IELTS - 22

The Story of IELTS

Prelude Not necessary in the first place
29th April, 2006, a warm summer saturday morning, I woke up at my uncle's place where I had come the night before, for the english test the next day. I was a little nervous about the test, and for having not prepared.

I go to the test center, which is a posh hotel and stand in the line for registration, when my turn comes i am informed that i should be carrying with me a print of the email confirmation of the test date, which i dont have. There is still time, so i rush out, hop in an autorickshaw and dash into the nearest cyber-cafe which has a printer, get the printout, and rush back.

The rest of the test is very uneventful and in a few days i get the test report.

IELTS stands for International English Language Testing System, which is an exam for english language, a requirement for applying to universities for a course and a visa in english-speaking countries. The test has 4 modules: listening, reading, writing and speaking, and you get a score which is called a 'band' for no particular reason, which indicates that how good you are in the english language.

My score was 7.5, 8.5, 9 and 8 respectively with the overall score 8.5, which is out of 9, so it was damn good. Its been confirmed that having studied in the english language through out school, high school and engineering college has made me fluent in all uses of the language. My application was good to go.


Chapter 1 Again?!
Four years pass. I havent used the score I got at that time, because i didnt go to any english-speaking country for a course. Now i am considering for going for a higher research degree and IELTS is on the horizon again.

Why again? I cant figure out, but the reason they give is ('research has shown that') the english score can change over a period of time, so it is necessary to give the test again after 2 years, and they have made it official because the score 'expires' after 2 years.

Why i cant figure it out is because 1. everything changes, IQ changes, life principles change, and test results also change, obviously. But by how much? I dont see any reason for them to change unless 1. i live in a jungle where i have no use of the english language, 2. i study or work in a different language, 3. i study or work in a non-english country, 4. despite of the internet and blogging and twitter, i am not interested in using english for accessing technological services and gadgets.

2. my giving the test should be a pain for the examination system, i have to be given a test date, seat number, the question paper, my answer sheets need to be sent to the competent authorities for processing, etc etc. It is in their best interest for me to be given a short-reassessment test preferably online or on the phone, to check for the score deviation. (which if the 4 points in point 1 are negative, shouldn't change considerably.

3. i have applied for a higher research degree. which means i can very well converse with researchers who have written research papers, and they think i might be able to make an original contribution in my research area, write a thesis to get a doctorate degree and might also be presenting papers at conferences with awesome researchers in the audience. The test-taking authorities may want to consider cases like mine which are outliers in the horde of applications by students going 'abroad' for a 'better life.'

So I register for the test, pay a pot of money and wait for the test date. Dear reader, kindly notice my unwillingness at the whole affair at this moment.


Chapter 2 Reluctance Redux
I mark my mobile-phone calendar with alarms to fire off two days before to not forget about the test. And sure enough, i was happy to have done that and tried to 'study' for the test the day before, just to familiarize myself with the process of the test.

I start with the practice listening tests, and after 80 correct answers i toss it away. The reading tests are similarly completed. Writing and speaking need to practice, and i was good to go for the test the next day, thinking any score below 9 in any criteria would scar me good.

It occurs to me then, although not very crystallized in terms of words and feelings, that the testing system is a bit of a fart. I mean, the listening tests are like wiping your arse with silk. Which means, that it a waste of good silk. The actors are so careful with speaking, the rules are so carefully and precisely mentioned, the tone and tempo is so perfect, its the language testing system at a dead end.

20th November, 2010, another fine saturday morning, i wake with a mild hangover and kill time till midday. After another uneventful test and a few hours i walk out and catch the latest harry potter movie, which is more or less the same as any other harry potter movie.

It occurs to me then, and again not very crystallized in terms of words and feelings, that the testing system is really a smelly fart. The exam is conducted with military discipline. People are seated, confirmed with their identities, the test begins and modules begin and end, the examining authorities walk like German soldiers among Jews. It is indeed the system at its perfection, and the dead end.

The next day, i have the speaking test. As i walk in, i find chairs nicely laid out in a small hall, with a registration table and three little rooms beyond the hall where the interview/test takes place. I am early for the test and the guy before me isnt there so i am asked if i would like to immediately sit for the test (about fifteen minutes before my said time), i say ya sure, happy to get it done with early. The registration authority confirms if i am 'really ready' for it before my time.

I am shown to the small room, i sit down and the test starts. The examiner is new to this, very nervous, particularly after finding out that i have given this test before, and soon enough, i am driving the test itself, completing his questions and talking like Steve Jobs on stage unveiling the revolutionary breakthrough iSomething product.

I made a note of my thoughts after the test: (verbatim from my daily notebook)

1. well.. that was a waste of time
2. did well, not so bad, intimidated the examiner a little bit, one or two eye-to-eye lockdowns where i sadly note now: he buckled.
3. was taken in early and finished at the time the test was supposed to start
4. topics discussed: 1. shopping, 2. academics (changes and inflation), 3. My friend and batchmate Divesh and his multitouch table, 4. nothing else i can remember right now
I am here at the cafe coffee day, CG Road now, kids around, annoying little kids, Kenny G playing is saxophone very passionately out of the speakers, all around everything is so sad, but we are doing the best we can. And there are no rules, as such, or let me rephrase, 'the rules you thought govern life are no longer true as you grow up, but there are different rules', well what not? Go home, play grand theft auto or crysis (for the nth time) [reason simply being] its a nice game.

It occurs to me then, and again not very crystallized in terms of words and feelings, that the testing system is a very smelly fart indeed. The examiner wasnt really interested in my answers, he was switching topics so often, breaking the flow, which is annoying, and speaking rehearsed phrases. I've learnt as a researcher how to keep the accessing points muted and let the other guy really talk, maybe the examining authorities should look into that.

Chapter 3 The Test Results
I get an emotionless SMS on my mobile phone, test results: 8.5, 7, 7, 7.5 (listening, reading, writing, speaking); overall score 7.5

I am in the IBM research lab in Delhi, the walls shatter and a black hole opens up in the sky and sucks me in. I read the sms again, and it says this is indicative and the scores in the TRF (test report form) will be final. I assure myself there has been some mistake and the scores will surely change. Sure enough, they dont, and my father confirms it over the phone when i am in the train, back to ahmedabad. An earthquake derails the train and falls into a crack into the earth.

Chapter 4 The Dude Abides
I need to get it reassessed. Fight a war, take a stand, shake the testing system by its foundations not for me, but for the generations of fucks that will give the test long after i've forgotten about it. Sure, why not, and after that maybe i can give Obama some tips on financial deficits, China and what to do with nuclear weapons.

Yeah, fuck it, the mantra the old bum Dude Lebowski, I submit my score to RMIT so that my application is considered complete.

Chapter 5 This Blog Post
Writing this, till here. Maybe in the afternoon i will go to the local IDP center to discuss this.

[The views expressed in this blog post are pure and absolute and to be considered world-changing like other words to similar effect. This post has been unedited. Suck on that, anyone who wants check my english]

Bits of Rapture

There was a game we used to play we would hit the town on fridy night stay in bed on until sunday

lyrics copy-pasted from a lyrics site:

There was a game we used to play
We would hit the town on friday night
And stay in bed until sunday
We used to be so free
We were living for the love we had and
Living not for reality

It was just my imagination x3
There was a time I used to pray
I have always kept my faith in love
It’s the greatest thing from the man above
The game I used to play
I’ve always put my cards upon the table
Let it never be said that I’d be unstable

It was just my imagination x3

There is a game I like to play
I like to hit the town on friday night
And stay in bed until sunday
We’ll always be this free
We will be living for the love we have
Living not for reality

It’s not my imagination x3
Not my x18

this is of course an investigation into the different modalities that affect our experiences, starting from this song that plays in your head that you want to experience as it was made, for which you consider the options, realizing that its not on the computer, you download a torrent from a torrent site and its still not it and you download from beemp3.com and a different song downloads, and then you remember youtube.

youtube deserves this paragraph break because it is a site on which you can easily find videos of songs and generally videos of songs are made by the same people who made the song, so its an as-good representation of the idea which led to the song as-it-gets, so there i go on you tube, and in the meanwhile, the Great Meanwhile, download an image and update my status on gtalk and make a new post on this blog.

"thoughts, actions, experiences, bits of rapture.. in short, the greatest stories ever told!"

Thoughts on meeting Dr. Who

If you really were to one day, walk down the street and happen to notice a old wooden blue police call box dusting away in the corner somewhere, you would do well to wait for a while. If a man appears to be running towards it, most certainly follow him.

Most people who meet this person, The Doctor, seem to have life-changing experiences. This is really easy for the doctor, because he is a time traveler and time travel most certainly leads to life-changing thoughts.

What degree of changes we are talking about here? Lets examine in detail. The doctor, who would offer you a ride inside the tardis, has the potential to show you everything from the birth of the earth and the end of time and universe itself. Thats all well and fine, but what about my life and my troubles? Fair question. Where would you like to go? One would pause for a moment and think about the life-changing events in his or her own personal life. From the faded memories of the early childhood and beyond that, and would like to visit a few again. Now what we are as a person today, is a collective of all the things that have happened in our lives, and each moment and action matters, because if it happened differently, you wouldnt be you and you wouldnt be thinking the way you do. Your present (the right-now moment) thought process is an amalgamation of all the experiences you have had over the months and years, some are conscious changes, some are unregistered changes, a complex system with innumerable factors which if represented mathematically would result in a myriad array of equations and nested epi-equations reflecting your cognitive processing. This matching of potentials is necessary because for some reason, I believe that all mental models (which we understand to be an integrated exchange system of the physical brain, the mind, mental and physical memories) have to be 'kept busy' with processing of information.

This leads to an interesting offshoot here. The mind has the capacity to process and store information in neurons and it is generally agreed that there are one billion neurons in the physical brain each making 1000 connections to other neurons, and by some fantastic upscaling and assumptions we have a figure to the physical limit of the brain's capacity: one million gigabytes of information. We dont need all this for our daily life, but regardless of conscious thought (consciousness described as the ability of the mind to describe itself) processing of some quadrillion bits is happening every second anyway. The brain (or the mind) is always upto something. One of my friends Dr. Chirantan Kanani, expressed his happy hopelessness at the fact that we have no idea how the brain works. I said, maybe we will in one hundred years? He said, thats height of optimism! This is where day-dreaming in our waking state and dreams in our sleeping state enter our discussion, but only for a cameo. For the realms of the dream world, visions and whatnot, are beyond the scope scientific inquiry at the moment, though always at the door.

Coming back to the time-travel situation, suppose you wish to go back in time to stop an awful road accident you had which left you in bed for a few weeks with an acute bout of existentialism and hopelessness kicked that in your life then, and the pain and the slow process of regenerating tissues, making you want to avoid that, and you wish to intervene and stop yourself from entering the vehicle on that day at that time at that place.

Now there is a charming assumption that certain points in time are fixed (and this has been often recited by doctor who himself) and no matter what you do some things happen. This would mean that the accident i was so desperately trying to avoid doesnt need to happen in the exact same manner, but needs to happen with a certain flexible conditions. The exact date may not be important, the exact time is not important, its only important that it happen within a range of factors. This argument doesnt appeal to me because it is not backed by a good answer to why things happen. If its so important, who decides that? You? God? Destiny? Destiny is a good concept but free will is better. Also it seems like a poor excuse in our explaining things, and we often resort to the less-wild answer 'to prevent things from falling apart.'

Another view states that once time travel is possible, you are automatically dealing with copies of people and alternative timelines and multiple universes. This is backed by quantum mechanics and is thus a strong argument. The hypothesis is that if there can be two outcomes to anything, the universe splits and both outcomes happen. I chose not to think in this direction unless you can give me an address of this copy-universe so that we may go there to continue our talk.

So we are left with the possibility that you indeed can change things, and you successfully go back in time and change the event, stop it from happening. This would change you, this would change the experience you had with yourself gnawing yourself in the dark while recovering. This change would be instantly reflected in your present self. This is similar to saying, that if you go back in time and not go so far as to kill yourself, but neatly scar yourself, you will instantaneously have the scar appear in your present-self.

The situation here is of getting a feedback to your actions, whatever you may do to yourself while traveling back in time and dealing with yourself and getting an instantaneous effect. We may discard the wonderful Doctor and his tardis at this point as we enter a state of consciousness or existence sans time. This is a state of instant wish-fulfillment or thoughts being realized as soon as they arise, but we are looking at entirely new definitions and consequences to the words 'as thoughts arise' and 'thoughts being realized' in this state of consciousness or existence.

My hunch is that this is not a state we are heading into, or should be aiming at, but we are already in it.

Love, Beauty, Hope

(click on the image for a bigger image)

Credits:
Song - New York, New York
Artist - Polly Scattergood
Engine - CryEngine 3
Game Environment - Crysis 2
Setting - New York, 2023
Delta Force operator - Alcatraz, Nanosuit 2
Story - Rickard Morgan
Game Publisher - Electronic Arts
Platforms: PC, XBOX, PS3
Release Date: March 11, 2011

notes on the current condition of the refrigerator

I bought it last year before summer, for cold water, ice and to store fruits and vegetables. It has been over 15 months now and the fridge is working fine. Once a while I have to pay attention to its workings and appearance.

The fridge door is opened since last night, and I plan to clean it well and thoroughly before use again. Since a few weeks I have been meaning to clean it. The current conditions are dire: the top is dirty, so is the door and the door-body soft lining is too ugly to look at. Inside, it is generally dirty, the door and the shelves and the ice box is completely covered with frost.

I like mangoes, and the last time I went home I came back with three mangoes, which I kept frozen for many weeks before finally gulping the last one down last night. Now I could clean the fridge properly, it is completely empty.

The other flat-mates pay no attention the cleaning and the maintenance of the fridge. Many times I don’t act because I expect them to as well, but they never do, but I still expect them to, and it’s a vicious cycle of inertia.

Two weeks ago, I had kept a half-full bottle of mazaa in the kitchen. I didn’t pay any attention to the bulge it developed which hinted at some internal chemical process, possibly fermentation. The bottle exploded and sprayed tiny droplets of mazaa all over the walls, doors and floor. I cleaned everything immediately and it smelled very fowl. But I didn’t look at the fridge door, which was also dirty. Cleaned it a couple of days later when I noticed it.

It was in an interesting state: the decayed mazaa must have provided some sort of nutrition and some fungi had started to grow on the door. It will be like this at the end of the world as well: human buildings and structures aren’t all that permanent. Left to itself, the fungi would spread in the kitchen and age it rapidly, in a few weeks or months one can only imagine the extent of nature’s will to take over where it is not allowed still. Tiny agents: microbes and dust are always around, make no mistake! They are always trying to reclaim the natural way of things and relationships.

So today probably, I will go back home, wipe off the dirt and the communities and the cultures in it, clean the fridge from the inside as well, and make it squeaky clean.

Significance of Nick Fury saying "Sir, I'm gonna have to ask you to exit the donut."

In iron man 2 we see what happens to a man who is on top of his game, his enemies' game and every other game there is which has a top to be on.

the whole movie is on one side, then this scene we are about to discuss happens, and the movie continues to a brief and explosive ending.

tony stark is sitting in a donut, and we know what a thing with a perfect hole in it symbolizes. thats where tony is, thats where he has been for a long while now, in the self obsessed mad-genius partying mad dog race car driving orgasm of a life.

nick fury requests him to exit the donut, he does, they have a discussion in a diner and tony is forced into one more pressure-crunch to prove himself as he did in a cave with a box of scraps some months ago. only this time he wont be making a bulky iron armor-suit, he will be making unobtainium right in his hologram-reeking hi-tech basement, making a small particle accelerator as a part of the process.

the movie ends after 5 minutes and if you blink in any of those 5 minutes you havent missed much, only a couple of explosions, or maybe the hot black widow taking down tens of security guards by moves that would have impressed Neo.

lets hope iron man 3 contains the spirit of the first part, with tony's return to pure innovations in a humble setting.

Cotton Pants

how silently do clothes spend time on the line.. releasing the water they contain in the air with patience. with the smell of modern-day detergents, like flowers in spring, or the hair of a girl, sometimes in the sun, sometimes in the shade, they dont care much, although i think they prefer the sunshine.

cotton pants, made out of cotton, brilliant white puffs that spring right out of the ground, from the very earth itself, lined with stronger threads and metal rivets and zippers, these are the elements here and there, arranged for style and aesthetics by people who know how to do it, and when you wear them, the cotton lasts long, lycra offers just the right amount of flexibility.

the whole process is so bound to nature, almost serene as nature itself.

So this is what I'll do with Ironman 2

i love tony stark. what a man he is! What A Man! making the iron-man-weapon out of a box of scraps (which was given to him to make the jerico missile, a box of scraps!) under the gun, in a cave in afghanistan! and the garage he has! the shiny cars and the electronics! thats all just perfect.

i recently saw the trailer for the new movie. and it was great to see him, just see him do things like he does things and say things like he says.. thats enough to live on for weeks and weeks.

so when the new movie is out, i will watch it in parts, 4 shows in the theatre i'll watch in slots of 30 minutes, like the first time i'll only watch 30 minutes, and the next day, one hour, and so on.

because, we dont get that sort of stuff often, that is pure gold, its like very old wine, and you must take it in parts.

yes precious, the plan is well thought.

Awesome Yellow

Yellow is the colour of a golden retriever./

It's also the colour of the nice, shining sun/

And the smooth buttercup/

Sparkling, when morning is done.
Yellow is awesome./

Yellow in lemonade/

A shining fish swimming through/ The bluest water.
Yellow is the flaming fire in your/ fireplace./ Yellow is awesome.
A small yellow gumdrop/ In your mouth./ Yellow is the colour in a rainbow/ It's also like yellow writing paper/ On your letter./ Yellow is awesome.
Some Victoria