FOUR HOURS AND FOUR SCORE YEARS! VOL 1

Einstein once said(or did he????) " It's all relative, my friend". Well, he gets my stamp of approval. Class hours give us a long time, relatively , to let go of our mind.Four hours seems a long time when you cast yearning glances at your watch every five minutes. Classes serve us with some valuable time for introspection and reflection. The mind wanders to places unheard of and (in)sights unseen. Although most thoughts invariably start and end on women there do occur a few fruitful periods of grey cell activity.
The week started with Wednesday morning blues( The first two days were a blur. I dont remember anything).I was feeling high. Not on dope or anything, Just on high moral ground. I looked around the class. A lot of lolling heads. Long nights and Ramu, first thing in the morning serve to put even isomniacs like us to sleep.That and the eternal fear of eye contact with the teacher leading to subsequent questions serves to ensure that the only place you want to look is down. Then, BANG!! PARETO...The name just popped into my head. The next half hour whizzed by as I spent it trying to put a face/book/subject to that name.
Aha..Pareto Charts!! The famous 80-20 rule.... I had revered the guy a couple years back while doing the TQM course. Well, Time does heal all the wounds of education. I tried to think up more but my mind returned a blank.
9:55 am
----Break------
I wikied(if i am the first person to use this then I claim the copyright) him and Voilà...I could put a face to the name now after all.
A bit about the great man now. Born in the city of love, Paris, in 1848, this Italian boy was your typical French bourgeois. As the revolution gathered steam around him Vilfredo received education at all the right places and played all the "in" ( he was an engineer,"in" now.."in" then)cards of the time to end up as a Professor in Switzerland in 1906 where he proposed his famous 80-20 rule which stated that twenty percent of the population owned eighty percent of the property in Italy at that time.
10:00 am
---Break Over---
Sups Time...An hour of cat and mouse. Sups is your typical dreaded know-it-all professor who revels in his ability to ask unanswerable questions and basks in the glory of his knowledge. Of course, his job is made easy by our total ignorance. The position of the head and eyes in Sups' class are a matter of great importance. Too low ...the question comes ......Eye contact with your friend....question time......head held too high and eye contact...Boy, you must be brave. An hour of misery.
11:00 am
----enough already-----
Pareto came back with a vengence. I realised that the reason I had come to think of him in the first place was Guruji. His unerring concentration serves to appease the teacher and thus saves the other students the misery.Thats your 20 and people like me form the 80. Wikipedia says that the "80-20" should be applied with caution. But, Bring 'em on, I say, it holds true almost everywhere. For example,

1. less than 20% of the girls account for more than 80% of the beauty in the world.
2. 20% of the population(politicians,corporates, celebrities) controls 80% of the country.
3. 20% of all footballers make the teams what they are.
4. 20% of all people determine how rich this country is.(people still die of hunger here)

Well, you get the hang of it....

Hardly would Vilfredo have thought that his rule would be used so callously by reverent fools, but hey, life is not fair ...and 0.20% like me and my TQM professor are the only ones who think about him.

11:30 am

-----Pareto put to Rest------

The next 15 minutes were an unitelligible mish mash of thoughts and images. After spinning around like a wayward compass they came to rest, and quite inevitably so, on women. But my mind had been on social issues( high moral ground, remember). Well, I had previously read of a 1999 Italian court verdict declaring that a woman wearing tight jeans cannot be raped, as the garment in question cannot be removed without the lady's consent. A bucketload of BULL!! So, exploitation and discrimiation are not home to this country alone,huh?But then what else can we expect from a super-masochist country like Italia??(no wonder their football sucks). I thought of India, women, empowerment, liberalism, feminism and saw nothing but a dead end

----on hindsight-----

Sometimes my heart goes out to the members of the fairer sex. They bear the brunt of the worst forms of exploitation in this world. In India, it starts from their homes, travels with them to their workplaces where it rears its ugly head again. A word, a gesture, a touch, an act or a look or a few looks(unwanted attention, as the IPC calls it) are enough to serve the purpose. Even hydra would have fewer heads than this monster. Life must be a living nightmare for the women of this country, I fear and God forbid, if you are beautiful ,then I can only guess. If women lay the blame squarely at the dorstep of us men, I would accept it without a word of protest for the choice of our actions were made consciously by us. But still, Unfair though it may seem, part of the blame lies with the women. I had italicised bear earlier to make a point. It shows the attitude of our women. If you want to bear or be exploited then no one can help you. Only if you are willing to raise your voice(most times,literally... I am sure it will help) against the injustices done to you can you acheive all those fancy terms that you dole at will. I can recount at least two cases where I had intervened when women were being ...how to put it delicately......touched, shall we say, in buses. The women in question chose to stand and take it while they had a choice. Hence I feel that they deserve the blame I lay at their doors.

But, hats off to you women in general...Most times you are far better than us.....

And Pareto is wrong here....20% of the women make their choice to live life by exploitation...but they do not sully my opinion of the remaining 80%

12:00 noon

-------Pappi Enters-----

And all my good feelings about women took a hike.

To be Contd........More on Pappi, Probability and the first family...