Blithe

a I u N

R Ri lr lrik

e o^N

a i au c

hayavaraT

lyann

na ma^NaNa na m

jhabha^n

gha Dha dha Shy

jabaga Da dash

kha pha Tha tha cha Ta tav

Kapay

sha Shasar

hal

What is this? Any guess?

Well, this would probably be the first thing anyone would learn in a Sanskrit class, the Maaheshwara Sutrani. It gives me some kind of excitement when i say it. This could be because i still remember it . Sanskrit, a sacred language of Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikkism, Jainism and many others dates back to around 4000 years ago. It is one of the official languages of India. Samskrutham means “to compose or something which unifies”. Those who have studied sanskrit in their school and colleges would definitely feel it, since there was some kind of a drive of studying the language. However, the curriculum for Sanskrit in the present educational system is much like a one way traffic. It doesn’t encourages students to speak in sanskrit. There is no use of studying various sandhi’s, alankara’s etc etc without knowing its usage. The language in general is diminishing. I think there should be an encouragement to speak and understand the language; to unravel the thoughts & morals the language has in its deep roots.

I recently read an article in Deccan Herald, that the students from various US universities such as MIT, UMD, CMU, UPitt, Pennsylvania State, UPenn, Purdue etc. have brought up an online Sanskrit magazine with an aim “Rachayema Samskruthabhuvanam” meaning “Shall create a Sanskrit world”. It feels great people are still interested about the language, know its importance and implications on one’s way of thinking. The various shubhashitha’s and shlokas that we recite would be meaningless unless we understand. I think its a great step taken by them.

Also, i had been to Mattoor a few years back, a village situated 4 km from shimoga and was astonished to see that this village has Sanskrit as its vernacular language with 80% of the people converse in it. Till now, the number of people speaking Sanskrit in this village has increased which is really good for the language as such.

Hope, everyone understands its importance and save the language from being routed out.

Do check : www.speaksanskrit.org

CVS- Capital Value system is the new buzz in Bengaluru after Sakrama. The mastermind to introduce it, is the BBMP ( Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike). While the Palike has given five months of deadline to its bengaluru citizens to adhere to. I believe BBMP is being desperate to loot the citizens after its earlier scheme, Sakrama failed and faced lot of agitations from various organizations with court ordering a review into the scheme.

Sakrama, a scheme to convert the illegal part of the site owned into legal one. I feel the problem is at the roots. Any citizen before constructing a building  should have its blueprint approved by the BDA. So the question is, how can there exist a illegal building dimensions? Its because of the corruption that has deeply routed in the system which gave such illegal plan approvals. So now, the same officials, not able fill their pockets have devised this plan with exhorbitant fines which i think is unrealistic.

CVS, capital value system is a tax on the building which is proportionate to the land value at any given point of time. S0 its fluctuating tax. Its a huge burden for the middle class people. Imagine a place like Sadashivanagar or Malleshwaram were the land value is enormous, what would be the fate of the middle class people living there? Well, its a system clearly introduced to loot money from the people in the city.

BBMP  should  chose a direction to improve the conditions of Benagaluru, the garden city, provide the necessary infrastructure,  handle the ever growing traffic jams instead of introducing some senseless taxes.

I had topped in my 3rd and 4th sem exams, was very satisfied with it, which i always dreamt of, from my school days. My hardwork and some other factors drove me to achieve it. But wanted to do something different in life, wanted to put my skills in a useful way. It was an usual  boring 5th sem class in Dec 2006,  solving some senseless SM charts problem. Had many ideas running in my mind. The class got over. It was a mere coincidence or it was destined to happen. ‘N’ & ‘Ni’ approached me and asked whether i was interested in doing a robotic project. I had not even spoken once to them in 2 yrs of engineering. So, i was a bit hesitant. Anyways, i wanted to do something different other than studying some crap, i accepted. Evening we met, introduced ourselves. Within minutes, i realized that i was on my way to achieve something special. It was a competition at iit-kgp and we required a 4 member team. So i called on my friend ‘H’. The next day we met and it clicked. We had a team ready to achieve the goal; to win the robotics event. We met a couple of days in the evening and worked out the strategy. I found out the fire for success in ‘Ni’, whose words motivated that we are no less than the iit’ians. We had the semester exams coming. 15days left, stopped our work and started to concentrate on studying meaningless subjects. Exam was over, thankfully i did well, though not to my full potential.

Holidays started…  some 30 days left for the competition. We started to work on the algo., to be implemented on the bot. ‘Ni’, the most talented i had come across in my class, started to get some derivations which looked like Greek to me.  This made ‘H’ and me to start working seriously on the prj. 20 days remaining, we had no idea as to how to construct a robot. So night outs was the only solution if we had achieve success. ‘Ni’’s home was our meeting point.  Algo. began to take shape. Possibility of various problems of the algo began to pop up and we accounted for it. 10 days left, we had an algo. which we felt was distinctively unique. We were very happy with it. But then came the hardware, which we had no clues as to how to tackle. ‘R’ was the lifeline. 4 of us met him and discussed, which this gave us  hope of taking the bot to iit-kgp. We began to construct the bot. ‘Ni’ and ‘H’ ( a good programmer) started to code the algo.  ‘N’ and myself looked into the hardware. With 2 days left, we had a robot almost ready waiting for the program to be loaded. Did a lot of program testing in the comp. before it was loaded into the bot. After correcting the errors in program and bot loaded with it, we expected it to run on the last day. But that didn’t happen.

We had to pack the bot and catch a train to kgp. A bit disappointed with it, we met at the railway station. We had 2 more teams from our dept. going to kgp for the event.  It was for the first time i was on my way to an IIT. I had read Five point someone by Chethan Bhagat and was very eager to experience an IIT environment. Morning 5am we reached kgp and we had volunteers to pick us. We reached the iit, kgp campus , got our team registered and went to the hostel. We had the event the next day. We didn’t have any computer to debug the code. IIT’ians are very encouraging. ‘M’ lend us the comp. We started to debug in the evening , the time tickled so fast that only to realize it was morning 6 am. Well, the commitment paid. For the first time, we had the robot running. It was one of the happiest moment. We took the bot to the arena. It was great to compete with the iit’s and nit’s.

The environment was vibrant with the robots taking the centre stage. We had the robot inspected by the organisers and were given a slot to perform. Dont know what went wrong, some connection was lost i believe, the bot didn’t work properly. The organizer gave us time and rescheduled our slot from 2:00pm to 9:00pm. However, we tried our level best to get the problem rectified. It was 11 pm, the organizer asked if we were ready. We explained the problem to him. He was convinced by it and gave us time till 1:00am. That was the kind of encouragement we got from them. I now realized why iit’ans excel more than us; it was their commitment. However, we couldn’t complete the arena and we lost.  We had explained our algo. to an iit prof. who was satisfied with the work and its uniqueness and we won the Best Algo. It was moment of satisfaction for us, after month of night outs, it paid. We are still reaping on its success .  Another team from our coll. also won a Law of motion event which brought double happiness.

It was this point i felt that we are capable of competing with the iit’ians. It was their commitment which brought them success. It was a wonderful experience going to iit-kgp, the Billoo’s,  the rasgolla, getting caught by the police for playing cards in the train, kalighat temple and chakka’s attack on us in the train!! lolz….

Well, F1 2008 season started with a bang! with Force India’s Fisichella and Coulthard colliding at the first corner. It wasn’t Dr.Vijay Mallya would have expected in his first race as the director of Force India. Lot of accidents involved at the end of the race which resulted in only 7 of the 22 cars finishing the race.

A perfect start for Lewis Hamilton from pole and a sigh of relief for Ron Dennis after the spying controversy that marred the 2007 season. Heikki started the 08 season with the MP4 Mercedes , qualified p3 had a good race , not the best; since there was a good chance for a podium finish, but messed up his position during the saftey car period.

Reliabilty has become the issue for Ferrari who had the worst starts for the season since 1993 with both the cars failing to finish the race. Massa, impatient driving & engine failure resulted in his failure to complete the race. The same case was with Kimi who made some unusual mistakes.

Renault who got their prince, Feranando Alonso back into the team came fourth in the race while his team mate Nelsinho who made his debut into F1 had to retire due to an accident.

Williams had a good race, with both the cars finishing the race and Nico Rosberg bringing a podium finish for the team for which they were dying for. Kazuki who had an excellent debut race.

Honda, now headed by Ros Brawn, formerly in Ferrari have found some pace in the car and we can expect a good season and has come as a breather for the team. Rubens and Jenson didn’t finish the race.

BMW, one of major title contenders this year with a competitve car had a mixed result. Nick finshed second while Kubica who had a very good qualifying couldn’t finish the race.

Toyota has been team who haven’t made any significant improvement from the 2007 car. Both Trulli and Timo Glock, who has taken Ralf position couldn’t finish the race.

Red Bull had shown some consistency ,but accidents prevented both their cars finishing the race. Super-Aguri, STR-Ferrari and Force India would be hoping for a better race in Malaysia. Ferrari need to get a look into the reliability issue and get a proper car setup.

Hope more cars finish the Malaysian GP on March 23,2008.