what happens if a student falls in love… :D

ok… arbit theory time :

consider an average iitian who develops a ‘liking’ to this girl… we call this degree of liking as ‘love concentration’ which is a function of time. now, his grades start getting affected adversely because he can’t think of much else but this girl. and the more the ‘concentration of love’, the more his grades get affected.

so, we formulate this equation:

- d(grades)/dt = k[love(t)]

here, k is a constant depending upon the person in question and [love(t)] is ‘love concentration as a function of time’.

now, the [love(t)] can be assumed to be of the form : N( 1 – exp(-λt))
where N and λ are known constants and time is in months.

so, we integrate this equation ( from t=0 to t and find that grades as a function of time is :
grades(t) = grades(initial) + kN/λ – kN(t + exp(-λt)/λ)

now i can’t actually draw the graph here right now, but it turns out that the grades initially decrease, reach a minima and then go up again

to be honest, this is what i expected… because when i fell in love, it was whirlwind of emotions of sorts and then gradually, we became each other’s strengths… and its imperative that we support each other now…

update : courtesy my friend kalyani’s comment below, the struck out part is incorrect… hoping someone can suggest me a love(t) function which proves the struck out part…

informal session with nagesh kukunoor

courtesy azeotropy ‘08, the chemical engineering department’s fest, i got the chance to meet nagesh kukunoor in person… he studied to be a chemical engineer from osmania university, hyderabad, having never cleared iitjee… he talked about his life and how he came to the profession of film making being a chemmie…
after completing his masters from georgia tech, he got into a consultancy job and one day, three years into his job, it struck him that this is what he would be doing for the rest of his life… this same monotonous routine would be the one he would adhere to even when he was 40… and to think of that this profession did not excite him in any way… he wanted to do something worthwhile with his time – something he appreciated and something he loved devoting his time to…
so, he joined scripting classes and acting classes… with this decision made, he came to india with all his life savings with the intention of making a film on the subject he knew best about – typical middle class hyderabadi life… and hence came hyderabad blues…

one thing that i remember distinctly about his talk is that he talked about us being indians, we think that we have achieved a lot by clearing jee, clearing gre, going to an awesome university and ending up in the US, with an classy high paying job… we think very highly of ourselves… but the thing is, the average IQ level in middle class india is so high, its only with a bit of hard work we can achieve all these wonders…
also, becoming an engineer does not require as much ‘drive’ as to become a doctor… you don’t ‘want’ to become an engineer so much as your friend may ‘want’ to become a doctor…

if all of us gave some thought to what we really wanted to do we wouldn’t be a nation heading towards a situation in which there were more people to manage than people to be managed… let’s face it, as a nation, india is losing out on professionally skilled workers because everyone seems to run for an mba…

the session was humourous… very and had something to take back… something to think about – i like such talks…

blogger’s syndrome – again!

just felt like writing something… the ‘today’ column on the dashboard looks too empty otherwise am getting back to a serious case of blogger’s syndrome… well, since i deleted my previous blog, i might as well write again about my most exaggerated and highly glorified syndrome…
see, when you check your blog stats every say one hour (or even lesser – maybe half an hour – if you have a lappie, like me) and await comments like crazy, you’ve become prey to this syndrome… i’ll elaborate my case… i began blogging this february… one day before the 12th board exams… so initially i start, inspired by of course by kalyani… first i didn’t know what i would write about but then, as time progressed, i became more and more comfortable with the blogosphere…
then sometime in july-september, i lost the passion for blogging… i wanted to write but the sentences wouldn’t form… i felt as if i wasn’t writing from my heart… and then i’m back to stage one of the cycle again – mad about my blog… you can call it being narcissistic and being obsessively compulsive about the blog, but then… life comes in phases – phases in which one thing is supreme and the rest gain lesser importance with respect to the time devoted to thinking about the thing that is obsessed about in comparison to other activities and thoughts which occupy your thought domain…

PS with the last word, i actually think i’m becoming mad about math… exam today went… well… i’d rather forget it…

the sense of smell

somehow, unconsciously, i tend to associate a smell to everything – every single thing in this world… sometimes, i even surprise myself thinking about smells of a particular ’situation’ and ‘thought’… don’t know how that can happen…

most of the time, its the smell of people i meet… no matter how clean or dirty they are, that smell never leaves them… and most of the time, that smell is reminiscent of the smell of the homes that they live in… whenever i step into a house, the first thing we do is breathe… and hence, i smell….

but more often than not, i do not consciously know which smell i related to what or whom… it’s more like when i smell that smell in some other place, i am reminded of where i smelt that smell before…

maybe all this sounds crap, but to me, it’s true…

let me give you some examples… we had gone to the US for a period of 3 months in the summer of 1998… and we lived in a one room apartment there… and last year, sometime, i smelt a smell that reminded me vividly of that apartment… one other time, i remember visiting a friend… and somehow, there was an unassociated smell in her house… that reminded me of some other friend… and i asked her… and she said yes, the other friend had been there just a while ago… that really surprised me…

today, quite a few of my friends are not in india any more… when i think of them, i remember their smells… the way even their notebooks carried the same smell… i miss them… i want to smell those smells again…