Wow, it's been a while. Two weeks of midterms and projects, quizzes and "tests".

It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end… because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing… this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer.

And thank you WikiQuote. Ah, I'm going to miss Dumbledore in the next and last book; all those quotes I could have memorized. And here's a theory that says Dumbledore never actually appeared in Book Six.

After the Chinese midterm, I was really excited that I'd guessed one of the answers and I really wanted to write about it and talk about how genius and elegant the Chinese system of writing is. But since I didn't get time to do that, I guess I'll do it now. So, as you might or might not know, Chinese words are written in Chinese characters. Each character represents precisely one syllable in the language (since a lot of the simple words are only one syllable long, a lot of words are just a single character). We are supposed to memorize the writing of most of the characters in our Chinese textbook; however, there are about five or six in each lesson that are meant for "recognition only". So, while studying for the midterm, I practised the writing of most of the Chinese characters but forgot to look into the "recognition only" ones. And Chinese words are not like English words that you can memorize at a glance; it takes a little while. Which is why I was at a total loss when I saw the following word on the exam that I was supposed to translate to English:


The first thing that came to my mind was that I'd never seen these characters and that maybe the teacher had made a mistake and I should go ask her if this wasn't an error. But then, I knew my teacher and knew that I could hardly expect her to make a gross error like this. And going to ask her would prove that I didn't know the character while at least now I had the chance of guessing, though admittedly it was a faint one. So, I tried to think of characters I knew that looked similar and what they sounded like. That's because a huge majority of Chinese characters are actually not simple pictograms but "pictophonetic compounds" which means that one part of the character gives the character its meaning and the other part gives it its sound. The second character, this respect was problematic because I'd only seen it as a part in another character 都 (dōu) and never on its own. So, my best bet was now the first character. The second part of the first character reminded me of the last character in the Chinese word for "I'm sorry" - 起 (qǐ). I also knew that the first part of 记 (jì) was the "speech" radical and thus was probably the meaning part. So, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to assume that the second half of both characters denoted the sound. If so, the sound would be qǐ (chhee or छी in Hindi). Now, this is where a limited vocabulary helps, because I just had to think of a word that I knew that began with a qi sound. The closest I got was jìzhě (reporter). I knew it wasn't too far-fetched because the sound parts in Chinese characters are not very strictly adherent and that the qi I was looking for could actually be qi, ji or xi as they are part of the same family of sounds just like क ख ग घ (xi is pronounced as shee or शी). So, I put down "reporter" and moved on. When I finally got back to my computer, I fired up TextEdit and typed in jìzhě to see what character came up and bingo! That was pretty freaking sweet.

Ah, that was the high point of my midterms. The CS midterm just took place on Thursday and I'm somewhat anxious to find out whether I totally messed up or did decently. The CS class I'm taking now is the one in which potential majors get separated out from the hobbyists. It's a centrifuge of sorts for the CS department. After this class, you know whether you're a CS major or not. I like this class.

I watched my first Indiana Jones movie on Friday (Raiders of the Lost Ark) and it was quite decent. We also watched the original Star Wars trilogy last night and that was pretty awesome too. मुझे अपने दो रूममेट्स के साथ फ़िल्में देखने में बस एक कष्ट है और वह यह है कि यह लोग फ़िल्म देखते वक्त ना खुद एक शब्द बोलते हैं ना किसी और को बोलने देना चाहते हैं। कुछ भी कौमेंट मारो तो इनसे झेला नहीं जाता। ऐसी भी बात नहीं है कि फ़िल्म चल रही है और तुम अपनी लाईफ़ स्टोरी सुना रहे हो। इनसे तो फ़िल्म के बारे में भी बात नहीं कर सकते। और यह भी नहीं कि हम Red Violin या Black जैसी कोई बहुत emotional फ़िल्म देख रहें हों। इन्हें तो Star Wars और Indiana Jones में भी बिलकुल शांति से बैठ कर Lucas की कहानी देखनी है। कुछ ज़्यादा ही serious बन्दे हैं। हे भगवन।

Labels: English