Ego Post *Smirk*

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After a long long time, I had enough patience and time to sit and solve The Hindu Crossword. Took two hours, but the rush of finishing it is AWESOME. Here you go. Answers with explanations!

Across

1 Would the salesman soar to a theme repeated in music? (7)- reprise {Rep+rise}

5 What a query seeks (6)- easy one- answer

11 Invigorate with some Payyoli venison (5)- container clue- liven meaning invigorate in “Payyoli venison”

12 Alumna, o'so peculiar and inconsistent (9)- Anagram of “Alumna, o'so” - anomalous

13 Desolate place made famous by Eliot (9)- wasteland- eliot ‘s work-googled

14 The girl about to return is so thin (5)- good one- she+return (er)= means sheer

15 A hoodlum would add a plug to it (4)- Ugly- Don’t know how it fits, but got it from the rest of the letters

17 Old instrument found right in the middle of broken oil can (7)- good one- anagram of oil can +”r” for right=clarion

21 One male, out-of-date, in a deadlock (7)- (one=I) + (male=M) + ( out of date=passé)= impasse= deadlock

22 Strip the skin of poacher's first slippery swimmer (4)= Peel J (poacher’s first=p + slippery swimmer= eel)

26 He would lead a novice into drug (5)= pilot (Got it from he would lead. Guess has some pot funda to it)

27 Relatively smaller fish, a subordinate (9)= underling= sub-ordinate

29 A German terrorist, heartless and losing head, reformed by university official (9)- Registrar- complicated, got from university official and the other letters

30 Say hello, get to receive a note (5)- Awesome one- get+note (musical note =re) greet meaning say hello

31 Go back escorting girl on a pleasure trip (6) = Outing! Go is back and hence is g & o, and pleasure trip. Guess nitu thing is slightly dumb

32 Commercial poetry unfavourable to one's interests (7)= adverse! J brilliant one. Commercial=ad+ poetry=verse)

Down

2 Part of the roof whereunder one may overhear talk (5)- eaves [Basic civil engineering to rescue and also from the eavesdrop thing]

3 Money put up for a curdling agent (6)- rennet- it is a cheese like thing. Money is “re” and then found cheeses starting with re.

4 POW camp that put gals at jeopardy (6)- anagram of gals at= stalag [Prisinor of war camp]

6 Craft of Biblical survivors (5,3)- easy- Noahs ark

7 Everything, with a bit added, is nutritious (9)- awesome one- (everything= whole)+(a bit=some) = wholesome

8 Place to relax with others around Oregon (6)= resort , from place to relax

9 Weapon for a second grade, depressed shooter (7)= good one-> (second grade=b)+ (depressed=low)+(shooter=gun) = blowgun

10 Venetian attraction, first of dories in a churning lagoon (7)= (first of dories=d)+(lagoon) anagram= gondola

16 Publicity for a Chaplin film (9)= limelight!

18 Enthusiastic supporter of division at home accepts appeal (8)= partisan(Got from meaning and division=part)

19 Draughtsman's tool (1-6)= T square (ED!)

20 Voyages of a student involved in brawls (7)= flights (Fights+l) got from the meaning of voyages and fights

23 Spectacles include harbour in Portuguese town (6)= OOOH visual clue! Spectacles=OO, put (harbor=port) in it. Oporto is in Portugal said Google!

24 Admired — dead or otherwise (6)= adored. Sort of container

25 The accent of a born blackguard (6)=brogue (got from other letters. Apparently it is a shoe, can be considered as a blackguard)

28 The things revealed when kismet is reversed (5)=kismet reversed= items J

Shame!

It being an awesome day, I took a long walk to my bank that is a couple of kilometers away from my office. After finishing all that I had to be done at the place, I was about to cross the road, when I saw this little girl, not more than 4 years old trying to cross the road. She was obviously a road-side dweller and should be one among those who live under the bridge near Cybertowers. The kid was frantically trying to cross the road and didn't realise there was a bus that was coming whizzing towards her. I was right on the divider and was petrified. I kind of screamed at the kid and she stopped on the other side of the road as the bus grazed past her. Again, almost unperturbed by what was an extremely scary encounter, she tried to cross the road , when a guy with a CTS bag, stopped and held the girl back.

By this time I had crossed the road and in my broken Hindi asked her if she was out of her mind. The CTS guy parked his bike and took her across the road, while I walked back all shaken up.

The girl was tiny! By normal standards, she would be in kindergarten using Crayolas making stick diagrams for her parents to put up on the refrigerator or their office desks.

Something about all this is incredibly sad. And knowing that I can't really do anything to change any of this makes me feel like a piece of insignificant lint.

What is the bloody use of having a government that doesn't bother about children begging on roads? It is a travesty of the entire concept of pursuit of happiness, democracy and all those big political words.

Life seems to be ruled only by probabilities. We are what we are because some dice seems to have been rolled that way.

What a shame!

Milman-ed and Halkias-ed

Something happened today that made me realise that I need to stay in touch with engineering. Running at 10 km/hr, I was trying to figure out for twenty minutes, how the heart beat indicator on the tread mill works. Somehow, I couldn't quite figure out where the transducer was and I couldn't imagine it to be on the running pad. If so, imagine how sensitive the sensor should be and how much of amplification needs to be done.

The intrigue deepened when I noticed a small sticker proclaiming that it housed a wireless receiver. I can't imagine how a wireless receiver will work to retrieve heartbeat from a moving target. Even if it is a receiver, there *has* to be a transducer! Communication has never been my forte, but imagine the noise cancellation and the processing that needs to be done even to indicate in a fluttering colour scheme the heart rate of a very dynamically moving object.

Unless one has actually worked on a bread-board with transistors, he/she would not realise how tough it is to make the darned thing amplify. Compound this with VLSI techniques which can house millions of transistors in a small chip, designing it, testing it, give it an error tolerance. Multiply all this with the task of detecting microvolts of heart beat. Trust me, bio-signal processing is one of the toughest areas to work on.

Somehow it works out to be beautiful, isn't it?

Rain

First rains in new places are special.

Sitting in this bubble, I didn't realize that it was pouring outside. Scrunching up my face on the glass window and leaving nose prints all over the sheer glass, I felt that someone had pressed the mute button; for I could see that it was pouring and yet, it quite didn't feel so.

I wish I had been sitting on the fifth floor watching the rain, from above, rather than second handedly in the first.

First rains in new places are as special as the first days, first book and the first quiz. In Coimbatore I remember coming back after engineering drawing classes to the rather deserted mess when it started pouring. The first pang of loneliness struck and slowly ebbed down as I gulped down the rather sugary tea.I remember dropping my A2 sheets in the muddy water outside and after feeling too good to sit and redraw the elevation and side-view figures, I submitted the frayed ED sheets the next morning. Not unexpectedly, this went unnoticed.

Today's mute rain shall remain in my mind for quite sometime, though I didn't have the wholesome excitement of meeting my ED professor the next day with my wet frayed drawing sheets. But, it is rather scary that in this phase there is nothing to be scared about and also, nothing much to look forward to except for the endorphin induced moments of euphoria.