AESTHETICS OF AN INSTANT

The world in general believes that more often than not, half knowledge is far worse than no knowledge. Half knowledge without knowing how to use it is as good as knowing nothing and even if you do put it to use how bad can it get? I mean logically one does realize that one does not achieve his aim with no knowledge. But half knowledge? I mean you did spend some time, learning it didn't you? Can it really be harmful? Well, it isn't. At least not in my world…..

My subjects involve a lot of work and more often than not, it is not completely possible to give them the attention they demand. The semester pattern is designed such that you have enough time but not too much. An engineer can notify himself on the good looking girls in his batch. He can even run about trying to find out their name, or write a program for the color of dress she will wear the next day(believe me people have done it!) ,but to sit for long hours and chit chat with them would cost him, not money, but marks. Yes friends before one can find out whether the girl is single or not the semester exams will arrive and hell will break loose, and after that we don’t get to see those beautiful faces anymore. The thrill of taking two months to find out their name or writing a C program on them is now a distant memory. We go home and stare at the same faces we have been seeing since the day we were born. Yes parents, and yes you do get to see the variety in their facial expressions from the time of receiving you in the railway station to seeing your results, you get to see all the expressions you missed for six months so much that, you don’t miss them anymore.

What happens when we come back? That’s the interesting thing about college; you get new subjects and new faces every semester. In fact in the beginning you find it hard to pick your entertainment, so hard that you forget which one of them you were patronizing last semester. So as I was saying, my subjects do demand effort and attention, a great deal of both, and often we devote neither time nor effort. But we do study something; I mean everybody does want to score after all, you don’t want too much variety in the facial expressions part when you get home, do you?  So we all put in our efforts and study. Now surely you cannot remember everything when going for an exam. That’s when the real talent of an engineer is seen. Convert what you know to what they want, without getting it wrong. This is obviously a challenge, but once you get a hold of it, it’s your best arsenal in college life

I present before you three cases from my own life

Case 1- Workshop Exam

The workshop is basically where they make you do things you will seldom do in the rest of your engineering life-carpentry, plumbing, fitting and soldering. Each of them I hate doing for a different reason

Fitting-takes too much effort, almost makes me feel like I have donated all the blood in my body just to cut some piece of metal

Plumbing-worse than fitting, takes so much effort that two people have to do it

Carpentry-you cut, cut, and oops you’ve cut the wrong part. Do the whole thing again

Soldering-I don’t particularly hate it, but then again I don’t like it too much either

So the semester somehow passed, with me completing all the above four tasks. Finally the workshop pre-finals came and I got carpentry as my experiment. I looked at the rather shabby piece of wood. I remember reading in the procedure that I had to cut it along some particular line in order to make a joint. Simple enough I had to cut it along some line. But problem was that there were three lines and I dint know which one to cut. I looked at the examiner; he was checking the wood samples of the previous batch. I stared at the wood hard, visualizing what I had to create . I then started to work on it. In half an hour I was done. Then came my viva, he showed me some tool that looked like a wooden hammer and asked me “What is this tool?”. “A wooden hammer sir”, I replied. He made a frown. I suddenly found my wood more interesting and decided to look away. Apparently the wooden hammer in carpentry was called a mallet. I lost my marks.

Case 2- Computer Programming

Next practical was computer programming. This time too I studied very little, but decided to take it more optimistically. Viva came again with my question being, ”What is a structure?”.

As usual I dint know what it was, but I decided to answer it anyway. I told the examiner all about Union and how it was related to ‘Structure ‘ (with  good vocabulary in the middle) which made her all the more confused. But hey, I got the marks! I didn’t know that chapter and yet I pulled off a good viva.

Case 3- Workshop Final

Again the same workshop, same carpentry. But this time I knew which line to cut from the beginning (thanks to the pre-final),and again came the viva.this time I did however read a little about tools and went. The same examiner asked me, “What is this?” pointing at the same wooden hammer. Oh no! I went blank. I was suffering from a case 2 engineering exam disorder, I read it, but forgot! The examiner smiled, I smiled back. This time I decided that I was going to give it a try anyway. I remembered faintly the functions of the tool and started enlisting them. The examiner was pleased. If he asked for alphabet A I was giving him alphabets B to Z, for free. Finally the question boiled down to the same thing “So what is it called?“ he asked. I said “sir ma ma ma …”. “Mallet “, he completed. Yes sir i said. “ Stupid name sir, not able to pronounce it” I said.

Seriously not able to pronounce it?

Who cares anyway, he bought it. I got full in my viva.

Here is my take home message to everyone here, “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull shit”.

But never give up. Who said that? Not anyone famous (yet). It’s just me.

I know that what happened with me was the mere aesthetics of an instant, that instant. But nevertheless there is no harm in trying.

“Whatever you can do, begin it, boldness has a genius, power and magic in it”-Goethe

                                                                          

Few days ago I was doing the usual what every student does on a holiday. I was browsing on Facebook with a friend of mine. I came across a post that read “if half knowledge is dangerous then engineers are nuclear weapons”. My friend, a medical student looked and asked, ”Are you offended?. “No”, I replied. “I’m just amused!”.