Kuch to log kahenge

"kuchh to log kahenge, logo kaa kaam hain kahanaa
chhodo, bekaar kee baato mein , kahee beet naa jaaye rainaa

kuchh reet jagat kee ayesee hai
har yek subah kee shaam huyee
too kaun hai, teraa naam hain kyaa
seetaa bhee yahaa badanaam huyee
fir kyo sansaar kee baaton se
bheeg gaye tere nainaa

hum ko jo taane dete hai
hum khoye hain in rang raliyon me
hum ne un ko bhee chhup chhup ke
aate dekhaa in galiyon me
ye sach hain zoothhee baat nahee
tum bolo ye sach hain naa"

Brilliant, this is a million dollar song. Anand Bakshi, Hats of to you for the lyrics and Kishore da, you are GOD!!!!. Just like if cricket was a religion, vivian richards would be the god, if music were one, kishore da you would be THE GOD.

Now coming to the song, doesn't it sound perfect, " kuchh to log kahenge, logo kaa kaam hain kahanaa chhodo, bekaar kee baato mein , kahee beet naa jaaye rainaa", most people dont follow it. If we were to follow it, life would be much easier, trust me. Yes, people talk, they keep talking and most of the time it is crap. If we should just stop listening, they will shut up one day, but just dont listen to them and waste your entire life.

The "i dont care" philosophy does seem to work after all, you dont need to be Ayn Rand's howard roark, but you can practically filter out 99% of the people around you. It works pretty well at the office, you dont need to care what your boss would think for everything you do. For a fact, if he is a smart guy,he just does not care what yo do as long as you work when it matters. Thinking about his reponse for everthing you do will only screw you in the end. It even leads to insomnia as i hear from some guys @@@@@@@. I HEAR.

If i can add to this great song, "Log to kehte rehte, jab tak tum apna kaan bandh nahi karoge, jab tumhare kaan bandh hojayenge, woh chup chap chalejayenge".

Well i dont know which new generation musician will write this poetically, but this is the essence.

Lesson for the day, "AS STATED ABOVE".

My obsession with cars

Porsche's, Ferrari's, Audi's are all I think of these days. I was recently having dinner with my ex-advisor at the University and he happened to mention "Murali, you have a nice car", and then I went on about the cars which I tested and the latest models and stuff, went on to confess that I was getting crazy about (cars) before I could complete it, the professor just completed it by saying "I can see that". I am just waiting for the day when I will my own Porsche 911 with a 6 speed manual gearbox. Well Ohio sucks with speed limits like 65, I hope to be driving it in Montana at 100 mph. My colleague Anna will join me there for sure, but i dont if she wants another drivers license rusticated. But at present I have no qualms about my Rav4 V6, it just rocks. Simply too stable, amazing power and a joy to ride. Too bad they dont make it with a stick-shift. Some things are better handled manually, anyway the typical lazy american wants a coffee in one hand and the steering in the other, so there goes the stick-shift in the bin. Amazingly almost entire Europe and Asia still seems to love the stick. Of course you dont want a machine to drag you along the Autobahn, you want it to be doing what you want.

after an year

I cant believe, I haven't scribbled on the net for almost an Year. Well it was no doubt an eventful year. I graduated, found a job, bought a nice new car, lost my love and I am still kicking. Life has definetely become more eventful and I am sure I will blog pretty often from now on.

I'll go for a recap of the year next time, but today let me just go over something interesting I encountered on the construction site today. The guys were apparently alabama union workers. Working in an field engineering firm like GRL Engineers has let me travel widely within the United States and I can say that I do know something about the disparity in the wages of labor across the country by now. I am not sure if the guys (I am not even referring to the foreman, I am just talking about the people who go up the leads hook up the hammer, do welding, put up bolts and nuts) in New Jersey were so exceptional that they make 75$ an hr, while in Alabama they make 10$ and hr and someone in seattle makes 20$ an hr. Weird isn't, I am yet to get a grasp of it, but all i know is that a technician in NJ makes quite a lot of dosh, even more than most engineers and a guy working at wendy's beats the guy who slogs his day out battling the scorching heat of alabama hands down. Well I guess it is all still better than the truck driver I met in seattle airport who casually mentioned that "I made 8000$ a week in california". damn it, thats a lot of money, freaking too much. anyway enough of this.

I would love to start writing about other issues that have been eating me up, but i'll save it for later.

humbling and beautiful

well, i have not written for quite a long time, actually was very very busy and yes the result was fruitful. very good results for the material i was trying to model.

but today just out curiosity, i tried to go beyond what was needed and encountered some beautiful but really complex mathematical functions after a very long time. how many times do you come across a situation when you have to find the inverse fourier transform of a function that has a compound inverted summation in the denominator.
the description looks crazy right, but the function has a beautiful meaning. abstract and applied math can be very humbling at times. this branch of science has always fascinated me. things can't get better, do you ever tend to love something when you cant solve it in the final step, math can get you to like it.

i still remember taking discrete math (i am a civil engineering student) during 3rd year at roorkee, well actually i dont want to share my experiances on that class, forget it.

funny crawls in you

have you ever noticed those funny feelings you have before something important for which you are all prepared. I am blogging now, and I have a very important meeting 2 hrs from now. it happens all the the time right, feels funny sometimes. your thoughts vaccilate from tense to feel free and sometimes people snap.

but I am enjoying it, and anyway let me go through my stuff for one last time, will write in detail later.

keeping things tidy

Well just recently got rid of a roach problem at my place. This is one thing I have never been able to do all my life "keeping things clean and tidy". I guess it is ingrained in certain people and just brazes across the rest for a few moments and then it's gone. well now I am in my room now with everything lying around me and none of thme in places where they are supposed to be. Sometimes I chuckle saying "its ok thats cool" and then one day I say "am I living in a ghetto".

You see, in india things are much easier this way, you never need to clean your room, there is always someone to do that (in most cases it being my mom). you can never afford such luxuries here i guess.

By the way yesterday i checked out the latest linux OS released, simply awesome. I guess it is time people start using linux ending the micrsoft monopoly. But I just dont see it in the near future. I ask my dept secratary "bermie why dont u use linux" and she is like "Ravi, what's that". These people can only relate a computer to the windows xp desktop and MS word and nothing more.

I used to be fond of computers and long lines of coding a long back and then never showed interest in it, but I always had appreciation for breakthrough coding and now let me at least use linux (i know linux pretty well, i assure you)

nilavum malarum

sounds nice right, nilavum malarum paadudhu, en ninaivil mayangi pesudhu, nilai marandhu marandhu paarpathellam ....

wonderful awesome, the song is so evergreen that i can keep listening to it all day. i wish i was back in India having a nice time with all my friends around. for the past few days this feeling has been rubbing on me.

India is going great guns and its economy is progressing exponentially. I dont want to just hear this, I want to be in the midst of this progressing India. People make a lot of plans and strategies when they plan to return to their homeland and I am no exception.

United States is super dooper, but makes me feel lonely even though my dept just has 8 grad students and we all know each other very well and dept time is real fun.

I was just talking to bart zalewski, a polish colleague of mine who too misses poland and then me and bart went for a long drive and bart was planning to start a construction business in poland. Ok not bad, i thought if tata is making 1 lac cars, let me make 1 lac effienciency houses for my country.

let me make another strategy.

finally found a way

well, Abaqus has been giving me a hard time for the past few days. the drive through nail problem was never converging.

Today I finally configured something and yes, it works. It fact works very well.

So after a long time with theoretical mechanics, i went into to some hardcore building const. experiments and now back to modeling things using FEA.

feels good when the model works.

i'll have fun today.

one of those nice mornings

Today cleveland is stunning, I got up early and walked over to my department with mild sun gazing over. Absolutely beautiful.

Getting up early is actually nice and then in the department andrew promised me his timber code so that i can get started with my wood experiments on monday. Anyway i was just consolidating my FEM models.

and here is a tribute to orson welles, accoriding me to one of the best movie makers of the century, not to undermine spielberg, but i feel he is no where near the genre of film makers like Hitchcock, Orson Welles and of course Stanley Kubrick. The lady from Shangai by welles was amazing, even beats "The Third man".

The movie dates back to 1949, when I think of that, it sometimes is irritating to look back at Indian movies of those days (not that they are any better these days), but why did Indian cinema always base itself on emotional drama. The general answer is the public likes that , and i vehmently feel that "the explanation is crap". Who on earth said that indians dont like crime and mystery woven plots, inefficiency on the director's part should not attributed to the taste of the public.

anway thats how it is..............

getting no where

Summer of the 1st year of graduate study where everyone tries their hand at research. well i did not have a great experiance i would say. my thirst for theoretical mechanics went on a high and there i was in the midst of viscoelastcity and plasticity. The abaqus model went begging for a few days and i was enjoy mechanics at its best. of course, i had an elementary model ready. then i talk to a couple of people who have had a lot of experiance on shear walls and they say what you are trying to model is almost impossible. they said i better start getting an experimental setup underway. now there i was at the height of frustration, wasted all summer, of course enjoyed mechanics, but then all my modeling using FEM has gone to the bin.

i guess i better be optimistic to come up with a breakthrough model and also do the experiments to verify that.

anyway my advisor will soon be here to guide me out, i hope i am heading somewhere even though there is something that tells me..................

Today was one of those days when I felt "oh my god what am I doing in life". It has been days since i did bakkar with anyone for a good length of time. My god this country makes life busy for people and puts in a mental barrier called privacy. I miss hostel life. Roorkee was so much fun, I want marwaha, sashi and F-99 back. LIfe without this at night 9 pm looks really difficult to me.

After dinner at 9 pm it starts, I am the guy who starts usually " Dude the system sucks, we never used our brains after clearing the entrance to come in here". And thats enough to trigger a discussion that encompasses so topics one can hardly think of. and all on the cosy bed there with some song for marwaha on the comp. Everytime the sem begins Marwaha says "abhe is bar phodna hai yaar kuch tho karna hai", I still remember these lines. And i knew how this determination used to fade away as time passes.

But we all finally landed ourselves in decent career platforms didn't we, we managed our way through with 4 years of bakkar. Who the hell said grad school life is good and United states is fun. Life sucks, at least cleveland, Ohio sucks big time and roorkee, uttaranchal, India ROCKS.

will continue cribbing later

admiring archimedes

What did this great greek brain give the world, 2 amazing laws in science without which we would still be fumbling in the pre industrial era. The law of buyoncy and the lever principle. I like the 2nd one more, because it is more thoughtful way in which archmides discovered it and of course it has also got to do with the fact that Applied strcutural mechanics is my major. The lever principle might look very elementary to a layman, but the way it was first formulated by archimedes is still astounding. He thought of the principle of virtual work during
232 B.C. when no one had thougt about such things. The statement "GIVE ME A PLACE TO STAND AND I WILL MOVE THE EARTH" was very thoughtful and confident statement from a man who the intricacies of what he was talking. I dont know why, but still such fundamental discoveries in mechanics look more convincing and show sheer talent than a new micromechanical tissue analysis or whatever!!!!!!!!!!

Humming Raaja's tune

These days nothing appeals to me more than the maestro's music. If only my pc could express it's emotions it would start crying " Oh my god again, this guy is playing karagattakaran for the 20th time today". Music keeps a man going and Illayaraja's music keeps a man rocking. "kamam thedum ulagile...nada thyagarajarum, onnai uruki uyiril vilakai erinaramma".... amazing lyrics. he is simply excellent the one and only raaja. Maestro says all musicians cheat people very well and the guy who cheats people better is called the better music director. 25 years this guy has given us flawless music and we never needed to listen to anything else right. I started becoming a raaja fan only during my final and 4th year at Roorkee and I am still exploring on and on the depth's of his tunes. will write more later.

Case Western Reserve University

Case Western Reserve University