To continue my last post, I will write about an experience regarding an Engineering Drawing assignment.
There is this friend of mine, a really nice guy who has had a rough Engineering ride so far. He has 4 K.T.s and is working hard to clear them. Another fella, who has 2 is also a good friend. Now I felt really bad about them and since just feeling bad and doing nothing helps
absolutely no one, I was thinking of ways to help them. I am all right at E.D. and do like doing this subject's assignments. So I went to them and asked them whether it would help them if I made one of their drawing sheets. I told them to do the conceptual ones themselves as that would help them to develop the subject. But there were a couple of sheets that were just to be copied and I told them that I would do them for them if it would save their time.
They both said yes and I had some extra work. The sheets took me couple of hours each. I felt so full of myself. The time came when they had to get their sheets checked. Our teacher recognized my work(on his sheet). When we met later he asked me the reason of my 'social service'. I told him the reasons (pretty much the above paragraph). He heard them and told me that my friend had got 5 and 6 marks in each of the other sheets and 9 in mine. And I might have helped him in getting a little better term work but my help was hardly anything. Because he didn't know anything new. If I really wanted to help him, I should have taken out some time and taught him the concepts of the other chapters, so that he would be able to make sheets as good as mine, himself.
And I felt really bad. I knew that he was right. An old sentence came to my mind-
'You give a man a fish and he won't be hungry for a day, you teach him to fish and he will never be hungry for the rest of his life'. I had always known this. That's why I a so against giving alms to beggars. It is not the right way to help. Also it encourages beggary.
Its the same later as well I suppose. You don't help people by giving them money as effectively as you do by providing them employment. One point here though. The one who gets the easy help (cash, the fish or the drawing sheet) would probably be happier to get that easy help than doing things the hard, effective and long lasting way i.e. learning to do them. Funny short sight here again.
So I guess its important to choose the way of helping. I have promised my teacher that I will teach my friend one chapter of drawing, during our preparatory leave.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Work in the right direction
Engineering and assignments always seem go together.
Ask any engineer and he or she will recall the late nights or the early mornings that he or she must have spent completing them. Just the enormous workload and the ever approaching deadlines make you learn to live with lesser sleep. The assignments themselves are donkey work. They are totally useless. Everyone copies them and manipulates them. It just goes to show how we fail to move ahead with times. I personally would love to work in environments where my brain does the working and not just my hands. The only positive thing you can say about them is that they teach you to work hard and help you to learn manage time. But since they are so dumb, they have only encouraged me of ways of cheating them and finding as many shortcuts as possible. Also the fact that if I had put my energies and such amounts of time into something more creative and useful and thoughtful, I can guarantee you that I would have been a much better person.
So assignments are very frustrating(read pulling hair, banging heads and shouting WHY WHY frustrating). But they just have to be done. The university has alloted marks for the assignments and not submitting them might mean failing in one of the subjects. And that would mean taking the issue too far. But I hope that in the future we are given better things to do.
I have always believed that Engineers are people who, when they graduate should be able to build something. Either on their on or as a part of a group that compiles the efforts of different people to make something wonderful and constructive. We build this world. Machines(mechanical) cars(automobile) skyscrapers(civil) mobiles, robots(electronics)
and of course softwares. So if we are to have assignments, give us some that would help us build these things in the future. An assignment that gives us real satisfaction.
That would certainly help, well the nation really.
At this rate all I am doing is increasing my writing speed.
Ask any engineer and he or she will recall the late nights or the early mornings that he or she must have spent completing them. Just the enormous workload and the ever approaching deadlines make you learn to live with lesser sleep. The assignments themselves are donkey work. They are totally useless. Everyone copies them and manipulates them. It just goes to show how we fail to move ahead with times. I personally would love to work in environments where my brain does the working and not just my hands. The only positive thing you can say about them is that they teach you to work hard and help you to learn manage time. But since they are so dumb, they have only encouraged me of ways of cheating them and finding as many shortcuts as possible. Also the fact that if I had put my energies and such amounts of time into something more creative and useful and thoughtful, I can guarantee you that I would have been a much better person.
So assignments are very frustrating(read pulling hair, banging heads and shouting WHY WHY frustrating). But they just have to be done. The university has alloted marks for the assignments and not submitting them might mean failing in one of the subjects. And that would mean taking the issue too far. But I hope that in the future we are given better things to do.
I have always believed that Engineers are people who, when they graduate should be able to build something. Either on their on or as a part of a group that compiles the efforts of different people to make something wonderful and constructive. We build this world. Machines(mechanical) cars(automobile) skyscrapers(civil) mobiles, robots(electronics)
and of course softwares. So if we are to have assignments, give us some that would help us build these things in the future. An assignment that gives us real satisfaction.
That would certainly help, well the nation really.
At this rate all I am doing is increasing my writing speed.
Friday, April 11, 2008
Donate Blood Readers
Loads of Colleges encourage blood donation.
My personal experience started with a very good lecture.
The guy who gave it, explained to us that blood is very precious and that the human body is its only manufacturer. So in the times of need for a fellow human, the only way he can be saved is by another persons blood. And the fact that we have a buffer stock of blood in our body(about 200ml per kilogram of body weight). So its expected of healthy people to give their excesses(which are hardly of any use to them anyway). At the end of the lecture I was like 'Why shouldn't I give blood?, rather than whether I should give blood'.
In a way the lecture was very similar another one that I had in my 7th. That one flashed in front of my eyes. Then it was about the use of firecrackers. Now I loved bursting firecrackers. And doing some things with them that may be I shouldn't have been doing. But I always looked forward to Diwali for getting another chance to experiment with them. The lecturer explained to us that not only do firecrackers harm the environment causing noise and atmospheric pollution, they are also usually made by employing child labour. So it would be a better society if people restrained their flamboyance. It was a very effective lecture as I stopped cracking crackers (though I have cracked a few on others insistence). And I try to encourage people to the same.
My blood donation itself went very smoothly. We went to give blood with our group of friends. The blood bank had set a limit of 45 kgs and I was measured at 49. I had no side effects after they had extracted 350ml of fluid from my body. Then we spent three quarters of an hour for refreshments roaming around bunking lectures. We would get the attendance of course.
I try to tell people to give their blood too.
And I will do the same at every opportunity(twice a year until I graduate). And that says it all.
My personal experience started with a very good lecture.
The guy who gave it, explained to us that blood is very precious and that the human body is its only manufacturer. So in the times of need for a fellow human, the only way he can be saved is by another persons blood. And the fact that we have a buffer stock of blood in our body(about 200ml per kilogram of body weight). So its expected of healthy people to give their excesses(which are hardly of any use to them anyway). At the end of the lecture I was like 'Why shouldn't I give blood?, rather than whether I should give blood'.
In a way the lecture was very similar another one that I had in my 7th. That one flashed in front of my eyes. Then it was about the use of firecrackers. Now I loved bursting firecrackers. And doing some things with them that may be I shouldn't have been doing. But I always looked forward to Diwali for getting another chance to experiment with them. The lecturer explained to us that not only do firecrackers harm the environment causing noise and atmospheric pollution, they are also usually made by employing child labour. So it would be a better society if people restrained their flamboyance. It was a very effective lecture as I stopped cracking crackers (though I have cracked a few on others insistence). And I try to encourage people to the same.
My blood donation itself went very smoothly. We went to give blood with our group of friends. The blood bank had set a limit of 45 kgs and I was measured at 49. I had no side effects after they had extracted 350ml of fluid from my body. Then we spent three quarters of an hour for refreshments roaming around bunking lectures. We would get the attendance of course.
I try to tell people to give their blood too.
And I will do the same at every opportunity(twice a year until I graduate). And that says it all.
Sight
Its funny how people see only what they want to without actually looking ahead or even behind.
Here’s a nice example. I was coming home on my vehicle back from my classes. Coming home from Andheri station. People who have been there know what it is like. The road is shaped like a ‘T’ and the lower part of this ‘T’ ends up to the station. It’s a one way and vehicles can only leave (as I was). Now this was a festive day. ID and Good Friday.
So the roads approaching the station were blocked. Now there were loads of uncharacteristically alert traffic policemen who were trying their best to regulate the traffic. And they allowed some of the traffic on my side to move on so that I was on the brink of moving across when they suddenly asked us to stop with me at the front of the line.
Here I, like others prepared myself for a long break. Then the vehicles on my right side moved on. After that the vehicles on my left side moved on. And finally they were asked to stop by the police. So we naturally started our engines as we were eager to move on. But the police made no signal asking us to leave. That really frustrated a BEST bus driver. He began honking his horn and started gesturing towards a policeman. The policeman returned them by pointing at the traffic and holding up his hands asking him to be patient. The BEST driver then asked me to tell the policeman that I had to study and to ask him to leave us all!
The point I am trying to make here is that if the BEST driver had looked ahead (literally) he would have found that traffic that had been let off, was still at the signal (its Mumbai remember). Waiting for the ones in front of them to move on. And if we, along with the bus had been allowed to move on, we would have traveled centimeters and joined in the chaos. And blocked off other roads. And surely wasted more time than what would have been if we had been quiet and patient.
Now if the BEST driver had looked ahead (figuratively) he might have for seen what would happen. After they finally let us go, we traveled for something like 7 seconds to another halt. The road was clear, hence we covered quite a bit of it but as in most cases, it makes sense to measure length in terms of time rather than in terms of distance and its units. So we had stopped again. And we would have if that policeman had let us off earlier. It would have been a longer wait and one without having covered the distance that we had.
So short sight can be corrected by raising your chin and looking ahead.
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