Stuck in a lingo

Just a few weeks back, I was challenged with a big decision to make. This decision once made cannot be reversed. It could potentially make my life better or ruin my life. Moreover, there were many constraints which made the decision making process tougher.

Our college had given us 5 choices of foreign language to learn for the rest of our course.  We had to choose between Chinese, French, German, Japanese and Korean. But there were many constraints. Each subject had limited number of seats. Due to limited number of seats, the most popular ones will get filled up quickly. Also, the factor of speed of information plays a role here(not internet speed). The earlier someone comes to know about it, he has better chances to get the language he wants. It so happened that the German language course was a popular choice because the Aerospace Industry is more relevant in Germany. I had a decision to make. I wanted to learn Chinese because it was a different language with different script. Also, Chinese is the most spoken language in the world. I wanted to learn Japanese because I can understand anime better. I wanted to learn French because it is a beautiful language. I wanted to learn German because of popular choice. If i had a chance, I would have taken up all four. But unfortunately, I had to choose only one. I logged onto the website where I had to choose and I realized that there were only four seats left for German. I quickly clicked on German and submitted my option. After the confirmation came, I heaved a sigh of relief as the people around me started panicking because German was full.

I decided to take German because it is more relevant to our industry. Also, German is kind of an angry language so I can sound a little rough when speaking it. Moreover, I have been learning French online so that it helped me make the decision. Now, I don't even regret taking German and I am looking forward to the third semester to learn the new language.

A 21st Century Tambrahm wedding

In my childhood, parents used to take me to different weddings and marriages. At that time, I only went along with them for the food. Reception food is always grand and delicious. Nowadays, I go to weddings to meet long-lost friends and relatives. In a typical Tambrahm wedding, the reception is usually on the eve of marriage day or it is on the evening of the marriage day. The preparations for the 2-day(sometimes 3) marriage ceremony start months before. The "eligible" bachelor's parents start sending out jathakams(horosccopes) and advertise in every possible media that their son has reached a marriageable age and is ready to accept any proposals from eligible women.

Last week, I attended my cousin's marriage. It was a not-so-typical Tambrahm wedding. My cousin met his bride in the USA when he was doing his MS. They liked each other and since they were reaching a marriageable age, they decided to get married. The parents agreed and the marriage was arranged. They got engaged and the engagement ceremony was held through skype. They were in California at that time, the ceremony was held in Chennai at around 5:00pm when it was around 4:30 am in California. I was watching all the proceedings through a stream from Bangalore. So the ceremony was modern yet traditional or as I like to term it- mod-trad.

The wedding was held in Chennai because skype cannot be the answer for everything.  Days before the marriage, my brother(cousin) went out with her a few times or as the westerners like to call it, they went on a few dates. The preparations in their homes went in a typical way with both the parties buying dresses, ornaments, saris for each other. The bride and the bridegroom spent thousands to get a makeover. Relatives from distant places arrived at their house to stay for the wedding and after the wedding.

On the eve of the marriage, they had a ceremony called reception. The bride and the groom stand on stage and people flock onto the stage to shower them with gifts and blessings. The general rule is that they stand alongside the couple and pose for pictures. This ritual is usually accompanied by a musical performance. After their plastic smiles get plastered on negative films, they will be ushered by the parents to devour the food provided for them. The food is a mixture of all popular Indian foods and it is usually completed with an ice-cream along with an Indian specialty sweet. These guests, when they start leaving is interrogated by their hosts about the food and they have to keep repeating that they had their fill and the food was excellent even though it is not.

The next day is called muhurtam day. This is the day when the main ceremony happens. This went on in a traditional way and nothing out of ordinary happened here. I don't want to go on with the details but the two families who are modern yet traditional came together in the event of marriage and blessed their children.

This is what I call a 'Mod-Trad' Tambrahm family and I think I belong to that category too.

The English Language Duality

(A word of warning to my readers. The following articles contain some critical stereotypical opinions against a particular race or a country. If these are insensitive to you, please do not proceed. Even though the words are a little bit overly insensitive, I have no grudge of any type against that particular country or its people. I respect all kinds of people in the world.)

As people say, language is a medium of communication. Every language is different in their own way; be it the script, grammar, phrase construction or style of communicating, each language has a different way to implement the rules of language. It always amazes me how the same language is used differently in different parts of the world. English is one such language spoken globally. The grammar, script and syntaxes are the same. A person coming from Asia can understand the english spoken in Britain if he has been pre-educated in the language. Though the language is taught differently in different countries, english is still english in those countries.

As I have said before, English is a language which never changes regardless of its geographical location. But there are subtle differences which changes the way the language is spoken across countries(continents). History tells us that the language was born in Britain and evolved there for centuries before propagating to other places. I use this irrelevant sentence to thank them for giving the world this beautiful medium of communication. Now coming back to my point, the language has evolved in different ways. Mixing of cultures and traditional languages, social factors, past history and relations between countries are some of the factors which contribute to the afore-mentioned "subtle" differences in the language. The americans started learning english only after a fleet of ships searching for "India" landed in the "west". After this incident, there is no turning back. The americans churned the language with their own local language and created the modern "american" english.

A purist will not be happy with what the Americans did to the original language. An optimist will say that it evolved for the better. Even though i'm not a pessimist, my opinion is that the americans have destroyed the very essence of the language. They have taken it in their own two hands(or 1 billion?) which are coated with arrogance and squeezed out all the essence from it.

Football is one game I love to play. But for Americans who are reading this, a picture of the egg-shaped football comes to their mind. Ofcourse, we all know the original meaning of football, a game played with a round ball(not egg), where the players kick the ball to goal. I frown at the Americans who use the original English words for something meaningless.

I am now sad to hear that nowadays, the popular British culture is now influenced by american culture. They forget about their history and prefer modern american culture. It is not only happening in the UK. India is also experiencing this. People are more inclined to american culture than our own country's culture.



  

Just a BIT more...

Have you heard of the Butterfly effect? In chaos theory(mathematics), Butterfly effect is explained as the sensitive dependence on initial conditions, where a small change in one place can affect largely to a later state. The name of the effect is derived from a hypothetical situation where a hurricane is formed because a butterfly flapped its wings several weeks before. Well, I have experienced the butterfly effect in a different way and that incident does not involve a butterfly or any other insects with wings or hurricanes.

It was the year 2011, the month of August(if I recall correctly), I was studying in 11th grade. During the start of the year, they had announced that we, the 11th graders are going to host a school fest called Napsonic. We were really excited at the fact that we were going to organize and host a mega-event, all by ourselves. Each student signed up for one particular department of their choice. It was decided that the one-day fest will consist of 4 departments(Music, Art, Computer Science and Quiz). The whole event was informally and unofficially code-named MACQ. We segregated ourselves into the respective departments based on our interests.

I joined the Computer Science department. The first few days, we put our creative part of our brains to work to make some events which we can organize with limited availability of software,hardware, finances and man-power. After hours of debating and deciding, we came to the conclusion that we will break up the Computer Science department into four groups, namely; Programming, Pictionary, Treasure hunt and gaming. We divided ourselves into these four groups. Treasure hunt was supposed to be on the computer only. So it was kind of a virtual treasure hunt. Everything went well while preparing for the event. We were working hard day and(not night) evening. In the name of testing few games in our computer lab, we ourselves played the game for hours. In between the games, we took short breaks to salvage some on our treasure hunt and programming events. Moreover, we were all competitive gamers, so we take our job seriously. But, that proved to be costly because we couldn't finish preparations for our school fest.

One week before the deadline, we started working overtime, that is after school hours(or after 2.45pm as we call it).  We finally stopped playing games and started doing work. Ofcourse, we were just following great people's words-'Play hard, work hard'. So that play hard part was accomplished even though we were not satisfied. Now, we had to satisfy the second objective. By the eve of D-day, we managed to complete our work and were ready to organize a great, fun-filled event.

The next day dawned and I was excited to host one of the first event of my life. I went to school early and inspected everything to see if they are in the right place. As if the president is going to be present, I left no stone unturned. I even checked if all the chairs are arranged in proper orderly manner. The participants arrived and there were about 32 schools present. The first and second round went smoothly without any incident. It was time for the third round called treasure hunt. The teams breezed through the first few levels of treasure hunt only because the puzzles were too easy. Throughout the duration of the round, I was walking around the computer lab trying to act majestic and boss-like. After some time, when the teams were at half-way mark before finding treasure, I spotted a few nervous glances. Slowly, some teams started getting worried as they were racking their brains to get through one level. I smirked to myself thinking that the level was too smart for them. Slowly, I could see that the teams were getting a little uneasy. They started using other methods of calculations and also primitive methods.

After a few minutes, I realized that there was a serious problem. The voices in the room were getting louder. One person from one of the team came up and explained the situation. He mentioned that the team couldn't get the write password even though they have done everything right. I looked into the problem and he was indeed right. He had done the right calculations and the answer was right. But when he typed the answer in the password window, the prompt said wrong password. That particular level involved binary number system. The task was that the teams will be given a 4-letter word. This word should be converted to binary digits and they must be arranged in order. The number of 0's and 1's should be counted and the password for the next level is the number of 0's in the left and number of 1's in the right. It so happened that the number of 0's and number of 1's were both 16, so the password was supposed to be 1616. But according to our records, we had set the password as 1716. Since I already knew the password as we had set it previously, I knew that the password they entered was wrong. Also, the password which was preset was logically wrong. Any binary number obtained from letters or words are always expressed in 16 bits. But our password was 17 bits which was wrong.

Eventually, all the teams realized that the pre-set password was wrong. We decided to share the points equally among teams and we sympathetically apologized to them for taking away the fun in the game.

This error was in fact a mere human error. This could have been avoided if more number of people had checked manually but since we didn't have time, we couldn't do it. This incident had a great impact in my life because it practically showed me how The Butterfly Effect works. One small bit created a huge chaos in the otherwise peaceful system.

I hope I haven't bored you with such a long story. I just felt I had to share this with my readers because there are small things in life which we tend to overlook. These small things can later snowball into big problems in the future. In Mathematics, there is a chaos theory called butterfly effect. There is a separate research on that topic. If you want to know more, try reading on it. Also, the chaos theory is another interesting read.
For the movie buffs out there, there is this mind-blowing movie called 'The Butterfly Effect'(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0289879/?ref_=nv_sr_1).