Chiaroscuro Zeitgeist

Manila, Philippines; 8-10 July 2008:-

Selected by the Government of India, I have recently come back from my trip to Manila which was worthwhile. The delegates from the ASEAN countries and the Dialogue Partner Countries (India and China) met at the Trader’s Hotel, Roxas Boulevard, Pasay City, Manila under the following themes:

       1. Going Nucleur

       2. Gourmet Talk (GM Food)

       3. Spatial Science: The view from above

       4. Extreme Games

I had prepared a paper on GM Food: Prospects and Problems in India, analysing, writing, observing, understanding and concluding with ideas and not being a cut-copy-paste freak. I had written on the economics of GM Food in India and the SEA countries for as to how this would be a bane in all aspects. I had also looked at the religious, ethical, medical and environmental side of it.

Sourojit Das, from Kolkata, accompanied me with is project in the Going Nucleur category.I started off on the 6th from Delhi, with a flight to Kolkata (Jet Airways). With the international flights (Thai Airways) there was next to no difficulty except the fact that we failed to find a single water booth or packaged water selling shop at Suvarnubhum International Bangkok Airport. We reached Manila on the 12th at around 1:00p.m. with one Mr. Dev from the Indian Embassy at Philippines waiting for us. With a brief problem finding our teacher from Kerala Agriculture University – Ma’am Najeema Unikammu and ultimately finding her out having reached the hotel before us. With a brief refreshment at our room (1712, Ma’am had 1515 and Gov. fficials had 1211, 1220, etc. – don’t have to keep records so minutely,have I?-), we went for the inauguration dinner at 6:00 p.m. meeting Angelli Cortez and other Filipino officials, without looking at the other delegates much. Had the inuguration ceremony next day with dignitaries like Ms. Ester B. Ogena and Ms. Alabastro in the fray. One delegate from al ASEAN countries had to put the piece of a complete picture of the AYSS emblem into the frame on the stage and stand facing the audience. After performances from the very innovative group Lights Out. The secretaries of the Departments of Science and Technology of all countries came on to the stage after this before I could know that I had my presentation the same day (8 July 2008) at Ambassador Sala I (changed from Hortencia where ma’am Unikammu had her presentation; even Sourojit had his venue changed from Ambassador Sala I to Carlotta) after the plenary sessions of four dignitaries in the four parallel session themes already mentioned (two of them being from IAEA and Nabi Games).

The delegates in my room where of a different kind, if to be said they represented all sorts of people. We had timid people like Ms. Mom Charya (Original Chairman; Cambodia) and Ms. Tania Devana (Indonesia), extroverts like Mr. Darrel Then (Philippines) and confused lads like Mr. Yan Cheng (PR China). My presentation was after a Singaporean boy and a Vietnamese girl. It went well except that the facts were to heavy to be digested at a go as my co-delegates felt and showed by their expressions. The Chinese fellow was after me. I did not want to ask many questions and asked only 1 query from the boy from Singapore who to avoid answering asked me to repeat, laughed on the second instance making it look like a joke, coughed and smiled and ultimately became so confused that I had to go back without an answer

I also asked the resource person for our session a question at te Embassy Balroom A:

“As the economy of the SEA nationas is poor, so you think people will be benefitted by the excessive price rise with introduction of GM food? Added to this are the side effects like open field trials without contained field trials and allergens. What would you say on the same?

The same day we had the cultural night. Most of the countries presented ethnic dances except us, PR China and Malaysia (if I am not wrong). who presented a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, a stand-up comedy show (to be explained later) anda Gov. video clipping of Malaysia, Truly Asia, respectively. The Chinese enterprising guy from the Extreme Games session came up with a question which had so many answers that he went round and round the ballroom with a stack of Olympics’ postcard giving it to ech person who answered (and having occassion of jokes, praises, flattery and nuisance) after which he presented a Taichi tutorial on the stage with four people from the audience (one among whom was aged, the second was the Thai boy I later became friends with and I am unaware about the others) with him making it slower than necessary such that these four guys would totter on a leg, fall, shake and make everyone laugh ! Those who had knew about culture praised us. I had a Lao girl take my photographs of my presentation or I would not have had any record of the same.

To be Continued…

 It had been good that day as I was officially made a Converge Clan competition in-charge. Not a big deal? Then get this right- I had to go for the following 4 competitions in 48 hours against 54 teams or 1000+ students:

1. Story Writing- The worst thing that could have happened with Alankrit buzzing into the room twice every 2 minutes twice,” Mrittunjoy, we are getting late…come on, man…” The Epilogue was on some vague boffin yankee who saves his faculty every a flaw occurs and this time its a neural chip-unit network disorder. I wrote a lot about Simple DB and Amazon, and it must have been so technical that it may not have percolated into the nuts of the Bits N Bytes members.

2. Junior Programming- I had a  good time in the prelims with Mr. Kharbanda helping me out in quite a few questions. The finals were tough with Matrix questions and our rigid mindset of strictly operating on VB and not C++. But ultimately we turned to C++and tried a question in the last 10 minutes after wasting 1.05 hours. Bagging 2nd position is good for a not-so-seasoned-a-programmer.

3. Junior Quiz- I had planned a lot and plans don’t work always. I had planned of derailing the junior quiz finals with maximum number of questions answered but fate wasn’t happy that day. I went off with Viplov Maheshwari, a gamer, and got 3-4 questions of the weakest point of mine i.e. Gaming! And we did not qualify even or else we could have won some positions with the types of  finalists got.

4. Group Discussion- This was my actual event in which I failed to recover from the start. The elimination round was that of  elocution on any one of the topics out of:

a. If our parents had Orkut…

b. Where should the Silicon Valley be established in India…?   

c.  Viruses…..

I took the third one and put in almost two  dozen load of info on latest tech news and the judge couldn’t make head or foot of it. And he wanted the same old kindrgarten- “Good Morning…Honourable Judges, respected teachers and my dear friend…” Didn’t qualify. Manil Grover of JKPS won the event.

Access truly turned out to be the most disliked event of the year with many avoiding going into the ‘bias well’.

The signature of Bro. Emmanuel was something which I suppose many wished to see, on the memorandum for the formation of Eclat. Let us hope for the best.

Venue: Ramjas School, Sector-4, Ramakrishna Puram

Date: 26th and 27th of November, 2007

 The Dynamix 2007 was held in great earnest by the Ramjasites and it turned out quite good. The GD, wherein I participated, was fairly nice. It was at around 9:30 that the events started (on time; otherwise rarely seen). They had a good video to start with. The teams I knew were: DPS VK, DPS RKP, St. Columba’s, MIS, Mount Carmel and Ramjas School PR. The judge was a joint secretary of the Informatics Department of an extension of the Government of India. He was well versed with the pros and cons of the GD so well that you actually couldn’t ‘bluff’.

Day 1

The topic for my GD prelim batch (I) was: Censorship on the internet.

I spoke a lot about blogs and flagging on the basis of a variey of issues. There were tough competitors: DPS RKP, MIS, St. Columba’s, Mount Carmel. The MIS guy started the GD and then it was no turning back for the next 45 minutes. We were given numbers (I got Team no. 5; MIS- 1, a girl from…-2; St. Columba’s-3; DPS RKP-4; Mount Carmel-6) I had a good GD and was happy with myself. Next up was Batch (II), the batch of the Great Quizzard@42 with only two other competitiors, one being from Ramjas, Pusa Road. The LuminaR had asked me to be a participant of the second batch and I complied. Five of us (considering DPS RKP who sportingly went up too) had a great GD on

“Piracy…”

We discussed for quite a while and GQ started bringing up stuff that was drifting away from the topic. Thus, Prashant changed the topic to

“Censorship in Games”

We had a good ranting about the Virignia massacre and gaming restrictions, and the DPS RKP guy even questioned the necessity of selling such games (say that to Atari, Nintendo and GQ for his ultimate answer to Life, the Universe and everything within- 42)!  Finally the results were declared

Group Discussion Qualifiers
 

Teams from Batch (I) are:

Team 1: Mothers International School
Team 3: St. Columba’s School

Team 4: Delhi Public School, R. K. Puram

Team 5: Montfort School

And from Batch (II)- Delhi Public School, Vasant Kunj. They told us to have our refreshments within 15 minutes and return. The finals topic was: Internet Governance or e-governance.

They were indicating towards the lack of any agency as an authority for the same and its prospectus if formed. I got out to points directly and went on with prioritization accoring to classification as I was against the topic. Then I spoke of Turkey’s case example. It was a long winding discussion. I later found out that the points like the social necessity like the usage of ATMs for even RS. 100 withdrawal seemed more feasable, and also of the export-software shares (1.8%), all of which I knew but didn’t introduce in the discussion.  My folly cost me a first position and give gift it away to AnkurB. Anyway, it was good exposure. Hope for the best in the future.

Group Discussion Winners

1st - Ankur Banerjee (DPS VK)
2nd - Mrittunjoy Guha Majumdar (Montfort School)
3rd - Sagnik (MIS)

I will not be there for any event tomorrow. So best of luck, Converge Clan and win it big.

On the 23rd of November, the NMNH orgnanized a written quiz as part of the Nature Awareness Initiative. There were fairly easy questions like ” A country whose name is also that of a tree…!” I am waiting for the results to be disclosed in the first week of December with the Prize Distribution to be held on the 19th of December. Hope for the best.

Rubbish, absolutely rubbish was Code Wars. Won’t say anything more. Rate it lower than EXUN 2K7. But the quiz stuff was excellent. Some links:

Code Wars website and the dictator- AnkurB’s site. And some Dynamix stuff is around the corner…get info at http://theluminar.net, Prashant Khanduri’s portal.