manogat

Read it on the homepage of Dr. Chaudhari





Arthur Ashe, the legendary Wimbledon player was dying
of AIDS which he got due to infected blood he received
during a heart surgery in 1983. From world over, he
received letters from his fans, one of which conveyed:
"Why does GOD have to select you for such a bad
disease"?
To this Arthur Ashe replied: The world over -- 5 Crore
children start playing tennis, 50 Lakh learn to play
tennis, 5 Lakh learn professional tennis, 50,000 come
to the circuit, 5000 reach the grand slam, 50 reach
Wimbledon, 4 to semi final, 2 to the finals, When I
was holding a cup I never asked GOD "Why me?". And
today in pain I should not be asking GOD "Why me?"

As per Astrocenter:

If you're trying to get your finances together, today might not prove to be very practical, SAWANI. Put it aside for later! Spend your day indulging in the lighter side of life. Get your family or close friends together and head outside! You may enjoy a day at the park, or perhaps even at the amusement park. Share some laughs and enjoy growing closer together. Those more serious matters will still be waiting for you tomorrow!

Couldn't help getting amused with the prediction... particularly the last line!

For the past couple of days, I have been manually correcting spellings in a data set for an experiment. The data is a collection of about 5-6 subjective/essay type questions answered by about 60 students.

Almost every occurrence of "create" has been spelled as "creat". Other examples include "veribls" instead of "variables", "ptrs" for "pointers". Rarely did I come across a properly spelled "you" which was invariably written as "u". Similarly "thru" is the new "through" and "consectve" is consecutive! Can you guess what is "addly" ? Its "additionally"!!

I wonder if this is a side effect of frequent use of short text messages (SMSing) and services like Twitter on our students, which make people compromise on orthography for the sake of length of message. Whereas our generation might still be able to sensibly decide when to use formal English and "whr v cn do wth sch stff", I am afraid the next generation of students doesn't seem to be capable of this distinction.

In another answer, a student wonderfully tried to describe "encapsulation" by giving an example "If I becomes ill then i takes tablet and i becomes OK but i dont kno how this can internally work in my body".

I don't know how far can we ignore the felonies committed in orthography and grammar on the pretext of appreciating the effort or the understanding. May be its time to take a stand that understanding is not enough! Proper expression is essential. Or is it time to change the rules of orthography itself? After all everything has a shelf life. But the important detail here that we seem to be missing out is the resultant chaos in the absence of any standards for writing. If "dis" is korect so iz "dat" den or thn mk no diff ither!

Badly require that grammar and spelling checker I believe. As a side note, I think this corpus will be a good data set to capture the typical grammatical mistakes made by users!

This is a post only to show off my new user pic ;-) Isn't it cute?

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The above was recorded on Facebook ;-)

Does education make a person more humble? Rather, isn't making a person more humble, the true purpose of education? I am not talking about degrees here...I am talking about enlightenment of the mind, widening of perspective,becoming aware of others living with you in this world etc etc.

What leads to the "I am always right and things should be the way I keep them" attitude in people? How to make such people aware that their way is only one of the possible ways and that someone might be preferring things totally differently? How do people get that "Others are all wrong and only I am right" attitude? And what do you do to make such people realize that it is they who are actually wrong this time? Personally speaking, I get amazed with such people...

Another question is when and how does a human being become aware of others around him/her? Aware that there are other people also sharing the space with you! A few examples -- When one sees people driving or walking on the roads. They choose to happily drift or take sudden turns, oblivious to the fact that there are hundreds of other people on the same road too! Or when people play loudspeakers in the middle of the night partying and are not even aware that someone might be studying next door for his exams! A couple of days ago I again saw a woman pour bucket full of water from her first floor flat on the road below...She did not even bother to see if there was anyone walking there!!

But I also wonder if education should make you more tolerant and accommodating in nature? And what does becoming more tolerant imply? You develop a "Chalta hai yaar...Jaane do yaar" attitude?

Ever wondered if you could use a more vivid word than "cut" to describe the wound you got while chopping those vegetables? Or another set of words which described your state of extreme happiness more vividly like "exult", "walking on air" etc.?
Ever thought what is it that makes a piece of text more enjoyable than another one? Or if you could write as well as your favorite fiction writer? Well, one of the keys to impressive writing is a good vocabulary consisting of vivid words, words that convey the way an action is performed or show the effect of an action than plainly telling them. These words are not to be confused with fancy and heavy words as they tend to overload the reader than excite him. Apart from these, at times I have also felt the need of checking the correctness of usage of a particular word or the correct preposition that it takes.

So in case you have had any or all of the above difficulties while writing, here is a solution developed as a WordNet® ** plugin for OpenOffice.org Writer.

Write it Right and Write it Better-WiRWiB accesses the WordNet® and prompts writers with synonyms and correct usage examples of the typed word. These prompts are non-intrusive and the "always-on-top" WiRWiB window quietly refreshes its contents as you type. You can enable/disable the add-on by a toggle button available on the toolbar.

You can download WiRWiB from here.
Please send us your feedback at sawani[at]cdacbangalore[dot]in



** WordNet® is a large lexical database of English, developed under the direction of George A. Miller of the Cognitive Science Laboratory at Princeton University.



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Almost everyone has claimed Barack Obama's victory to be special, considering his race which is also being regarded as an indicator of a "New/Changing America". Every other headline mentions his being a black alongside his getting elected. Not only that but Indian news channels have already started looking for India's own Obama :-)

I was wondering if the weaker section of Indian population would quickly draw a parallel from his victory and heavily promote the idea of a PM from amongst one of them. This is slightly dangerous if done blindly. I would want people not to overlook the fact that Obama has got elected not just because of the color of his skin. He is a learned man (Both he and his wife have had Ivy league education and they did not get it because of reservation quota!!), an accomplished author and a person with lot of commitment to his country as a whole. He seems to mean business given the professional finesse and dedication of his political campaign.

So before drawing any parallels blindly, people should remember that he did not spend his time putting up his statues all over Illinois and neither has he named every other junction in the capital in his or his mentor's name! He has a vision and a professional outlook. I agree that we are yet to see all these qualities make any real impact on the world. But its a word of caution for our eager-to-proclaim media and political chamchas!

Having fought social atrocities and stigma cannot be the only qualification sufficient for becoming the prime minister of India in the twentieth century. It is because today's times offer a myriad of challenges for any country, which can be successfully met only if the leader has a clear vision and exposure to modern thought and education.

So I hope people give a proper thought before starting a shout for a Mayawati or a Paswan to become India's prime minister next. I hope people give due merit to the person's education, wisdom, vision and accomplishment as a nationalist and not merely to the caste (s)he comes from!

Send this eCard !

Remember my post on quite and quiet?  I am sure many of the readers must be coming across lots of such incorrect usages. Well here is a recent one...

Someone used whether when (s)he should have used weather!

This one cannot be attributed to the new SMS/chat  lingo either when you say "ur" instead of "your" and I can't think of it as a typo by my wildest stretch of imagination ;-) May be the person was in a great hurry while commenting on his friend's post!