Mein Kampf

In my last blog I had promised that I would be explaining about OS Threads . Since I did not find enough time this week to come up with something concrete, I decided to churn out some nonsense to fill in the space, which I hope you will tolerate. I promise to tie up all the loose ends as soon as possible.

In my opinion those four years of engineering, that metamorphosed me from a semi incompetent idiot to a complete dunce, truly deserve a mention.

When I passed out of 12th, I was vaguely aware of three disciplines in engineering, namely Civil engineers(constructed houses), mechanical engineers(manufactured nuts and bolts) and computer engineers(got paid well for doing god knows what).

But the buzzword among students was Electronics and Communication. Every one I met or spoke to, recommended this branch. They were predicting all kinds of dire consequences for people who dared to chose CS.(not enough jobs, too much competition, market crash blah blah blah).People told me that Electronics was "Evergreen, timeless and always in demand".

The brain washing worked. I chose Electronics . Unknowingly signed on my death warrant.

First year, all branches had to go through a common syllabus. This irked me a lot. I was raring to have a crack at my beloved Electronics. Instead I had to learn about boilers, chemistry(the subject), Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and a myriad other useless topics.

Our first lecture was Maths. I could spot the math lecturer from a distance weaving through the busy corridor. The large spectacles, the Miss Wormwood look and a complete lack of dressing sense gave her away. I have always wondered how math lecturers reproduce...

After a quick introduction, she immediately dived into the world of Fourier transforms, Cauchy's integral theorem and such equally mind numbing topics. The rest of the class promptly went to sleep. Von Neumann aptly put it..."In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them".

I knew Maths would be my number one enemy for the rest of the semester.

However after my first work shop science practical, I had to change my opinion. Workshop was a nightmare! Shop floors in our college were located at the far end of our campus. They reminded me of the Russian gulags. Every Thursday I would reluctantly trudge towards those concentration camps awaiting execution.

First half of the semester involved, what was euphemistically called Fitting. This involved rubbing a piece of cast iron with a blunt file, until one passed out of sheer exhaustion. After a couple of hours of sawing furiously , a tiny scratch would appear on the cast iron. Whew!

After a disastrous few weeks, the lab assistants realized that there was more cast iron in my brain, than on the entire shop floor. They would watch me with amusement as I struggled with sheet metal, carpentry, welding and just about everything. Trust me, it is truly difficult to be incompetent at everything you do.

Second semester was relatively easy except for a monster called Engineering graphics. Graphics was all about drawing cylinders, cones imagining them from top view, bottom view , lateral view etc etc. No amount of tilting my head, squinting at my drawing sheet, adjusting the mini drafter or sharpening the pencil helped. I somehow scraped through it.

Putting behind all the nightmares of the first year, I eagerly looked forward for the second year. I would now be taught my subjects not some junk from other disciplines.

Little did I realize that Electronics and Communication engineering, is a sublime form of torture. The syllabus is humongous, designed by sadists who truly hate man kind for some inexplicable reason.

One could hope to understand all the electronics subjects by studying approximately for say, one million years. In my opinion every electronics engineers should be awarded for his bravery, before he gets admitted into an asylum.

With great deal of effort one could hope to remember the names of all the subjects in a given semester. Understanding the subjects was impossible.

No matter how hard I tried, I simply did not understand Signals and Systems. Our lecturer would come up with gems like "Convolution determines the system's output from knowledge of the input and the system's impulse response. It can be shown that a linear, time-invariant system is completely characterized by its impulse response". I would rather prefer a Swahili movie without sub titles any day...

Antenna theory was crap. The only redeeming factor about Antenna was the cute female mallu lecturer.

Microprocessors was taught by a senile old man. Every half an hour or so he would forget what he was explaining . So after a month or so, my note book was in an infinite loop of Push and Pop instructions. I knew it would remain so, till the end of the semester. Thanks to our amnesiac lecturer.

All theory subjects pale in comparison to the dreaded labs. Murphy's law originated here.

The only equation I truly understood was V=IR. Equipped with this profound knowledge, I would valiantly try to demystify every lab question. Implementing them was any way ,out of question. Thanks to the instruments. A carbon dating on the lab instruments would have revealed that, they were manufactured somewhere during the mesozoic era. The instruments were truly plug and pray kind.

My mini project was something called a "Musical doorbell". I worked on my project diligently. (which involved burning a lot of silicon, a few failed attempts at electrocuting myself and some major investment in semiconductor companies). The output was truly music to my ears.

Unfortunately my project guide had a different opinion.. " Idu musical door bella ? Male galladalli kappe kugida hage ide ! ".

The only subjects that I was good at were C, C++ and Microprocessors. Somehow I was drawn to it like a magnet and got addicted to it. Little did I know at that time, that these subjects would lay a foundation ,for what would be my bread and butter for the rest of my life.

Before winding up this blog, I should mention about the ecosystem in Manipal.The student life in Manipal is very interesting to watch. An anthropologist would perhaps neatly categorize the student population into the Hip gang, the Cognoscenti, the Muggers and the Amused lot.

The Hip gang were the easy ones to spot. They would always hang around the juice center , flaunting their billion cc bikes , bulging biceps and surrounded by coterie of bimbos. The collective IQ of this gang would be somewhere between that of the protozoans and molluscans. For most of them Engineering was kind of paid vacation.

The Cognoscenti(the truly brilliant chaps) on the other hand, would always be buried under a book( while most of the mere mortals would be blissfully unaware of its existence ). They were in every sense ,the true citizens of the Library.

The muggers were the ones who took ample advantage of the Indian Education system. Most of the muggers would be academically excellent because of their unique talent to learn anything under the sun by rote.

All you had to do, was to inform them that something was part of the syllabus and then throw at them a physics text book, a telephone directory or the stock market scripts. Lo and behold, they would reproduce it verbatim in the exam, without missing even a comma or full stop(And sometimes even the publishers copyright).

The amused lot (which included the likes of me) neither had the charisma to join the Hip gang, the desperation of the muggers or the intellectual capacity of the cognoscenti. So invariably my lot would sit on the fence, never venturing into any of the these territories and watch the others with amusement.

This blog is turning out to be longer than I expected. Its surprising how the human mind can spew nonsense by truckloads, but when it comes to writing something creative, suddenly you get the bloggers block. Well, let me finally wind up this blog, with the promise that the next one will definitely be about THREADS.