Meine Indien

Well...60 years of independence. 23 years of my existence in that place. And what a place! It has been an extreme ride of sorts. No half measures whatsoever. Cities with huge population exceeding 10 million. People with varied cultures. We may look them same but we are culturally different. But we are Indians. Unity in diversity. Democracy which actually works (trust me on this I was really cynical till the last elections but now I do believe in our system) and biggest at that. Sea of people at the crossroads of the cultural boundaries. A country with 1.3 billion, well represented by all major religions of the world. Country which got its independence through non-violence. Country which was plundered right from Alexander the great of the ancient Greeks to the Chengis Khan to the Arabs to the Europeans. Country which in the 17th century was the 3rd biggest economy in the world was reduced to a 3rd world country by 1950s. But, but.....we were taught to believe in circle of life (what goes around comes around) and its coming back for sure. In all this economic boom and money hype, we will not lose the core of existence. We were happy with whatever little we had and in future too we will be happy with what we have. A country which sees more terrorist attacks in one year than the whole of west Europe and US collectively. But we will never back down or seek help. We will achieve our goals on our own. No one can deny the fact that its difficult but not impossible.
In the end, We are responsible for what we are, and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves. If what we are now has been the result of our own past actions, it certainly follows that whatever we wish to be in future can be produced by our present actions; so we have to know how to act.
Thanks, Marcela for letting me realise the value of my country.

Just random thoughts

In Sam's words "Mac when did you become so philosophical!?!?" Why the fuck have I become so philosophical nowadays? Why am I taking life so seriously? The other day I was walking back to my place from my work / internship. Ok, Firstly the background, my internship is in a research institute where I will have to "design" (hahahahhahahaha) a self centering system for a CNC machine. This involves interfacing a laser sensor and an actuator. As boring as it may seem, it is made worse by the fact that nowadays weather here is awesome and it is hard to sit inside 4 walls. And also since I invented procrastination, all I do is browse the net, chat with people (damn windows messenger and google mail talk!!), day dream or drink coffee. So all this idleness coupled with caffeine from 4 cups of coffee has kind of scrambled my brains. Hence I tend to do "out of the box" thinking, or so it seems. Yeah, while walking back from Fraunhofer Institut I started thinking generally about the reasons behind this whole engineering charade of mine. Who would be so anal to worry about the offset of a workpiece and a chuck by 1 micron? Am I the right person to be so fucked in the head to think about such details? Do I need really need this? Am I a real engineer?