanity into doubt, but well like everything else about me even that part of me is fashionably undetermined.

Ze Panda

P.S. Head off to Laura’s NYC Tales to read about some true stories from NYC, stories grounded in fact, rather than in the murky depths of my currently unreliable brain.

P.P.S. Being Zaphod Beeblebrox seems like an appealing option at this point of time, an extra head couldn’t hurt

P.P.P.S. I am gonna have to start linking to H2G2 instead of Encyclopedia Galactica some day soon, saddly the Earth version of the H2G2 has yet to acquire the same qualities as the Ursa Minor version, and the commlink b/w Ursa Minor and the Earth are untested as of now.

P.P.P.P.S. My being sane/insane is yet to be determined.

... And I don’t even like GUIs, but then again Cocoa has a few serviceable components that make it mucho useful for a lot of things. For one there are the NSImage and NSBitmapRep classes, mighty nice and rather friendly ways of accessing bitmaps and 8-bit channel data for all sorts of picture, umm well mostly for JPEGs, GIFs, TIFFs, PICTs and BMPs (sadly no PNGs, I have rather fallen in love with the PNG format) and well I have been playing around with image analysis progs for the first time ever… There’s this nice experiment I did with adding random noise and then trying to remove or at least lessen it, and well I have a fair idea of how to separates objects and backgrounds and I am kindda working on comparing and recognizing similar objects, but then again that’ just a lousy way to spend the hot days that Delhi seems to be spewing out now-a-days… Oh well that and the li’l bit of photography I do manage to get done…

Ze Panda

@interface [class-name]:[superclass] {
   [instance-variables]
}
[method-declarations]
@end

@implementation [class-name]:[superclass]
{
   [instance-variables]
}
[method-declarations]
@end

That in short is what an Obj-C class looks like, umm well except for the fact that most (but not all) put the interface and implementation on different files…. Now notice a rather interesting thing, not only does Obj-C force u to separate out the implementation and the interface but it also, rather inexplicably allows u to add instance variables in the implementation part of it. That added with the fact that there r abt a billion ways to add protocols (what java programmers call interfaces) including a few which do not visibly involve a protocol inclusion definition on the class implementing a protocol, and u have a programming language which teeters on the edge of science and art, especially if ur learning it by going thru example code (I am)... But well it’s a nice language and I already know C, and that makes Carbon less of a challenge as compared to Cocoa (Java or Obj-C, and I don’t like Java) and well I need a challenge at this pt of time….

Ze Panda

The plugs were obviously peeved with yesterday’s entry ‘coz the incoming voltage has been low through most of the day (I suspect low enough for me to plug in 110V rectangular pronged plugs into 220V round plug points), and well the lights have been dimming through out the day… This is one of those moments in time when I actually want to live in a Flinstonian world with no fear of BSES (fancy name for the energy company) switching off power at odd times of the day, low voltages, burnt appliances and the like, a world with firefly powered light bulbs… But then again that’s lil more than a dream…

Oh and in a day of sloganeering and quotes by a myriad of ppl there was only one quote that I never came across, one of the more appropriate quotes on this day: vox populi, vox dei….

Ze Panda