Very recently I had been to the Sinhagad fort. Actually we had a very
casual trek up to the fort (we took a hour and a half) and it was more
a picnic than a trek. The thing I would remember most is the wind at
the famous "wind point". Only once before in my life have I felt so
much wind.It was actually difficult to walk against the wind. We tried
to hold our wind-cheaters open like wings and it was almost impossible
to walk forward. In fact I believe, at a particular instant I was
leaning against the wind, inclined at at least 30 degrees. And as
always, the food up there was really good (which is basically why I go
there in the first place).
Today I had gone to meet my teacher (guru would be a better word, I
think) Dr. Patankar. The satisfaction I got after talking to him is
only to be experienced.Well, it's a bit difficult to write about him,
because it would take a lot of time and effort to come up with
something that that can do justice to his wide spectrum of abilities,
interests and achievements. To list a few areas of expertise we have
physics, chemistry, mathematics, astronomy, astrophysics, astrology,
literature (he knows 'dasbodh' by heart and has read the complete set
of Shakespeare) and medicine. Not to mention his immense interest in
music (he has one of the largest collection of Hindi songs), movies
and philosophy. Today I got to know that he has a pretty good
understanding of the share market as well. All in all, a great
man. It's a privilege to know him, talk with him and learn from him.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Life of a Hacker Atul (The Shaolin) posted a poem on his blog titled - 'The Life of a Programmer'. You can read it here - http://the-shaolin.blogspot.com/2005/01/life-of-programmer.html Here is my version - 'The Life of a Hacker'. I wrote this one to bring forth the two contrasting attitudes of people in the software industry. I start my day by sitting on a chair, Giving my console a nice warm stare. By evening I'm done with some more hacking, Oh! This life is getting so exciting. Like many, I entered this world of hackerdom, Opportunities are many and there is plenty of freedom. Dreams of joining the likes of Stallman and Wall, And to be hailed as hacker by one and by all. Thus, I entered the world of bytes And realised the reality of copyrights. And that the world of patents isn't all that nice, Behind the trademarks, lie deceit and lies. Seeing beyond the monitor, Bringing...
Read more
An 'eye opener' Let's say that you are teaching a class. Let's say that you are teaching Unix. You have drawn a neat sketch of the inode-wise layout of the disk and you are explaining the concept of the hierarchical filesystem and directories and inodes and hard and soft links with the help of your neat diagram. Suddenly you discover that one of the students is not getting the whole picture ... because he can't see ... *because he is blind*. At that moment I didn't really feel the impact because I was too engrossed in the subject, too engrossed in teaching. But the whole thing really hit me hard on the bus ride home. A thousand questions were raised, not many answered. First, about teaching - in such a situation, do you teach for the lowest denominator or the higher one. Doing anything is going to unfair to the other category. But in this case, the whole problem is magnified to a huge extent. I obviously cannot rely so much on gr...
Read more