Words...and words

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Lofty Goals and Grandiose Views

As I settle into what will be sadly the last term of my life in WIMWI, life promises to be interesting. I have only 4 courses, one of which is an Independent Project (without any classes obviously). Don't have more than 11 classes in any week. Except for work for Chaos, and the IP, there is precious little to do.

And yet, there is so much to do. The most important goals for the next two months are:
  • Learning/improving my German, French, Spanish and Japanese
  • Clearing a huge reading backlog
(There is also a job to get, but that will be easy enough, of course :) )

The languages will be taken up next week. The backlog has begun to be tackled. Currently reading Dawkin's "The Ancestor's Tale." He is among my favourite authors, and his books illustrate some of the most interesting facets of the splendid phenomenon of evolution.

Darwin said, "There is a grandeur in this view of life," referring to the theory of evolution by natural selection in his "Origin of Species." I completely agree. One replicating molecule, accidentally created, is the ancestor of every known living organism. What an exciting thought! I almost begin feeling light-headed when reading or thinking about arms races, selfish genes, handicaps as signals (explained in another superb book, "The Handicap Principle" by Amotz and Avishaq Zahavi), etc. Truly grasping the timespans of hundreds of millions of years is beyond me, and the fact that this inability can be explained by appealing to evolutionary arguments about the human brain and thought processes is as lovely as the sea under a starry sky. Heady stuff!

Saturday, December 23, 2006

Back home

Am in WIMWI at last. Being back in Bombay last night felt really great.

Hope I can write some interesting stuff about my exchange trip now.

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Finishing JIT

I having been working on a short (10-page) paper on Post Cold War Canadian Defence Policy since last Thursday. I must have spend atleast 20 hours working on it already. And for the last two days I have been fairly diligent as well, mostly focussing on the paper instead of reading unrelated news articles I come across during my search or chatting with/Dbabbing/emailing others as is my wont. And yet the paper is not complete. It will hopefully be done today or tomorrow. Despite my extensive efforts, it does not seem to be much better than something I would have turned out had I begun 24 or 36 hours before the deadline. I find it a bit strange, though of course the logical conclusion is that the fairly pedestrian work I usually turn out is not because of working under time constraints, but simply an expression of my abilities. I have only been truly satisfied with two pieces of academic work I have done in 2006 - one was completed after considerable efforts by me and Kammo, the other was something with which I was lucky enough to quickly find all the information I wanted. Both were done in less than 24 hours, if I remember correctly.

Another thing I have noticed is that if I get more time to do something, I somehow manage to waste enough time to ensure that it only gets done not too long before the deadline. This leads to me think that it is better to begin late anyway, since I am not losing out much on quality and gaining much by being able to do something else in the freed up time. This concept has now become so pervasive for me (and for most other WIMWIans I know) that often I don't even try to begin something sooner (this paper is a special case), since I know that it will somehow be done at the end to the satisfaction of the teacher. So why bother from before!

I guess that Just In Time is not a bad philosophy!

Saturday, December 09, 2006

German advertising

Now that I have begun to stay home more often and watch German TV more, I have noticed that German advertising is quite good. When I was in Japan, I did not enjoy their adverts so much (to be fair, not understanding a word of the language was probably a significant hindrance in appreciation. Also, on most nights, I only watched TV after 11 and not during prime time). Japanese ads are too simplistic and crude as compared to Indian or German ads (or so I think).

I went to the cinema recently to see Casino Royale. Before the movie, a long stream of advertisements was shown. I really enjoyed two ads. One was an ad about the new Mini - it featured a car going through a maize field. As it passed, the corn passed through its bonnet (and presumably its engine) and turned into popcorn filling up the car interior. Don't think it sounds as nice in these words, but I really enjoyed watching it (and who knows the tagphrase at the end might have been funnier).

The second featured three men in a wilderness sitting around a campfire playing poker. One of them says (in German), "I like the movie 'Brokeback mountain.'" The other men immediately get up and walk away! The announcer then says something about an online poker website, where one can play even if one is alone, I guess. The man's expression when he said his line is really funny!

There were other ads too which had the audience in splits. But I could not understand them, because of my limited German :(

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Germany - Trips to Aachen and Bonn

These were two short excursions organised by the exchange club in Köln for us.

Aachen is a small town near the border with France, just an hour's train ride from Köln. It is the site of old Roman baths, and also the site where Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor twelve centuries ago. We went there on October 14. I went without a sweater, thinking that the weather would not be so cold. Was proven wrong by the evening and have never ventured more than 100 m from my house without one ever since :) I did wear shorts in Nice in late November though :)

I travelled with a group of mostly Czech students, and we met a girl there who was Czech but lived in Aachen and studied architecture (or was it art?) there. She gave us a guided tour of the city's quicker landmarks. I particularly liked the Mädchen mit Plätzen - a pretty bronze statue of a girl holding a Plate, a local chocolate delicacy. Aachen is a pretty town, but I knew I would see better places soon.

The next day, we went to Bonn, the erstwhile capital of Germany. The Bonn University building is really lovely with a bright yellow facade. The highlight of that trip was the Geschischtes de Deutschland Museum, which narrates the story of Germany since the World Wars ended. We were given a guided tour in German and I really enjoyed straining myself to comprehend the guide, despite him speaking relatively slowly and using simpler words for us. Many of the exchange students from other countries picked up German very quickly - some were able to converse quite fluently within a month of beginning learning. I feel envious of them, struggling as I am to reach decent levels in Gujarati, French and German despite persisting with them for many years.

Bonn was to be my last trip with other people. From then on, I was to travel alone in every one of my trips...