Kirk: At times you seem quite human.
Spock: Captain, I don’t think that insults are within your prerogative as my commanding officer.Kirk: I suspect you’re becoming more and more human all the time.
Spock: Captain, I see no reason to stand here and be insulted.
Had a weird diwali week. Started will a fever on the big day, then best friend had domestic trouble on dhanteras, then work trouble and finally a sister reveals a few closet skeletons on bhai duj. Well, being an agnostic I shouldn’t believe in luck, but was a bit angry. Did my best to console friend while getting major cold shoulder, tried to put sister on track imitating yoda, spock, musashi and stereotyped big brother, kind of worked through the work trouble and still sneezing like a bullhorn..
And to a certain wiseguy, blogging includes e-journals, I checked (wikipedia no less!!), blogging doesn’t just mean preaching about environment or darfur, instructing how to compute perfect mass ratios and specific impulses of interplanetary rockets, how to build your own quantum computer etc etc. So there!!!
Ehm.. now that I’m done ranting here is what caught my attention.. Are you aware of who actually invented examinations? Come on you must have wondered (wanting to build a time machine, to hell with Einstein’s laws, go back and…) well the Chinese..
Second question.. who invented ‘academic dishonesty’ (read cheating)? again the Chinese!!
wikipedia says
Academic dishonesty dates back to the first tests. Scholars note that cheating was prevalent on the Chinese civil service exams thousands of years ago, even when cheating carried the penalty of death for both examinee and examiner.
whew!!
The Chinese were pretty cool in other ways too.. they invented aerial warfare!!
The earliest documented aerial warfare took place in ancient China, when a manned Kite was set off to spy for military intelligence and communication.
manned kite.. beat that!!
and not just the Chinese, a judicious use of the internet over the last week resulted in me getting to know a few things about Indians, Greek, Mayans, Egyptians… After reaching the Romans I was a bit overwhelmed.. these guys had their catapults differentiated by ordinance pieces and ranges!! and Archimedes is rumoured to have used solar beams to fire and gigantic cranes to sink Roman galleys.. and everything from paddled ships to multistage rockets by the Chinese..
So well, the ancients were pretty smart in many ways. I wonder at times what would have happened had certain unsavoury parts of history not happened at all. Would we be building interstellar drives? But then we have always risen higher than the deepest we have fallen.. perhaps we aren’t hopeless..
I was caught up in all this yesterday night. And then the anger was gone. Somewhere in ancient Egypt a young engineer would have been feeling angry too being the butt end of some cosmic joke. That didn’t mean there would be no pyramid.
Diwali would return next year. The Light overcomes the Dark and we will have the last laugh (even yoda can’t put it better, but spock can, pointy ears rule!!)
One of the few generals in history who never lost a battle
and that sister wasnt me!!!
am sorry i did sumthing like that…aagey se kabhi nai!! pinkie promise 
abt the blog..its not new to me, i am proud of the fact more than anyone else in this whole wide world that my brother writes remarkably well!!
The chinese, huh? gee, now i’m not sure as to whether to love or hate them. i mean exams are a tremendous pain in the rear end, but their talumein soup……….talk about the horns f dilemma!
i was wondering, would it be possible for all the blame to be transferred to the examiner. if you think about it, our job is to attempt the paper(no fine print here, and if u happen to find some, BURN IT!!!), while theirs is to ensure the honesty and sanctity of the examination. Who’s the culprit here, hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm?????????
manned kites, huh? wouldn’t it have been easier to have used extremely intelligent birds? (quite improbable, i know, but far more probable than building a huge filthy kite with a bloke tied to one end, with a pencil and a notepad
).
boy he’d sure hope to hell that the intended spying targets don’t look up. that would make for quite a sight.
@divebomber
pencil and notepad.. hahaha
btw the manned kite thingy wasn’t that stupid, their gigantic kites were more like gliders.. had respectable altitudes, i wonder how they did any spying from that range
@esspie
pehle to is nam ka matlab bata.. oh its SP isn’t it??
@both
why don’t you use your human names eh?