Sunday, January 10, 2010

What you feel when you feel lonely

 Found a nice post by blogger Heena about Loneliness. It is the similarity of our thoughts that makes me post this link from her blog.

http://unboundspirit-heena.blogspot.com/2010/01/feeling-lonely.html

Monday, January 4, 2010

Do something that adds value, not takes up space


I read the post The white collar underclass by Steve Sammartino. A lot of the points made there are valid with regards to white collar workers.

Working for 12 hours or more and on weekends without overtime is quite common with us. No representation to protect employment conditions is quite true. Thou I wonder if this is a global tendency or not as some countries do have representation even for white collar workers.

If you are workers, you tend to panic in an economic downturn because the most impact is felt by workers rather than innovators.

Do something that adds value, not takes up space is the best advice to start this new year 2010 with. As Steve mentions, if you want to do something that adds value, just do it whether on nights or on weekends and even if there is no income.

Sunday, January 3, 2010

Sometimes it takes an idiot to change things


Sometimes it takes an idiot to make people realize that things have to be changed. Watched the movie 3 idiots today. It's a great movie and what was best that many of the things I could relate to due to my engineering background.

The movie shows well the pressures faced by children especially from a country like India where to be an engineer or a doctor is supposed to be the only options to a successful and high earning career.

The movie highlights what we engineers have known all along. And I suppose even the movie will not change much of what happens in an engineering institution.

Engineering for us students begins with subjects which hardly have relevance to what we want to learn. All students are supposed to learn physics, chemistry, mechanics and drawing inspite of opting for a specialization like computers, it, electronics.

The assignments given to students are just a way of earning money by selling papers with the stamps of their respective institutions. Students end up copying the assignments written by a few "Chatur" like students. Sometimes even if some words are not clear or understood, students just copy the design patterns :)

The practicals are just adhering to a set of do's and dont's already set by the pre written and age old journals from the old batches.

The exams are just tailor made for students who can mug up a lot of information. It hardly matters say for example if you know how to develop good software if you can just rote the program and write it on the paper.

While helping a woman deliver a baby with a vacuum machine is atrocious, it just tries to prove a point that it is using your understanding to create things that is more important than just reading from textbooks.