And I agree with him . . .

Last year, the government decided to increase the number of reserved seats in central government-run elite educational institutes like the Indian Institutes of Technology, Indian Institutes of Management and AIIMS by 27 per cent for the Other Backward Classes, taking reservations up to 50 per cent. Students on campus were upset and agitated. Rediff.com quoted Aman Jagannathan, 18, second year MBBS student at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences as saying :

"I know I am not saying anything illegal but I just want to be careful. I don't want to be known on as being against OBCs because I am not. I am just against the idea of reservation. I don't want to be misunderstood.

I am not against social justice but I feel merit should be appreciated. Reserve seats for those who don't have the economic means. Reserve seats for the children of those in the armed forces. Nobody will protest if you reserve seats for those who earn less than a lakh every year. Why should caste be the overarching factor? It's not my fault I was born a Brahmin."

And I agree with him . . .

I have so far chosen to remain dispassionate about the whole issue of reservations. There have been many friends of mine who written pageloads of stuff on why reservations are unfair and reflect regressive thinking and will ruin India . . . I am not saying they are wrong , and I am not saying they are totally right either . . . but I am a cynic, and I think, what is the point of all this . . . I think of the futility of raving seriously on such things.

As a certain Suresh Kamath says, "Reservation based on caste is going to divide us further. Reservation should be based on economic criteria alone. We should learn to forget our past and start looking at the future. What have today's children got to do with what some people did in the past ?"

On a lighter note, check out what this blogger had to say about the Machiavellian Villain behind this regressive step. I found it really hilarious !

Number Theory, Cryptography and some Humour

I have my Number Theory exam tomorrow - and I had to start studying at some point of time - so I was going through some slides by a gentleman named William Stallings. There is a slideshow per chapter. At the beginning of each chapter, he quotes somebody. For the chapter on Euler's Thm and Fermat's Thm, he has quoted the following text, which I found so funny, that I had to put it up right here, right now.

The Devil said to Daniel Webster: "Set me a task I can't carry out, and I'll give you anything in the world you ask for."
Daniel Webster : "Fair enough. Prove that for n greater than 2, the equation a^n + b^n = c^n has no non-trivial solution in the integers."
They agreed on a three-day period for the labor, and the Devil disappeared.
At the end of three days, the Devil presented himself, haggard, jumpy, biting his lip.
Daniel Webster said to him, "Well, how did you do at my task ? Did you prove the theorem ?"
"Eh ? No . . . no, I haven't proved it."
"Then I can have whatever I ask for ? Money ? The Presidency ?"
"What ? Oh, that — of course. But listen ! If we could just prove the following two lemmas — "

- The Mathematical Magpie, Clifton Fadiman

- William Stallings, Cryptography and Network Security - 3/e

The Engineer's Dilemma

The most confused person on earth is the third year B.Tech engineering student who is not very much interested in his branch. (Ladies, esp. feminists, please forgive me if do not say the polite "his or her", I am too lazy for that.) I have initiated this discussion with many of my ilk, and few disagree.

Let me define my ilk. We come in all sizes, shapes, weights and heights, and from amazing different geographical and cultural backgrounds, and can be classified into two main types. The first is the one who either had or thought he had a lot of interest in this particular field, and worked very hard to get into that branch in some institute which he thought was esteemed in the academia. The other is one (very much a like a friend of mine) who did nothing in his 11th and 12th (plus two, as some call it) and was so overwhelmed when he cleared AIEEE (which he thought was a tough exam to clear, but which apparently gives ranks to every person who cares to write it), that in a fit of "man!-now-that-i-have-got-admission-here-i-should-not-leave-it" took whatever he could get in the great institute.

Anyway, for people like us first year whizzes past us, and second year is like nirvana - we become enlightened in the sense that we know how disenlightened we were ! The horrible realization dawns upon us that what we thought was or would be interesting, is not interesting to us at all. There are others around us who absolutely love what they are doing and seem to find the subjects very interesting (like another friend of mine who grunts and yelps with orgasmic delight whenever he sees videos of rockets and aeroplanes). But we are the guys who take more interest in other things, which seem inane in the context and the course, but which would have been very helpful had we been doing something else. By the time we reach third year, the serious guys are already talking about scary things like MS, internship at engineering or software firms, "fundu" projects and the mother of all nightmares and the father of all nighthorses GATE-MTech.

We, however face the big dilemma - what should we do after we pass out from here ? A corresponding person pursuing a degree in medicine or law or any other major branch will never face this problem of choice. The moment he enrols himself in the medicine/law program, barring a few exceptional cases, he knows that he will be a doctor/lawyer in life. Not so for an engineer. We could do higher studies in a vast assortment of fields - engineering itself (within which also do we face so many choices that it makes our heads swim), law, management, etc, etc. Whew...

Take MS in the US for e.g. Choosing the field, and within the field the track, and then choosing the appropriate university and the program is very confusing, to say the least. As I am about to finish my third year, you can imagine the choices I am bombarded with !

All I can say is God help me ! And as I am an atheist, I doubt whether even God will help me. Darn !