Thursday, November 30, 2006

Arbit...

I was just looking through my earlier posts and realized that I have been writing a lot abt myself lately.Hmm.. I was getting too ethnocentric as the greeks would have put it..So I decided it was time for a thinker like me to enlighten you mere mortals with some words of wisdom :D

Does God exist? A question that has always bothered me...

My parents aren't particularly religious. Though mum always makes sure that we follow all the proper rituals on festivals. Silly as some of these customs may seem ,but after all you are interacting with the President of the Universe ,and you need some protocol:D
But I never felt the presence of God during these sessions. You know you think about God only when you are very sad or very happy.Both have happened with me and both the times I Felt God.
Once was when I was standing all alone on the terrace one day after rains .Everything looked so clean, smelled so pure, divine...The sky was a lovely purple,leaves all bright and green, children playing football, white little birds flying around...And then I thought how small man really is and yes, also how big... That day I could almost feel God watching .Thats the closest I hav got to him.
Another was when I learnt at 10:00 in the night that we had some exam the next day.Makes me laugh now to think about it:) but come on , I was just 11 then and this news threw me into extreme nbd. I dint tell anybody about it .I tried studying for the exam but culdnt concentrate and then I just closed the book and prayed hard , with all my heart,to God to sumhow tide me over. You can only imagine the relief, the gratitude I felt the next day, when school was cancelled due to excessive rains...
But to say that God exists is infinitely more frightening. Most of us think him to be some kind of super human being and thats it . We are happy with that image.But that may not be true.What does he look like ? Forget abt it ...does even the concept of image have any meaning in front of him ? Is he solid , liquid , gas? Can he see, hear ,smell? Do u see that these human characteristics loose all meaning before Him ? Then what is He??? It is a very bothersome question .Think seriously about it and before long you will find yourself really frustrated .
The modern scientific community has wisely kept its mouth shut over this topic. Some early philosophers have said that the concept of God is hardwired in our brain. But then is it only humans ? What abt cats ,dogs ,cows ? I dont think they hav any comprehension of what God is . Then what abt apes? If they also are not blessed with this ability ,then the theory seems a bit too human centred. Why such a quantum jump in thinking capability from apes to humans? Makes Darwins theory of slow and steady evolution look unconvincing...

Ok so after all that roundabout, merry go rounds ,the point that I wanted to tell you was that I do believe in a supreme someone.One who is above all, all and all...He is undefinable but he makes things happen. He is not physical but he affects the physical world.It is seriously very comforting to believe in God.So may be he is just another defensive mechanism of the brain.But I know one thing for sure and that is that he does listen to you, if you pray hard, real hard, with all you heart.

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Phew..............

Finally finally finally.....the storm has passed and I am flooded by that wonderful feeling once again... Guess what? ENDSEMS OVER ! And that means a month of complete freedom ..... God knows I deserved this...:D
This was a sem of changes ... my room changed , my roomie changed, my friends changed , and moreover I changed.. and a lot at that....
The sem started off with a bang , earlier for me than for most. Ok I guess its about time to tell you all my side of the saga....
I was held guilty of putting proxy in a class and was DACed !!! You wuld think it to be the height of irony for me to be punished for getting a proxy done when its so easy to see that each and every IITian puts proxies daily...and I was among the moooooooooooost regular ones.... :(( :((
Well I was a little less mature then and I was naturally most upset over this.. Let me make it clear to you that the punishment itself was no problem (which involved teaching english to drop-outs). But the fact that I got a punishment was tormenting me lik anything..I dont know but I felt so lost then...It just was'nt fair...not fair at all.....
On the flip side this incident helped me grow. Mebbe it was a blessing in disguise. I know I culd'nt have done it without the help of my sister and parents but in the end my perseverance paid off..I was condoned and held " not guilty" ..aaah..one of the happiest moments of my life:)
Again, problems were far from over for me...I had to put up some fight to keep a ground floor room.. I and vandu were being forced to shift to the second floor. I refused and once again my resilience paid off...[:D]
So this is what I have concluded that you HAVE to put in a Fight( a fight with a capital F ) for a thing you want . Only then will you get it. Only thing important is for you to decide how badly you want a thing. Also if you can visualize urself not getting the thing , then believe me you never will get it. Life is long with many ups and downs but if there were not any downs we wuld'nt appreciate the ups all that much , right?
Actually gotta loads to tell u all..but i have also learned not to tell everyone everything .. so sorry [:d]

Here's a pic taken on department dheench day (heard that blogs with pics receive more hits :P )


Thursday, June 22, 2006

How does the world work?

Hieee!!!
The trouble with blogs is that they show your latest entry first which sorts of turns the thing topsy-turvy. Anyway let it be the way it is.
So I promised to tell you sumthing really amazing last time.Hmm.. The thing is that I recently got a gr8888 book on latest physics precisely “The String Theory”.It is called “ The Elegant Universe” and it is by Brian Greene. This one book promises to change the entire way we look at the Universe.
The basic thing about String Theory is that it says that you have a lower limit on how much you can keep dividing a thing. This fundamental unit of length is the length of one string which turns out to be precisely equal to the Planck constant i.e. 6.634* 10 –34 m.Is not that amazing??

But the basic intuitive flaw that arises is that we can’t comprehend that there can be a lower limit at all. After all you can cut an apple into half and then its half and then its half and on and on upto infinity…

The explanation to some extent can be found in an old Chinese problem. Suppose you want to go from point A to B.You decide to go half the distance first .Then you again cover half the distance left that is you have gone ¾ distance now. So you go on going by half distances everytime and eventually u find out that you can never get to your destination at all as always some distance will be left!!!!!!!!!! So going by this argument how can you even go ½ the initial distance anyway??? So does that mean that you can’t move at all? But people move all the time!! So where is the damn flaw??

The argument vanishes if you assume that you can’t go ½ the distance of a string. Well this is a bit like killing the whole issue by saying that Mother Nature just does not allow you to go beyond the string ? Why though? As to that nobody has a satisfactory explanation.

Still making this simple assumption has far reaching effects .One of the greatest successes of String Theory has been the explanation provided by it on the merger of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics on sub-plank scales. Also it beautifully incorporates the presence of particles like gravitons which are responsible for the force of gravity.

Have you ever thought how it would be like to have a multi-dimensional world???Can u even grasp the meaning of having another dimension? It really defies all imagination!!
So meanwhile ponder on the amazing creativity of this thought and not to forget keep watching out for my blog!!Adieu!!

Hi Again!

Hi!
After a long long time I hit the keyboard again. I hav spent the last one month in heaven it seems!Home was never a more welcome word !!Especially after one year of IIT.

I have been doing just what I please lately. Sleeping, eating sleeping and not to forget sleeping were some of my favourite past times:D:D:D

Well that’s not entirely true actually bcoz you do get bored of sleeping also eventually !Unbeleivable isn’t it:-o But so it is.

So my other pastimes have been watching TV,reading , listening to music,Minesweeper,Dave etc etc.Hey Hip hip hurrah for me I finally managed to reach the 6th level in dave .
You know this antique piece of a comp has developed a strange problem.The monitor goes off in every 15-20 mins .And even stranger is that it comes back on again if you rub the pins at the end of the chord joining it with the CPU ,with a metal object!! Even as I was writing this the monitor went off and came on again when I rubbed the chord using a key.

Well Well Well I know I am deviating from the original purpose of this blog as it was meant to give you a perspective of life at IIT.But come on I am now tooooo lazy to start another blog with another name and all.So just consider that NOW this blog deals with me only :):):)

But I won't bore u all by telling abt only myself as only snobs can do that .This was just a bit of background information to get myself in a writing mood.I shall tell you abt some really
Interesting things that I have recently read and which will radically change the way u look at the world around you and the
Laws of the Universe in general!!!So keep visiting my blog:)

Saturday, May 13, 2006

First day at IIT

Ohh! What A Day!!!A day such as will go down in history as to hav been of momentous importance not only to us but to the city of mumbai!I will tell u y.
The day we stepped into IIT,it rained cats,dogs,elephants,whales,dinosaurs.
Mumbai saw the worst flooding ever and I hope this disaster never happens again.Over a 100 people lost their lives.So you see we did not start with a very good omen and the days to come just confirmed the age old superstition.
Classes started at 8:30 in the morning of 26th july,2005.
I reached the class at 8:15.Hip Hip Hurray!(That was the first and the last time I was ever early to class:D)
It was a chem class .Our instructor was Prof Tembe.He seemed a jolly person.He did some light talk about JEE,IIT etc and then it ws straight to business.He started teaching crystal structure and soon was asking questions also.I tell u it scared me out of my wits (a test right on the first day!!!!) and I hid behind the guy in front of me and somehow managed to escape sirs glance.
It was mostly the same all thru the rest of the lectures also.My subjects were chem, phy,ma, economics and comp sci.
We had pattern making workshop in the afternoon.Mostly abt tools and stuff.
As I told u it rained very heavily that day and we had to waited a long time for the rain to stop while returning from the workshop.
I made some gud friends that day (probably due to my umbrella) mainly Sonali ,Aarthi, Anwesha,Kriti ,Nishtha and Vrinda as they were all in the same workshop batch as me.
Mummy and papa were to go back on the next day but now we heard that all trains were cancelled as the tracks were flooded and so they wuld be staying for a week more .
That night an exhausted me slept on a strange new bed,in a strange cramped room with new people all around me.Times had changed!!

Oops!!

Hey I just realized that I really hav not told u all "Who Am I"??
Well!!!That in itself is a very profound ques as I think nobody really knows what kind of a person they actually are:)
But taking the question literally I say that I am Aditi Goyal,19 years old ,now in second year at IIT Bombay ,India.That shuld be enugh for the present.
This blog's chief purpose was to be a narrative of life at IIT.And also to chase away my boredom:)
I will start the real stuff from the next post onwards.
And well this is me :)

It is vacation time!!

howdi!!
Finally I hav survived 1 year of IIT decently enugh with a CPI of 8.88:D :D :D
So I am free from the freshie tag forever and ever.Now we gonna be called sophies!
There is simply so much thats happened in this one year that it will take many posts to tell all of them.So I know I am gonna be busy this summer!!
I am not much of a writer so I guess u just hafta bear with me:)

Friday, March 31, 2006

LIFE is GOOD!!!

hello everyone!
It is nice of u to stop by my humble blog!
I am starting this blog on 11:15 am ,1st April,2006 ,from my sister's comp, in the GR8 institute of IIT-B,from the happening city of Mumbai,Maharashtra,India,Asia,EARTH.
Hope u shall visit again!
adieu!