Yes, it had to happen one of these days and it has happened...I hit the Blogger's Block.
The symptoms are: exhaustion, emptiness, and fatigue. Like at the end of a mental Marathon. The mind refuses to cooperate although the heart is willing.
Time to take rest and recharge batteries.
Received a wonderful surprise gift from Pratik...a very appetizing book: The Diary of a Nobody. Raring to go..
The Feynman Letters Book gifted by Supratim is almost over. Great Book...Wanted to write a Review...maybe some other day...
On his last trip to the US a month ago, my son brought me a very thoughtful gift: a cute reading light that can be clamped to the book you are reading. Watch-battery-operated tiny LEDs with a Universal Flexi-Spring for angle adjustment. It just gives the extra light needed to make reading comfortable for a chap with about 1.25 eyes.
My son is funny. He is so tensed up with his crazy job that he has no time to read at all. But he does so many li'l li'l things so I can read and write and be out of harm's way...
The last 300 blogs together read like The Life & Good Times of a KGPian hailing from the Sea-Side Village Muthukur... a tiny piece of a half-century's personal history, thoughts and feelings inspired by my many younger colleagues, students, grandstudents and li'l Ishani.
Here is a charming mail from a grandstudent I read once in a while:
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Wednesday April 28, 2010
Dear Prof. Sastry,
I was woken up on the day you put up the blog by a call from a KGP physics-deptt.-mate, now at Stony Brook, with a congrats. And then upon being told the reason for the congratulations, I hurried to see it with my own eyes.
May be thanking you is not appropriate for the same; instead I would like to inform you as to how keenly we watch out for any of your new posts. Your blog has all the ingredients of a R K Narayan novel - the small town boy, the road to the modern world, the modern world (KGP) and its evolution through your own eyes. It is perhaps the only story "based on true IIT experiences" that I read. (I have dared not touch any of Chetan Bhagat- as a general rule I try and avoid books popular at the moment).
Indeed for me your blog is a very interesting albeit a tantalizing read. Tantalizing since it always brings to my mind how close our worldvolumes passed each other by!!!
Hoping to read many many more columns and seeking your blessings.
Yours truly,
Siddhartha
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gps: Meanwhile here is Autocrat:
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Pun.ishment
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http://twainquotes.com/P.html
"...no circumstances, however dismal, will ever be considered a sufficient excuse for the admission of that last and saddest evidence of intellectual poverty, the Pun"
------ Mark Twain, a Biography
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http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/751
"-.. Do you mean to say the pun-question is not clearly settled in your minds? Let me lay down the law upon the subject. Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide--that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life--are alike forbidden. Manslaughter, which is the meaning of the one, is the same as man's laughter, which is the end of the other. A pun is prima facie an insult to the person you are talking with. It implies utter indifference to or sublime contempt for his remarks, no matter how serious. I speak of total depravity, and one says all that is written on the subject is deep raving. I have committed my self-respect by talking with such a person. I should like to commit him, but cannot, because he is a nuisance. Or I speak of geological convulsions, and he asks me what was the cosine of Noah's ark; also, whether the Deluge was not a deal huger than any modern inundation.
A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide. Thus, in a case lately decided before Miller, J., Doe presented Roe a subscription paper, and urged the claims of suffering humanity. Roe replied by asking, When charity was like a top? It was in evidence that Doe preserved a dignified silence. Roe then said, "When it begins to hum." Doe then--and not till then--struck Roe, and his head happening to hit a bound volume of the Monthly Rag-bag and Stolen Miscellany, intense mortification ensued, with a fatal result. The chief laid down his notions of the law to his brother justices, who unanimously replied, "Jest so." The chief rejoined, that no man should jest so without being punished for it, and charged for the prisoner, who was acquitted, and the pun ordered to be burned by the sheriff. The bound volume was forfeited as a deodand, but not claimed.
People that make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism...
.....And, once more, listen to the historian. "The Puritans hated puns. The Bishops were notoriously addicted to them. The Lords Temporal carried them to the verge of license. Majesty itself must have its Royal quibble. 'Ye be burly, my Lord of Burleigh,' said Queen Elizabeth, 'but ye shall make less stir in our realm than my Lord of Leicester.' The gravest wisdom and the highest breeding lent their sanction to the practice. Lord Bacon playfully declared himself a descendant of 'Og, the King of Bashan. Sir Philip Sidney, with his last breath, reproached the soldier who brought him water, for wasting a casque full upon a dying man.....
The fatal habit became universal. The language was corrupted. The infection spread to the national conscience. Political double-dealings naturally grew out of verbal double meanings. The teeth of the new dragon were sown by the Cadmus who introduced the alphabet of equivocation. What was levity in the time of the Tudors grew to regicide and revolution in the age of the Stuarts."
Who was that boarder that just whispered something about the Macaulay-flowers of literature?--There was a dead silence.--I said calmly, I shall henceforth consider any interruption by a pun as a hint to change my boarding-house. Do not plead my example...."
A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide. Thus, in a case lately decided before Miller, J., Doe presented Roe a subscription paper, and urged the claims of suffering humanity. Roe replied by asking, When charity was like a top? It was in evidence that Doe preserved a dignified silence. Roe then said, "When it begins to hum." Doe then--and not till then--struck Roe, and his head happening to hit a bound volume of the Monthly Rag-bag and Stolen Miscellany, intense mortification ensued, with a fatal result. The chief laid down his notions of the law to his brother justices, who unanimously replied, "Jest so." The chief rejoined, that no man should jest so without being punished for it, and charged for the prisoner, who was acquitted, and the pun ordered to be burned by the sheriff. The bound volume was forfeited as a deodand, but not claimed.
People that make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism...
.....And, once more, listen to the historian. "The Puritans hated puns. The Bishops were notoriously addicted to them. The Lords Temporal carried them to the verge of license. Majesty itself must have its Royal quibble. 'Ye be burly, my Lord of Burleigh,' said Queen Elizabeth, 'but ye shall make less stir in our realm than my Lord of Leicester.' The gravest wisdom and the highest breeding lent their sanction to the practice. Lord Bacon playfully declared himself a descendant of 'Og, the King of Bashan. Sir Philip Sidney, with his last breath, reproached the soldier who brought him water, for wasting a casque full upon a dying man.....
The fatal habit became universal. The language was corrupted. The infection spread to the national conscience. Political double-dealings naturally grew out of verbal double meanings. The teeth of the new dragon were sown by the Cadmus who introduced the alphabet of equivocation. What was levity in the time of the Tudors grew to regicide and revolution in the age of the Stuarts."
Who was that boarder that just whispered something about the Macaulay-flowers of literature?--There was a dead silence.--I said calmly, I shall henceforth consider any interruption by a pun as a hint to change my boarding-house. Do not plead my example...."
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