Quiz-2

Answers to quiz-1:
1. These are the researches for which Indians have one Nobel prizes...Khorana, CV Raman, Ramakrishnan, Ross, Chandrasekhar
2. Karunanidhi...
3. Jack Nicholson and Michael Caine..
4. India Gate Square...these are the largest public squares

Quiz-2

1. Liechtenstein, Vatican City, San Marino, Monaco and Andorra are the only countries in the world without what?

2. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, Honeywell Corporation, Chevron Corporation and GE are the 2nd, 3rd and 4th largest toxic waste generators in the world. Who is the largest?

3. Adriano Panatta is an Italian tennis player, who won the French Open in 1976. His claim to fame however is something different. He is the only person in his era to achieve this feat. Whatzit?

Game, Set and Match

Mr. Bhupati is a great tennis player, a businessman and a socialite. In some time, he is going to marry Ms. Dutta, a former beauty queen and an actress. This is just one more of those highly gossiped about nuptials between sports-persons and models/actresses. In fact, if the rumour engines are to be trusted, the wedding(in Goa :D) invitation list even includes Mr. Bhupati's dear friend, Mr. Federer!

Now this news has got me thinking about the state of Indian tennis.

In the 50s and 60s, there was a highly gifted Chennai lad who was making good name for India in the tennis circles. In an era dominated, almost overwhelmingly by Laver, Newcombe, Emerson and Pancho Gonzales, it is quite an achievement to make yourself even visible, and Ramanathan Krishnan was more than just visible. Known for his extreme finesse on court, he reached two Wimbledon semi-finals, losing both times to the eventual champions. His greatest achievement was perhaps the remarkable comeback from 5-2 down in the fourth set against Brazilian Tomas Koch to take India to its first Davis Cup final. His victory over Laver in Davis Cup(1959) and the Wimbledon junior title in 1954 were some of career highlights.

His son Ramesh Krishnan too made the tricolour a force to reckon with. Thrice a grand-slam quarter-finalist, he led India to their second Davis Cup(1987) final by defeating Australians Masur and Fitzgerald in the semi-finals.

India's best chance by far to win the tennis doubles gold were in the 2000 summer Olympics at Sydney and Athens respectively. In 1999, Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupati reached all four Grand Slam doubles finals, winning the French+Wimbledon double. It was a a new peak in Indian tennis. In 2004, they had quarter and semi-final runs in several events leading up to Athens. The only tennis medal yet was the Bronze medal run by Paes in Atlanta(1996), where he lost to Agassi in the semifinals.

Several controversies aside, Sania Mirza was once World No. 27.

Currently, there is only one ATP level tournament in India and barring one, all male players rank well below 200.

This sport needs some attention, and the "Bhutta" wedding is not the kind of attention it needs. Hopefully we'll have a grand-slam champion in the next 10 years.

Mind Fodder

TEDxBITSGoa had a rather interesting video, where this guy talked about how revealing to others your goals and strategies reduces your chances of actually accomplishing or sticking to them. The psychology being that when you reveal your goals, you trick yourself into believing that you are actually on the way to achieving it. So, instead of working at full steam, you mellow down(and take li8).

What you should be doing instead, is to identify your goal and a strategy you are going to adopt and keep it to yourself. That way, you make an impression on yourself that you are yet to achieve it and need to work diligently in order to get there.

This makes for rather interesting mind fodder right now, as the exams are right on top. Obviously everyone has a target in their minds when it comes to exams; a certain par score which they want to go above. Consider the case when I revealed to my friends the plan to canvas three courses over nine hours of non-stop, intensive mugging, with pauses only for water and leaks.

Surely, making a blog entry after a few hours of sitcom viewing makes the TED talk a fact to be noted...

This Lub-Dubbing thing is beyond any applied science!

The odds are 1:6.

No, these aren't the odds of the Netherlands winning against Australia in the Cricket world cup(no offence to the Dutch). These are the odds of sighting a girl in an engineering college in India. Now, if you decide to apply certain filters to this, then the chances of sighting anything plunges to an astonishingly small value.

Engineers are angels, in a manner of speaking. Let's face it, engineers have alone created more than three quarters of the jobs(conservative estimate) in the world since the industrial revolution. They've mastered construction(bridges are one of the most important economic assets of a nation), shrunk distances(anyone wants to share a cab to the airport on the 25th?), changed the way we eat(cheese isn't microwave friendly), the way we communicate(hey, gg man, ftw!) and have even made family entertainment ever so easy(all you need is a 5.1 Channel Surround sound home theatre system, a full HD 1080p screen, in a wood panelled room, the latest Blu-Ray version of your favourite movie, a Blu-Ray compatible reader and a family sized couch, not to mention, very deep pockets). Rising pollution levels and industrial accidents are only two small ways in which engineers contribute to the steady supply of the ill and the injured to the doctors. Engineers are the ultimate problem solvers and so it can be said with confidence that there are no fields in which the engineers have not made their presence felt.

Or is there?

A closer look may reveal that, these awesome problem solvers are yet to crack a very essential riddle, which students of liberal arts, humanities and commerce usually have it figured out in varying levels(the failure to figure this riddle out may be the reason that they are forced to indulge in self-help). Could it be that the selfless solving of the problems of the world for a living, may have left them too exhausted to give this particular problem, concerning themselves, a sincere try? And even if you venture an attempt, what algorithm is it supposed to be based on? And if Darwinism is to be believed, then aren't the fittest(read: geeks) supposed to be the alpha male?

As every engineer ponders over these issues today, here's wishing everyone out there, a Happy Valentines Day!

(PS- I think Bajrang Dal comprises of engineers who have given up on ever solving this riddle :) )