a vote of thanks

C. Pandurangan, guide till now, has also become a mentor from this day. Bharti and i had came to lab for some work and so did he. Then he made little tea for himself. He offered it to Bharti and myself. Guess what? yep, it was tea time. Bharti and myself had tea cups in our hands and sir was standing infornt of us. Wallah! the chat began.

He has always been a great orator and he proved it yet again. He began with his how he always feels young and mixes with kids wherever he goes. He recalled an incident when he (over)heard his father-in-law say to a person who had come asking for him in a marriage function, 'he would be telling stories to kids, just search him around where you find children'. He told us how fond he was about telling stories to kids. Sheer joy. Yes, i could see sheer joy in him while he was narrating to us the incident. I believe that he did slip into the memories of those days. I could guess where the topic would head to and it did!

Aim of life- to be happy. Zero marks if you said that. Aim of life is to achive perfect security :P. Some person somehow proved that in computer sc. no one can achive perfect security. So, what did the intellectuals do? They aimed for computatinal security. Security which is not perfect but given the resource now, you won't be able to distinguish it from perfect one. Yes, that is the aim of life. To get as close to perfect as possible. He raised some very fundamental questions: 'if all things that bring joy also bring pain, then theoritically is perfect joy achiveable?', 'if yes, how?'. Upon a question raised by my friend, 'aren't we too young to get into all this stuff', he replied, 'it's not the question that you want to happy forever or not, its the question about when you get into the state of mind to experience that unlimited joy, bliss.' He tried explaining what is happiness. He said happiness is not physical, it is a state of mind. That is the reason why one can become happy when he remembers fond memories from his past. That in turn proves that one can be happy if he wants. He even went and argued that 'sleeping with a girl is not wrong, nature made us that way. Morals and etiquete are all man made and can be broken, if you feel thats joy. But a word of caution. One must always remember that he is not an animal, and what differntiates him from animals is his intellect, so he must use his intellect and then do what he is doing.'.

On a lighter note: Aim of life - to be perfect. That is not achiveable, so be so close to it and others are not able to make out that you are not perfect.

Thank you Sir. for the cup of special tea and for such a wonderful talk.

Before i end this post, i would like to take this opportunity to thank bharti too because had she not been with me may be sir wouldn't have gotten into discussion and may be there wouldn't have been anything that i would have written about. Thank you Bharti