Just another blog!

It's really weird that the posts most difficult for me to write are the ones that have a deep personal touch: they are the ones that reflect my own views, or relate to some experience I have had. Maybe you would think that these posts are the easiest to write, and that they should flow out of my fingertips onto my keyboard, and from there onto the internet. But it is these posts that trouble me the most. I may write for lengths about DIY projects, or on why facebook sucks, or anything else; but when it comes to writing about something I really connect with, I have difficulty. As such, it is not difficult to explain this: Brecht's distancing works for me as an author as well as an observer, I write best when there is some distance between me and the object of my work. Here, again, I find myself drifting into the realm of the objective. But that is not the purpose of this post. So, I drag myself back to writing what I have put off for over a week. Recently, I met some wonderfu...

I receive around 20 emails a day. I hit delete for most. While studying letter writing in school, I often used to wonder, is letter writing relevant any more? I mean, who sends snail mail? Isn't it much more convenient to write an email? Fast forward to a few days ago... I received a note, not really a letter, from a friend, whom I had the pleasure to know for over three months. The pleasure of reading the note really changed my perception about the composition exercise learnt in school. So, what is it that a handwritten letter has which email lacks? Maybe it is the personal touch, the realization that a person has written the letter, and that it has not been written by a computer. Handwriting just happens to add a personal touch which the cold hard sans-serif font of email just cannot capture. I also think that handwritten letters take time and effort into composition. This means that they generally have a better content than email, which is often written casually, in a hurry...

So, here's another DIY Let me start by putting the cart before the horse. I shall start with the credits. This project was done while I was working on my Electronics Design Lab, along with my friends, Srujan M and Indrasen Bhattacharya. The work would not have been possible without the generous help received from the staff at Wadhwani Electronics Laboratory, who ensured that the only thing we did right was to leave the lab on time. This project would also not have been possible without the guidance of our dear and learned professors. It would probably have just about become additional dead weight on the head. Enough with the credits, now, I need to dive right into noise cancellation and how it works. The essence of sound is a pressure wave. The pressure wave, when incident on the eardrum sets into motion the complex mechanisms inside the ear, and after a long path, rather like the Cog advertisement, ends up making some nerves vibrate. The nerves send electrical signals to the b...