Posts

My first time Judging an Event!

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Last week I received a call from my professor (who was also my mentor all through college) asking if I would like to judge a departmental event on Saturday. My reply was a big YES! Being called back by your alma mater is always an honour and something I had been looking forward to for quite some time.  The week long event was on "Acing the Recruitment Process" where student applicants were made to sit through mock interview rounds starting with resume screening, group discussions and finally the personal interview (which I was to judge). I think that something like this is a definite must-have in any institute. While degree college gives you an idea of what you will be working on in the coming 10 years (that is if you make a career in what you've studied) it really doesn't really put you in the seat of a candidate who's applying for a job. While fresh graduates know WHAT they want to do, and WHERE they want to be in 5 years, many of them are unware of HOW to take

The Beginning of the End - Code Red for Humanity

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Over the last 4 days, news articles have been pouring in of how badly screwed we are thanks to all the 'warning bells' the generations before us have ignored. I'd like to think that our parents' and grandparents' generation wasn't so much at fault but there doesn't seem to be a lot of other people left to blame for the state of our environment right now.    What's all the uproar about? The IPCC   has in it's latest report said that global heating has arrived which will see Earth’s average temperature reach 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels around 2030, a decade earlier than projected only three years ago, according to a landmark UN assessment published on Monday. The threshold will be breached around 2050, no matter how aggressively humanity draws down carbon pollution. “This report should send a shiver down the spine of everyone who reads it," said Dave Reay, director of the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute at the Universit

Introducing WordoftheDay

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  #wordoftheday is a Shamika.in spin-off where I post about new words & terms I come across either through articles, forwards or just simply the dictionary. The Backstory - I studied in ICSE board right up till 10th standard. Which means I was done studying the unabridged version of Huckleberry Finn by the time I was in 6th Grade and The Merchant of Venice & As You Like It by Shakespeare by the time I was 15. Living in the 21st Century and studying something that was written in the 1600s. Not that I was complaining; Shakespeare was a pleasure to read (and also a HUGE flex when I went to college - as I later realized). Two days ago

Mumbai Bird Race 2021

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2021. The year of finding normalcy in chaos.  Chaos brought about by the uncertainty of the virus, of what tomorrow would look like and what is to come. With new processes being set and routines changing overnight, (some of which happened for the better and some which I’d be more than happy to see not be a part of tomorrow) the one thing that remained constant like a silent support system was nature.

COVID Edition: Proof of how a chain is only as strong as its weakest link

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Once upon a time, a few mistakes ago, there lived (and still lives) a man who decided to take the Pandemic very lightly. What happened to him? He contracted the virus. Not only that, he passed it on to his entire family (we live in India - so you can assume it was a joint one). His wife, brother, sister-in-law, children and parents. All of whom tested positive even though they've been staying home since the start of the year. That brings us to the question - So what? The point is, one person's recklessness can result in an entire family being affected by it, in the process rendering everyone else's efforts of try to stay safe a waste . The lockdown has been tough on everyone for some time and things have been abnormal (or should we say - the new normal) for longer than we expected. However, as sensible adults and citizens of a country we know (or rather hope) is trying do it's best in controlling the spread of the virus, we must take it upon ourselves to try as hard as

Second Order Thinking

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Very often it so happens that you encounter a problem and arrive at a solution which appears to be the most logical one - an outcome of the First Order Thinking.  Every action has a consequence. And every consequence has another consequence. The premise of  Second Order Thinking  is that every solution, if not evaluated thoroughly, will have a bigger consequence which has worse side effects than the original one, thus possessing the potential to mess up the ecosystem (imagine being asked to rework and made additions to a code which already works perfectly fine. What you will end up doing may not only give you the desired outcome but may also make more undesired changes to the output). Simply put, the prevention of this kind of a "screw up" is what calls for Second Order Thinking.  Let me give you two examples which lacked Second Order Thinking:

My 5 PM Date with a Thaali

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4 days ago when PM Modi requested the nation in his 30 minute long #JantaCurfew speech to bang their utensils and applaud the people on the frontline on Sunday, 22nd March 2020, I must admit that I wasn't expecting much of a turnout. But lo and behold!  Modi isn't our Prime Minister for nothing. The man actually got everyone up, awake and banging their thaalis , not at 5 PM, but as early as 4:45 PM (atleast around my place) . All he asked was for 5 minutes. But we gave, whoever deserved our gratitude, a full 30 minutes of ear-deafening and enthusiastic thaali -banging appreciation (in hindsight, it would've been so cool if the whole thing turned into an impromptu "We will rock you" mass concert). The whole vibe, for that period, was amazing. Amid all the stress of everyone contracting the Corona Virus, I actually felt for sometime, that there was a chance, that India would survive the outbreak much better than any of the other countries would. T