Bugs and Features

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 http://blog.commonfloor.com/wishing-you-all-a-happy-ganesh-chaturthi

One day when I was a kid we were visited by my cousin's family. I noticed that this girl's right hand had an extra little finger (making 11 in all). And I asked my mom why she doesn't get it removed by an 'operation' (surgery). And my mom told me that it is a lucky charm.

And when I was 10, we were all leaving Cuddapah town for Nellore in cars and special buses to celebrate the wedding of my uncle (the bridegroom of the baraat party). Just before locking up, there was a howl of pain from the kitchen and we all ran in and found that my grannie was bitten by a scorpion. I thought the wedding will now be postponed. But, no! Everyone said how lucky we were since being bitten by a scorpion before a journey was the luckiest of omens.

A decade or more back Ed Taylor and I were exchanging Upanishads and Bible and bantering on the sidelines. And Ed called our Hindu gods 'cartoon characters' since they didn't resemble any normal human being. I agreed that Hindus want to make their gods not in their images (like in Bible) but special. And asked him what is the shape of his Christian God. And he proudly declaimed that their God is featureless and bodiless. But, I poked him, He does hold forth and issue all those Commandments (written and preserved on tablets but never followed).  He agreed and I told him that He was like a ventriloquist without his dummy; and that we had long ago invented a female like that called: Akashvani (AIR of modern times).

Human imagination being only that much fertile, I guess, having no bugs is a bug and having no feature is itself a feature.

Till I reached IIT KGP in 1965, the pics of all the fine buildings I saw were perfectly symmetric, like the Taj Mahal (forgetting the Pisa Tower which was a bug). And then there loomed this Main Building of IIT:

 

 ....wiki

Frankly its imposing tower looked like the outlying chimney of a polluting industry...sorry!

And all the bikes I saw till then were symmetric like the Royal Enfield Bullet...till I saw a Vespa scooter which had its engine hanging precariously on one side. And then the Volkswagen Beetle that had its boot and engine reversed.

While they were flourishing on earth, dinosaurs grew in size but not intellect over a million years and more. And they didn't achieve much. So were the Neanderthal men (and women). They just hunted and ate and procreated but never progressed.

And then there was a bug in the genes of the Missing Link (that is still missing). Homo Sapiens were born. And within a few thousand years they scaled all the heights of the earth and stepped on the moon (and the noose floor). And invented mechanisms that are going to wipe themselves out. What a bug that was! It has a name and number I forget...it is called the Adventure Gene. 

Their adventure is not only physical but intellectual, somewhat. If I were asked to make a gold plaque with a figure embossed on it that will be buried deep enough to survive all man-made catastrophes and possibly recovered by future 'buggers' and that will depict the greatest achievement of us Homo chaps, I would choose the Quantum Picture of a Hydrogen Atom:

http://snews.bnl.gov/popsci/nuclear-energy.html

 What would YOU choose?

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Devil's Workshop

Charles Haddon Spurgeon (never heard of him):

"There is no fatigue so wearisome as that which comes from lack of work"

gps: 

"Ask ME!!!"


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