What I Truly Feel about Engineering Education in India

What I Truly Feel about Engineering Education in India

In my professional career in India, I have worked in multiples of about five years in two different organizations for a total of 23 years and I learned a lot while shifting from academia, including research, to a couple of industries, and then back to academia, for about 10 years.

I am not aware that any of the faculty in the School to which I was affiliated knows that on February 9, 2024 a Boeing aircraft jettisoned a door soon after take-off. OK, it was not a door, but a door panel plug fitted in a space originally designed to have had a door. Even if any one of my colleagues had read about that incident, they did not acknowledge it in water-cooler conversations. That silence, other than water gurgling, was deafening.

What I learned is that four bolts came off the panel because the required “edge distance” had not been provided – the bolts were too close to the edges of the panel. A design/drawing/fabrication flaw, fortunately no fatalities. This is taught to students as the first thing in steel design. No surprise. I will explain in a little while.

It is six months, at least, since there has been a major incidence of failure on the National Highway running just outside the university (Deemed-to-be) campus, only 7 km due west. I immediately knew that such a failure could not have happened but it did. That is, it has to be a major failure, probably a landside inside the embankment without a structural retaining wall – a Retaining Earth (RE) wall. A major disaster.

I suggested that our students be taken there, with appropriate permissions, to learn about the mechanics of such an almost free-standing retaining wall and also think – merely think – about the possible causes. The repair work must have gone on for more than four months, but no initiative from any other quarters to spur a site visit by students. Now it is too late, as the affected lane has been repaired (with an incongruously higher crash barrier). I would speculate, as I know the mechanism, that it is a failure of the drainage system. On the other side, as a precaution, the concessionaire has installed additional drainage pipes, jutting out of the panels, spoiling the aesthetics! 

In the School of Civil Engineering at the university, we are intent on producing diploma holders, who can do what they are told to do or repeat what others have done, and give the students degrees – at the undergraduate and post-graduate (“Graduate” in Americanese) levels.

I will take up the post-graduate level first. There is absolutely zero aptitude for analysis. Indeed, even our faculty may end up asking what analysis is. I am not joking. My experience over the past five or six years has repeated itself numerous times – every post-graduate project was a substitution project – substitute some material for cement and claim enhanced eco-friendliness. Indeed, it was I who, in howsoever loud a voice I could muster, commented on lack of justification for the claim.

Cow dung instead of cement paste type of thing; or bacterial healing of concrete when at best what happens is a precipitate of dubious structural strength fills in the cracks. As far as I know there have been no strength tests of the precipitate itself. The only thing is resistance to attacks by chloride, sulphates and others. There is absolutely no curiosity – Oh, I am doing what has been done earlier, by substitution. No science behind it.

Undergraduate students go into frenzy when they see a question that does not have numbers. Any and all algebraic manipulations are beyond their ken. They have become excellent calculator-punchers. I know that all the first year engineering students will be stunned by the question paper in Engineering Mechanics if it had reached beyond the level of calculator-punching. They know their formula, and know how to calculate. That is all is being tested.  

But, faculty are incarnations of Karnan (of Mahabharat) when it comes to grading CIA papers. There was an instance in a section that in two tests (during the semester), the minimum mark obtained was 56% (28/50)! Read that again – the MINIMUM. That section must have been a select bunch of geniuses!

It is likely that an elective course in Finite Element Analysis will be dropped. I suspect it is the mathematics, not necessarily daunting if taught as a development in mathematics, which led to such automated processes to get the desired results, but if, and only if, the input was correct.  An engineer’s experience in a software is no guarantee that she would spot a major error – recall the Boeing incidence, if it were a design flaw.

There is enough breast-beating about the standard of teaching. Perhaps justifiable. Yet, we should take a look at the system. At one level, you have the so-called edupreneurs, aka the management. Very tough people to satisfy, because they are just accountants who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. They think engineering is just punching in and printing out, true practitioners of GIGO – Garbage In Garbage Out.

At the immediate lower level you have the heads of schools/departments. They are betrothed to the idea of education as source of profit, per the management. They lose their spirit of the venture the moment they get to be the head.  Rather, that spirit is redirected to elsewhere. I have seen this happen, and publish technical papers.

Just below are the other members of the faculty. My opinion of their technical output is unprintable. They are abiding by the instruction they get, from the management and more incessantly, from the head of the school/department. Set easy questions, award high marks independent of performance, guide researchers through a repetition of prior work and publish technical papers of dubious quality. I am being generous here.

The students are not blameless. A student gave a feedback for me saying that I do not know anything about the subject on which I have climbed many rungs, indeed, many ladders over the past 50 years. I cannot but dismiss it. It neither affected me nor could have affected me personally.

Now, to the apex of this pyramid. There sits the parent(s). They are looking at the immediate RoI of the education their wards are getting.

So, if you wish to get your institute a rung up the ladder, as the edupreneur you have to sacrifice profit for a brief time and focus on students’ education and not merely their placement. Educate the parents about what you are doing.

“Oh, no, we can’t do that,”  I hear the edupreneurs’ chorus.

Then, sit at the top of the garbage heap.

Raghuram Ekambaram

Did Telugu People in Australia Celebrate Sankranti Today?

 

Did Telugu People in Australia Celebrate Sankranti Today?

If they did, it is OK. But, did they celebrate Makar Sankranti? If they did, they did not know that it was most inappropriate! I will explain.

What does Sankranti mean? In Sanskrit, it means “transition” or “passage”, I learned. Makar Sankranti means the Sun transitions from Makar constellation (Capricorn).

While the Sun “travels” north starting around December 21, as per Hindu astrology/calendar (which is lunisolar), we celebrate it in the middle of January. But, that is not very relevant here. What is relevant though is the seasonal implications of this change in the apparent change in the direction of motion of the Sun.

On Makar Sankranti, India celebrates the beginning of the lengthening of the days and shortening of the nights, leaving behind the long and dreary nights. Point to note: India is situated wholly in the Northern Hemisphere of the earth. More to the point: Australia is situated wholly in the Southern Hemisphere of the earth.

Now, you are aware why I chose Telugus in Australia. They celebrate Makar Sankranti with gusto. Tamils, not so much, while they have christened it as the festival “Pongal”, to signify overflowing prosperity. Not bad. Quite secular. Yet, leave it to Tamil Brahmins to make a religious ceremony out of it – Suryanarayana Pooja!

Telugus in Australia must bemoan the shortening of the days and the lengthening of the nights when the Sun “travels” northward. It foretells the winter Down Under. What I know is Australian winters, along the coast (where most of the population lives, just like in Greenland) is not half as bad as in the northern hemisphere. Yet, it is winter and days are indeed shorter than nights.

So, when should Telugus in Australia celebrate the equivalent of Makar Sankranti? Karkataka Sankranti, when the Sun starts its southward journey, leaving the Tropic of Cancer!

Do they? No, not as far as I know.

Sankranti, meaning merely “transition”, is OK; yet, celebrating Makar Sankranti is not!

Raghuram Ekambaram

  

The Trick to Enjoy Test Cricket - Enjoy Chewing the Cud

 

The Trick to Enjoy Test Cricket - Enjoy Chewing the Cud

I was a pre-teen in the mid 1960s. My paternal grandmother’s younger brother used to tease me on Indian cricket, and how.

In those days, M. L. Jaisimha, Chandu Borde, Dilip Sardesai, Farokh Engineer, B K Kunderan were the openers / 1 down. This grand uncle (is that the formal way to designate this relationship?), when we visited him, not let me in the house, sitting as he always was in the roofed veranda, enjoying retired life.

Those were the days. I too am retired but I do not get to enjoy this phase of my life. Please do feel sorry for me.

If a cricket match is being played anywhere in the world, he would catch me and ask me a few questions, mostly arithmetic; like, if a team is at 269 for 8 wickets, at what score would they complete their innings. I had to do the required mental gymnastics (no electronic calculators then), and say, 340. His response? No, 336 (he, like many others of that time, had many tricks up his sleeve for arithmetic calculations; read Richard P. Feynman’s Surely you are joking, Mr. Feynman). I would hang my head in shame.

Well it is another matter that the innings score hardly ever came close to the predictions of either of us. I am sure my grand uncle knew this and perhaps this was his way of teaching the limits of proportionality, or of arithmetic in general. This was precisely when I was learning the usual “water tank filling and emptying” problems. I got to question what I was taught only in the twelfth year of my schooling (ironically in college, during my Pre-University Course studies) when I was introduced to elements of calculus.

Coming back to M. L. Jaisimha et al., the score in the Indian innings roamed around twenty for two or some such low scores, one opener with the one-down batsman, or both the openers back in the pavilion (no dugouts in those times). I used to be very satisfied if the innings score breached what I had predicted using proportionality calculations, that is, reaching three digits!

Now, it appears that the powers that be in IPL statistics group have not matured beyond my 3^rd or 4^th class competency in arithmetic.  How else can you explain, at the end of the 12^th over in a IPL contest, the chyron on the TV screen reads, “At 9 runs an over, the predicted score is ...; at 10 runs an over, ...; at 11 runs an over ...”? Worse still in the middle of the 16^th over, “At 9 runs ...” etc.

My question to whoever chooses to run these statistics on the screen: What is the probability that the score at the end of the innings (perhaps 20 overs [six balls an over] or a few balls less) will give a per over average that is an integer? I bet my life they cannot answer. The, why use statistics at all? Just say that, “At this venue, at this time of the day, with overcast skies, in matches between these two teams at this stage of the innings, the batting team has averaged approximately eight runs an over.”

Read the above sentence again, to realize that there really cannot be an average as very few matches would have been played under all the conditions listed!

A T20I or even an ODI are insanely focused on statistics when that measure carries no meaning. However, in Test Cricket, you have time to chew the cud, and enjoy uncertainty. Yes, there is nail-biting excitement in extended uncertainty. But, when shortened, the excitement may be intensified but would be ephemeral.

Yes, at the end of the fourth day of the fifth test between India and Australia in Australia, I was excited to imagine that the Indian cricket team would defeat that of Australia (it is not a nation defeating another nation, you see). Of course, that imagination went as well as a cigarette puff, into thin air soon after the Australians went in to bat for their second innings.

Yet, I enjoyed it when it existed. To have such a well-nigh impossible chance is, well, well-nigh impossible in ODI or T20I.

To be excited about Test Cricket matches, one has to become a cow, and chew the cud. I have been ready ever since my grand uncle led me down that path.

Raghuram Ekambaram

Why Can’t “Talking Heads” Stop Talking?

 

Why Can’t “Talking Heads” Stop Talking?

A stupid question, the title is. Why would a “Talking Head” insult their profession that mandates continuous talking? It might be gibberish, but still they are talking!

I like to read my news and not it being read to me. Hearing gibberish started out as a hobby for me, identifying it on TV news channels. My eyes and ears do not coordinate themselves quite so strongly.

 Some of the newsreaders on Indian channels overdo their, “I am not a stiff-upper-lip Brit...” act just a bit too much; if I were to concentrate more visually, I think I will see their tonsils! By the time they close their lips, the sound from them have reached the nearest star and have returned.

On the US based networks like MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, some of the presenters are wannabe Brits. Sounds from their mouths come out as staccato bytes. I am tuned to the slow drawl of the US south and my mind is not as flexible at 70 years old. So, I keep falling through cracks as I change channels, seeking variety.

Then, it became a little more serious. As I surf TV channels, I realized that I lose the chain of what the commentariat is saying. It appears to me that the interviewer is, along with their body language expressing nothing, use complex sentences as de rigueur. That could be OK, if only what is being queried about is a complex issue. It never is. Ill-composed complex sentences are there merely to make the host sound intelligent, yet the question remains unintelligible.

Shifting from the differences in the mechanism of production of sound in and by various readers/presenters, let me now turn to the content. The sentences are always long winded, grammatically complex, and when they are questions, the addressee is often left wondering where the question started and where it ended.  This appears OK with the addressees, who are the experts in anything they open their mouth about (domestic politics, geopolitics, sociology, law making and breaking, environment, climate, weather, sports...). They hardly hear the hosts’ questions, but out comes the answers, not pat but again long-winded; chasing a hit to the left field by the right fielder.   

The experts do not understand what the question is and the viewing public is left clueless as to what was said. It is even, all around. So far so good.

Twenty four hour news channels are the bane of civil society. I remember when my father, an anglophile he was, waited for the chimes on AIR News at 9:00 PM to reset his watch (a couple of times a week), and listen to the news. Just from hearing the well toned sounds from our valve radio, I improved, I think, my spoken English, including grammar. My vocabulary must have also expanded as my father forced me to go to the dictionary when I asked for the meaning of a word I heard.

 I also listened to, before I left for school, Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s tennis and cricket commentary. A possible benefit could have been my ability to translate information from words into images: a pull shot to square leg, be the batsman a left or a right hander, a right handed player sending a cross court forehand to the extreme back hand of the left handed receiver in tennis. Aces down the middle – no problem; a wide serve to the right handed player’s wide forehand in the deuce court. And, so on ...

TV commentators are in the same pile of shit as news readers. They feel compelled to fill up each frame with their voice with inanities spewing forth.

Only when “Talking Heads” give due credit to their listeners will they improve the quality of the news. If they treated their audience as dunce, there would be no chance of the presenters becoming intelligent. They would remain what they think their viewers are, dunces.

One way forward: force them to listen to their voices (no videos) every day of their performance the previous day. Doctors must operate on themselves.

Raghuram Ekambaram

     

Child Abuse of the Second Kind

 

Child Abuse of the Second Kind

When someone mentions child abuse, the thoughts of listeners go racing to sexual abuse of a child, as perhaps it should. Child abuse of the first kind. It is so obvious and so evil and visited upon such a defenceless and full member of society.

Yet, there is another kind of child abuse that starts even earlier that is equally vile but is not recognized so; indeed, it is celebrated, horror of horrors. I am thinking of religious indoctrination. Child abuse of the second kind. Some form of this type of indoctrination is physical.

Infant baptism is a right of initiation in Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Oriental Orthodoxy. Baptisms further down the road, for pre-adults and adults, are sacraments for many other denominations of Christianity. Basically, for a Christian–I am not a Christian, so give me some wiggle room–Christianity is proclaimed for them or they proclaim it for themselves.

I do not know why, but when I think of baptism, I think about the scene in The Godfather (1972) towards the end, which ends up enthroning Michael Corleone as the successor to Vito Corleone! Such violence. I am sure I see similar violence in this Christian sacrament.

Jews have their own stuff and so do both Sunni and Shia Muslims. Do not even ask about Hinduism, with special focus on Tamil Brahmins (Alas, I am one and I can speak with some authority).

In Christianity, one is born in sin. Would you believe something similar in Tamil Brahmin’s mindscape? You better. Till the 10^th day, the new born, its parents and further up the genealogy on the paternal side are, in a supposedly “good” sense, “untouchables”! In my opinion, in whatever “good” sense it maybe, it uncomfortably still resembles the “born in sin” seal of disapproval. Only after the baby is christened with the attendant Vedic rituals, this seal is effaced.

 Richard Dawkins, as much as I appreciate his views on Natural Selection through Random Mutation, religion, education, and other morality based issues, slithered away without answering when asked to comment on whether he thinks parents are committing child abuse when bringing up their child in the religion they follow.

I would go one step further and answer with an unequivocal and loud YES. I would, however, add a qualifier: to quote, partly and most inappropriately, what Jesus said on the cross: “...[F]orgive them ... for they know not what they do.” To say it more bluntly: this is the worst aspect of religion that excuses ignorance when no effort is taken to remedy it.

Yes, this is how I excused my parents for having been so ritual-bound, just going with the flow. It is a sociological pardon and not a religious one; my YES is not de-intensified on this count.

Now, to something on which I am fully with Dawkins: I quote him, “There is no such thing as a Catholic child; there is only a child of Catholic parents...” Ask yourself what religion you follow. The answer would be, “...of my parents.” You were branded at birth!

Again, I am going to take issue with a hero of mine, at a level much deeper than Dawkins, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar. With a singular goal of Annihilation of Caste, he converted so many thousands of people to Buddhism which he saw as caste-free. Yet, he was blind to how that religion was susceptible to political pressures to bring about what is termed genocide in Sri Lanka, some two decades after his monumental efforts.

Let me take a few steps back. Dr. Ambedkar was not an atheist and more importantly, he could not have been an atheist. No matter how charismatic a leader is, there can be no mass movement behind them. Had he been an atheist, his temple tank movement could not have been a defining event (Chowder tank).

I give you Shaheed Bhagat Singh, a deeply admired revolutionary who aimed at abolishing British rule. He did not have a mass following and one may attribute that to his atheism (Why I am an Atheist). Every atheist is different than every other atheist!

Religion is distributed geographically. A religionist from South Asia would be hard put to establish kinship with an Anglican religionist in the UK. Buddhists from Tibet may not recognize Sri Lankan or Myanmar Buddhists as their kin. Ashkenazi Jews different than Sephardic Jews, geographic separation.

I can only hope that there be no child abuse of the third kind in the future.

Raghuram Ekambaram

Cobwebs in the mind

 

Cobwebs in the mind

We know that spiders keep spinning their webs if corners are not regularly cleaned. But, what about corners where the occupants of the houses deliberately collect dirt? Of course, that would be a field day for the spiders.

Now, come to the human brain. This too has to be cleaned periodically. Instead of a broom stick, what is to be used is the long arm of rationalism, with the brush dipped in a solution of empiricism, even diluted it may be. When rationalism, howsoever diluted, is back tracking, the ecology of spirituality-cum-religiosity blossoms. The pollinators are what I call spiritual-cum-religious (I am not going to repeat this hyphenated word; now onwards, it S&R) are termites.

Lacking this effort, soon enough the brain, overrun by superstition, spiritual mumbo jumbo, inscrutable religious sermons, never-tested rituals, forgets to identify itself as a seat of thinking and learning, and unlearning too, and becomes more like an insect caught in the cobweb, unable to extricate itself; food for the ravenous organizations of spirituality and religiosity, eagerly waiting for such seasoned brains.

To digress a bit, I was in the middle of deep depression sometime in the middle of the first decade of the 21^st century. My mind was dipping itself repeatedly in self-pity, about perhaps the most trivial thing, losing my ability to solve the daily crossword in The Hindu. My wife played the hugest part in my overcoming this depression. My million thanks to her.

When did Indian brains become cobwebbed? In the mid to late 1980’s, Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayana and Mahabharata were aired one after the other and this led to the faux spiritualization of Indian Hindus. I do not believe there were any private networks then, and this is the point: the government controlled airwaves had no second thoughts about broadcasting a Hindu epic. Let that slide.

I learned of the serial Ramayana, from a friend of a friend. She narrated an incidence, almost as interesting as the epic itself, when she visited the home of a family friend of hers. The hosts were glued to the TV with the epic ruling the airwaves. There was not even a cursory, “Welcome! How are you?” from the hosts. Of course, she was offered a seat to watch along with the host family and a few neighbours as the epic was running on the TV, never mind the guest was a Christian!

S&R does not spare anyone.

As of now, I can name at least three such S&R channels – the termites have created their own spheres of comfort, and the thing is this: the sacerdotal calendar, made up by this is replete with festivals of all and sundry gods (yes, God is now demoted to gods). In my household, the pooja room resembles the web of a spider and the pictures of the gods (photos of every god of the Hindu pantheon) are the insects caught in it. And, Lord Vishnu dominates the scene, not because he is the first, the top tier; but, because he manifested himself whenever a devotee sneezed and he came down to earth to make him/her comfortable – S&Rs Vicks inhaler!

My wife carries only about one fourth of the blame for the god-cobweb walls. My sister-in-law who lives with us carries the rest of the blame. Now, the showcase, again congested by god- and miscellaneous-cobwebs, carries the imprint of only my sister-in-law. Merely to hide a portion of the showcase, I have kept the TV diagonally at the corner. You can see the handiwork of both my sister-in-law and me.

I had given specific instructions: No more than five pieces in a rack; these have to have some feature a part of our family that could make for a good story; avoid any and all references to any religion.

See the above and judge for yourself: My instructions have been followed more in their breach, and for the worse. And, religious icons are galore. It is super-congested that no item can showcase itself as it is mired in mediocrity. There goes the story telling part. I blame religion for this mess. There are other items I would have removed, but for the drama by my sister-in-law.

But, I must tell you one thing. In the apartment complex I live in, the walls of my residence can be seen in the interstices (in the pooja room; in the other rooms, the walls are tastefully sparse). I have not gone into the bedrooms of the occupants of the other apartments, but even their living room walls are completely masked! I wish I could show you that, but it would be tacky, and I am not a snitch!

Cobwebs in the mind create cobwebs on the wall, in the corners ... if one wished to remove the latter, one must start with the former.

Raghuram Ekambaram

Why do human brains stop learning?

 

Why do human brains stop learning?

I came to the question in the heading when I realized that people appear to be pre-programmed to put an end to analyzing some things. Perhaps because any particular brain “knows” that some things are too difficult for it to comprehend. Take myself as an example. I cannot, for the heaven of me, carry a tune. Yet, as a layman, I do enjoy listening to music, of any kind. But, were you to ask me the “why” of it, I would be bewildered.  

Yet, show me patterns of almost any kind and I invariably look for a pattern in it. Perhaps that is why I do not collect cobwebs in my mind, at least that I myself can discern. A huge claim, but do not ask me for proof.

What if I cannot find any proof? There are many millions of instances that are beyond me. Then, I say something like, “sour grapes”, and that is that. But, there is a caveat to this. Should someone were to offer an explanation for a phenomenon, I do not stop. I keep asking myself, “How can I get to understand?”

This is not a problem in my interactions on most of the topics I discuss with my family, relatives, friends and acquaintances. But, there is one, the usual answer to a question I ask on this as yet unidentified topic is, “This is what our elders have told us, we have been following ...you are not to ask why ...”

Now, you know that the topic is spirituality/religion!

I think of my father a lot. When I was young, say till the day I left the coop for my engineering education, he would patiently explain to me why this, why that etc. and tell me to my face that I would learn more about it on my own as I kept asking questions.

I wish to digress and get this off my chest. Once, when we were living in a third floor barsati in the then Madras (three rooms + kitchen, with flat roof in one room, and the others with sloped asbestos covering, and a large open to sky area across which one had to run in rain to the bathroom and toilet), I remembered asking my father why, though we were right below the water tank, taps ran dry first in our house whereas the flats in the first and second floor still had running water. He cryptically answered that we were closer to the tank than the other floors. That was the clue I needed, and it was the beginning of my focus on differences between situations to try understanding things. Even to this day, I keep thanking my father, and missing him, for not teaching me anything but teaching me to learn.

Yet, he clammed up when the topic veered towards God(s) and Goddesses, temples, the other religions and such other matters. These silences were not in his mental makeup, but I let them slide. I should not have.

People are scared of being exposed to themselves. As a result, they have self-silenced. While there are autodidacts (self-taught), these are auto-silenced!  What are they afraid of? The Gods, of course! I do not think Gods care whether you, as an individual or as a group, believe in Their omniscience, omnipotence and benevolence.

When would they unshackle themselves? Not as long as they fear what society would say about them. Their fear is not self-generated, is not even generated by God, but a mental imposition on them by society.

Yes, they say that man is a social animal, which could be true. We did survive by forming groups and group affiliation played a big role in human (as a species) survival. Isn’t it time to shed that fear mentality?

Are they waiting for an advertisement, as in the Virginia Slims campaign of long ago, “You’ve come a long way, baby”? This ain’t coming.

You “Just do it!” Nike advertisement.

Start learning again.

Raghuram Ekambaram

I Love Epics and Myths

 

I Love  Epics and Myths

As a professed rationalist, I really should not, but I do.  Why? Because I can cock a snook at those who believe these myths are elements of true events in the past.

When I was a pre-teen my parents took me to a movie probably Tamil dubbing of a Kannada movie, in which Lord Krishna obscures the sun by releasing the sharp-edged discus from his finger. Brahmins ran off scurrying to the nearby water body to offer obeisance to their forefathers, as is mandated of them on New Moon days.

Seeing this, the Moon god, accompanied by the Sun god, came down to earth to ask Lord Krishna why are the Brahmins doing the New Moon prayer ceremonies when it was a few more days in the future. Lord Krishna, never at a loss for an answer, pointed out that they, the sun and the moon, are together right there in His presence. Hence, by definition, it is a New Moon day/night.

Before Columbus deceived the natives in the Caribbean, Lord Krishna had done the cheating; gives the normal event a thing to be remembered, a myth, embedded in an epic. Reason enough for me to love the epics and myths.

Christianity is chock full of myths that people want to believe as truth. The boulder covering the mouth of the sepulchre moved / was moved; either way, not very reassuring. Jesus fed multitudes (5,000 as in one of the Gospels) from five loaves of bread and two fish. You can so fish for myths in what Jesus did and leave flabbergasted.

Recently I watched on YouTube some Biblical scholar saying that there was zero evidence of Moses ever having been a historic personality–a nice way of saying he was only a mythical personality–and even the name Moses is derived from Hebrew, and was not a word in the language of the then Egyptians. Then, in The Ten Commandments, Bithia, the then Pharaoh’s daughter says ever so dramatically, “Because I drew you from the water, you shall be called Moses.” This is a simple myth, in an epic.

In Buddhism, the Buddha at the time of his dying is said to have asked Ananda to lay his head on the northern side. An empiricist picking a direction in which his head should rest at the moment of his death? There is more to come … the Buddha giving directions as to how the ashes after his body was burnt should be disposed off and a number of such details. Tut, tut …

Mohammed too brought about some so-called miracles, like splitting the moon, healing the sick and the blind (normal item).

Even the very human, the previous century (the current century is perhaps too young to have had matured) Gurus carry this miraclitis disease. Their devotees have readily taken to miaclizing their Gurus’ existence (more than one Guru per person). There are just so many of them, a compilation about them would challenge the length of the Mahabharata!

I do not venture to name them but just watch any of the so-called spiritual networks on TV and you would find more than sufficient proof (that is a post in the making, without names, of course).

The more these Gurus (both of the past and the present), I am so much happier, as it adds to my blog-post count!

Hence, my love for epics and myths.

Raghuram Ekambaram

“Five-Day Test Cricket match is boring …” – NO, IT IS NOT!

 

“Five-Day Test Cricket match is boring …” – NO, IT IS NOT!

 

‘Freedom has a thousand charms to show,

That Slaves, howe’er contented, never know - William Cowper

 

The above lines carry least relevance to what I am going to write in this post. No, I am not going to talk about the slaves that William Cowper talked about. Rather, this post is about a kind of slave I am, to five-day cricket test match, watching on TV, a luxury I am affording myself in my retired life.

Yes, I am an anachronism. In this fast, get-it-done-yesterday world, even leisure comes pre-packaged with moment–wise activity schedule. Of course, without such a schedule, the vacationers would be lost. In my understanding, a vacation should be schedule-free, but not for the current corps of vacationers.

Yes, a Test Cricket match takes inordinate time, over five days; approximately 30 hours. A One Day International (ODI) takes about 7 ½ hours; a T20I, about 3 ½ hours. This slave to the test match is contented with seeing any cricket on TV, but I miss the charms of a test match.

One question to make a point: Has an ODI or a T20I ever kept you on the edge of your seat from morning (say, 09:00 hrs.) to about 16:30 hrs.? They could not have. Never. But, I was stuck to my chair for the full duration of a day’s play (including the lunch and tea breaks) for the test match at Eden Gardens in Kolkata (was it Calcutta in 2001? Who cares?).

I may be wrong in the commas and periods of the events of the fourth day of the match, India following on after its dismal first innings score. But, just listen to my memory. Every ball bowled by Australia on that day–I mean EVERY BALL–was a potential last nail on Indian team’s coffin. Yet, the then mighty Australians were denied, and how!

VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid (the Wall) just dug in, dug in, and dug in till stumps that day, fateful for the Australians. Every ball mattered. Digging in did not mean Ken Barrington’s (English cricketer) block-bloc-block strategy, but going after hittable balls with gusto (no sixes, if I remember right; too risky). VVSL scored a double century and RD, a century. Then, things happened on the final day and Harbhajan Singh took over in Australia’s second innings, scalped three or four wickets, all crucial.

Till the end, it was edge-of-the-seat tension. Will Australia, playing for a draw, be successful, an asterisked word, given the context India won? Would it not be a blot on their reputation? Yes, and yes, and it was not to be.      

India won. That was how.

This was not a one-off. More than a few decades earlier, I had heard, on All India Radio, Mansur Ali Khan, Nawab of Pataudi, score a double century by sending the ball across the rope on the last ball of a test match. That was excitement, even when everyone knew that the match was ending in a draw. He scored 203, I vividly remember, hearing it at my friend’s place, sneaking out of school. Yes, I have had my escapades!

One more, to round off, of being a witness of an unedifying collapse, when Australia and India played a test match at Chepauk. India was in a comfortable position. But, before I could have finished that sentence, Indian batting collapsed.

At stumps the previous day, Australians were reeling at 24 for 6 with all the biggies sent home. Then, Ian Redpath hit a skier that Ajit Wadekar could not hold on to (the sun was in his face, and it was on mine too, in the stands). The batsman made some 60 plus and that turned out to have been enough for an Australian win. The missed catch, there ended the match, a terrible loss.

Now, I am writing all of these without referring to any scrap book (I have none on this topic), no Googling. They just stayed in my mind as the voice of radio commentators, and, in the last episode narrated, a dispiriting personal experience, in sports.

It is not impossible that three or four decades later, some cricket fan now in his/her (my female cousin knew cricket stats upside down) could recall similar details of excitement in their ODI or T20I experience on TV.

I doubt it, though. There are just too many of them and one’s brain shovels horse shit every so often.

In my mind, I still carry them. So, it might not be about the format of the cricket, but more about how much. I was slave to test cricket in my youth because that was the only game in town. It ain’t so anymore.

Just musing: Will Cowper’s lines resonate with descendants of slaves among today’s youth?

Raghuram Ekambaram

Why do athletes look up at the sky when they win?

 

Why do athletes look up at the sky when they win?

Just about every athlete looks up, at the sky, when things go their way. Why? Is it their way of saying thanks to the Almighty? If yes, what should the other athlete do? Look down? Or, look up at the sky with a forlorn mien on their face? Would the Almighty respond to each, and how?

If only there were no Almighty, such questions would not have arisen. There would be competition, but both the winner and loser would still be friends, beyond the conventional handshake across the net in tennis and similar gestures in other sports and games. Across the board in chess.

Magnus Carlsen said it best in the context of the World Blitz title for men: paraphrasing, it would have been cruel had he not extended his hands across the board to Ian Nepominiachtchi offering a draw to a hard-fought and long game, had it been taken to a tiresome  and a “very, very cruel” conclusion. I do not know chess, but I can appreciate the depth of the sentiment.

Why can’t the world appreciate losers? Oh, commercial endorsements.

“Money for nothing …” Dire Straits sang. Truly so.

Raghuram Ekambaram