Tag: 2007

  • Laurie Baker and COSTFORD

    It’s very sad that peope are recognised only after their death.

    Just for reading when I am free:
    1. http://in.geocities.com/c_ncr/costford/architecture.html

  • Quality: Something to Look at Later

    From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:


    “He’d been speculating about the relationship of Quality to mind and matter and had identified quality as the parent of mind and matter. This Copernican inversion of the relationship of quality to the objective world could sound mysterious if not carefully explained, but he didn’t mean it to be mysterious. He simply meant that at the cutting edge of time, before an object can be distinguished there must be a kind of non-intellectual awareness, which he called awareness of quality. You can’t be aware that you’ve seen the tree and between the instant of vision and between the instant of awareness there must be a time lag. We sometimes think of the time lag as unimportant. But there’s no justification foor thinking that the time lag is unimportant – none whatsoever.

    The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The time lag, is always in the past and therefore unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and is therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectual initialization takes place. There is no other reality. This preintellectual reality is what Phaedrus felt he had properly identified as Quality. Since all intellectually identifiable things must emerge from this pre-intellectual reality, Quality is the parent, the source of all subjects and objects.”

    Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is, in the words of the author himself, not much on Zen nor much on Motorcycle Maintenance. It is this middle ground that explores quality that seeks to merge these two seemingly distant fields – Zen and Motorcycle Maintenance. The reference to Phaedrus is to the author himself before he was admitted to a mental institution.

    Robert Pirsig enjoys a sort of cult status in the United States.

    The reference to the Copernican inversion in this passage comes from an earlier part of the book, where he says:

    ” “The sun of quality,” he wrote,”does not revolve around the subjects and objects of our existence. It does not just passively illuminate them. It is not sub-ordinate to them in any way. It has created them. They are sub-ordinate to it.”

    After reading the whole book, I personally felt that this was the crux of the whole book. But, have to think about how the transition happens sometime soon.

  • A Nice Mixture

    I always like stuff in a nice mixture. Other than my hatred for day-to-daay publications I usually love reading stuff like JAM, JLT, Tehelka and Frontline.

    Frontline brings the mixture of serious stuff. A sample can be taken from the May 4, 2007 issue of Frontline.

    The Assembly elections at UP is this times cover story. Not something I like to read about too much but the first page in the article gives me one more reason for why politicians are despised in this country. Their arrival at any place leads to that place coming to a stand still. In the picture, Mulayam Singh Yadav is said to be arriving in a helicopter.

    Then an interview with Avinash Chander, Director of the Advanced Systems Labarotary, the people behind the construction of the 3000 km range Agni III. Agni III was a beauty to watch. He also talks about their next mission: developing a missile with the 5000 kms range. The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) which is developing these systems has been blamed several times for not meeting project timeline etc. But everyone’s happy when they deliver the goods, I guess.

    Then a pleothara of issues ranging from the SEZ controversy, the police reorganisation debate, the problem of begging and an article on GM cotton all find place.

    Next we come to the section that I particularily love. The spotlight on Kerala and the special on the occassion of BARC’s 50 year milestone. A paragraph from the text:
    “The BARC campus, spread over 2800 acres and ringed by the Arabian Sea and Trombay Hills. houses the 600 metre long Modular Laboratories and several critical facilities – the New Super Computer Centre, Dhruva, CIRUS and Apsara research reactors, a crystal technology labarotary, a desalination complex, central workshops, a 40 metre tall integral test loop for conducting safety experiments connected with the Advanced Heavy Water Reactor and a robotics complex and so on. A workforce of 13000, including 4200 engineers and scientists, is engaged in a bewildering variety of activities, nuclear and non-nuclear”

    BARC – Bhaba Atomic Research Centre has its roots in TIFR (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research) which began on June 1, 1945 on the campuses of the Indian Institute of Science. This was then relocated to Bombay in September, 1949. BARC was formerly called the Atomic Energy Establishment, Trombay. It was renamed BARC in 1967 in the memory of Dr. Homi Jehangir Bhaba.

    The story on Kerala revolves around the commercial exploitation of elephants in Kerala. Almost every festival in Kerala revolves around elephants. Initially they used to be brought out only for certain festivals. This has led to commercial exploitation of these animals.

    All in all, this issue of Frontline is worth a read. You might find these articles online on their website.

  • The Internet & Me

    Everytime around exam time I face this block as to what to do with the internet. That block is partly the reason for absence of any posting in the past few days.

    I tried to check whether I am addicted to the Internet. I could stay away from it for one day. I will check for two days over this weekend. This will prove that I can stay away from the Internet when I want to and hence the fact that I am not addicted to it.

    It is also a fact though that not getting any information outside the prescribed syllabi is something I hate. I also hate the kind of articles that I see on television or read in the newspapers. These facts come together to kind of get me online.

    I have therefore decided to blog when I can but mostly read lots and lots. A sample of what I liked while reading can be seen through my link blog. You can also click there by seeing the sample of posts on the sidebar under the title “My link blog”.

    I am also limiting the work on my space weblog to the Frozen Sun blog and to selecting the payload for the SEDSAT 2 mission. Over the next few days I plan to integrate the section on futuristic Indian Mythology to the Images section, where I plan to add a few more images.I will keep you updated. No major changes for now. You can also see my new tagline. I have never had a tagline till date on any of my blogs. Things change, I guess.

  • Trying

    I’m now trying to get out of stuff and trying to get back in. That’s another way of telling that I’m trying to get organised. I’ve tried most of the famous methods of getting organised. They all fail. Teh-solutions don’t work since I’m not a techie. The latest I’ve tried is a TODO which also failed.

    In the end, I’ve decided to make my own organization technique. Mail me if you’re interested in helping me: prad2609@yahoo.com.

  • You know when you’re stressed when

    Want proof that I can’t blog? Here it is. Found this in the local paper. Felt emailing it would be a waste of email, so decided to post it here for all to see (is anyone seeing?).

    You Know You’re a victim of exam stress when:

    1. Random Shah Rukh Khan movies begin to look like top-class entertainment.
    2. Your favourite pastime is tearing up sheets of paper
    3. Your daily vocabulary is reduced to: crap, damn, hell, bloddy, goddamn.
    4. You shoot stapler pins all over the room just to see how far they go.
    5. You sit blankly at your table, staring at the same sheet of paper for half an hour.
    6. Your diet consists of 3 Cs: coffee, choclate and Crocin
    7. You pray for floods, heat strokes, strikes of teachers and the death of G. W. Bush; so that exams are postponed or cancelled.
    8. You read the “love messages” on the bottom panel of MTV to de-stress
    9. You do chapters that aren’t in the syllabus
    10. You find yourself incredibly fantasising about Goa and Lonavla
    11. Approximately four times a day, you feel like running away from home and selling coconuts in Kerala

    By Mudra Mehta of NM College, as published in JAM. Go there for more fun articles.

  • Ideas Welcome

    I have been trying over last week to get out of books of philosophy and religion.I tried reading books by Stephen King et. all but no use, at least till now. Any ideas and suggestions are welcome.

    I went to the IIT Techfest 2007. With their money, I could’ve done better. But, that’s just selfish me getting all envious and jealous.Will try to blog more over this week, if possible.

  • Aubrey Menen

    Aubrey Menen was what I was reading over vacations. He’s actually a guy from the early 20th century with an Irish mother and an Indian father (trying to explain the name). He has some different opinions, which you might just as well read:

    The Upanishads are held in awe by many people in the West, a number of whom had the satisfactory, not to say flattering, experience I have just mentioned. I did not. This may have been due to my Indian background. The Upanishads, though reverenced in the West are really not much read in India. The average Indian prefers the Bhagavad-Gita, a beautiful poem in which the Lord Krishna teaches us the noble lesson that we must do our duty to society. The duty under Lord Krishna’s attention in the Gita is to kill, maim or otherwise dispose of the enemy on a field of battle in a petty dynastic war. The Lord Krishna heartily recommends that this be done and done with a will. Indians, I have noted, have a liking for filling their minds with elevated notions which do not interfere with the business in hand. No book has ever been written which does this better than the Gita.

    The Upanishads, on the other hand teach no moral lesson whatever. The attitude in them is much like that of the Scottish philosopher David Hume. He wrote a book proving that there was no such thing as cause and effect. At the end of it he remarks that he has no doubt that his reasoning is correct, but as for himself, he has not the slightest intention of letting it affect him or his way of life. In the same way the philosophers of the Upanishads, after having led the reader into the very depths of his being, with shattering results to all his dearest belief, advise him to get up and go and enjoy himself like anybody else, with, they specify, horses, chariots, food and women. The verses in which this is said are as coarse as a hearty laugh and a slap on the back. How people manage to find God in such a book I cannot say, but I think it may be that they have a natural refinement which puts things decently straight.

    Liked it till here? Here’s some more:

    The Upanishads are, in fact, a supreme monument to the fact that, in matters of religion, the Indians are eccentrics. From the earliest times, the Hindu faith was outlined in the Rig Veda. This described the gods to be revered and how to worship them down to the last detail. For centuries, they were believed to be the last word on the matter, but then some philosophers decided they were not. Having taken due thought, they came to the conclusion that the gods of the Rig Veda were probably fictitious and that to worship them was quite unnecessary. In any decent and ordered society – that of the Christian Middle Ages, for instance – these daring men would have been promptly burnt alive.

    The Hindus, instead, studied these teachings, wrote them down, and then bound them up along with the Rig Veda. It is hard to find a parallel to this act in any other religion. It is as though in each copy of the Jewish and Christian Bible, the Pentateuch was followed by some lively chapters saying that Yahweh did not exist, that the Temple was a highly redundant institution and that the Ten Commandments were binding on nobody but Moses, who had probably invented them for his own convenience.

    Now the Western world is brought up to believe that black is black and white is white and anybody who attempts to muddle the two is an idiot. This opinion has carried us along the a triumphal way of scientific discoveries which have culminated, for the time being (or forever), in the hydrogen bomb. The Hindu has never thought in this manner. He has always felt that anybody who could prove that black is not black, white is not white, but both are really the same thing, is a very clever fellow and worth listening to. The result is that the Indians have invented nothing at all, except some ideas. One of those ideas is that the only way of meeting violence is to do nothing about it, but to go on minding your own peaceful affairs. I might observe in passing that if the bombs do go off, this will, obviously, be the only way of putting the world together again.

    These are lines from Aubrey Menen’s “The Space Within the Heart”, 1970. Read the book, if you can. Although there aren’t many paragraphs like the ones given above, you might find it an interesting read.

  • Happy New Year

    I know I am about a fortnight late, but what the heck. Happy New Year.

    New Year was spent in Kerala. What was I doing at midnight? Sleeping. What else? So, I forgot about resolutions and stuff. Let’s see how the year goes without resolutions. The weird header art has been removed and replaced.