more rants

I hate the Windows Phone at times. I mean, I could ask for nothing better as far as the phone itself goes; but Microsoft has lately gotten into the habit of randomly and for no reason changing their terms of use. And for reasons that I can't comprehend, my account information indicates that I am a child. So I can't accept their terms and conditions, and I can't download any new apps or install updates for existing ones as a result, until my authorized parent logs into his account, and accepts the new terms for me. This happened once before, and the problem magically resolved itself. (I think it had something to do with the fact that the phone's account was linked to the Zune website - now it's linked, again for unknown reasons, to Xbox.) Now when I try accessing the "My Account" page, it says something almost mischievous, like, "Oops... It looks like you've discovered a glitch", and displays an error code (a different one each time) that isn't recognized by their error code dictionary. The "Oops" might as well be a "Congratulations!" Now when my dad checks the accept checkbox, and logs in with his Microsoft account, it goes back to the terms and conditions page, in an endless loop. This is seriously so retarded that I can't bring myself to say anything nice about Microsoft right now. Even the things people are saying about Windows 8 seem totally justified.

I am reading a book called Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters by Matt Ridley, a book that my dad gave my grandfather one Christmas many years ago. It's really interesting, is all I can say. It reminded me that biology was in fact one of the few classes at my first high school in which I could actually be said to have learnt something, thanks to the awesome teacher. Math and the physical sciences, to an extent, are not so much about learning as they are about discovering things. (There are probably a lot of things wrong with that assessment.) History in India is always, ALWAYS politically charged, and geography was so useless that I throw up whenever I think about it. I don't remember any of it, and am none the worse for it. On the other hand, I find that I remember a lot of the things we learnt in biology. It goes to show what a genuinely good teacher can do, even if you don't see yourself doing anything with that class later in life. Intellectual curiosity tends to be stifled in India, consciously or unconsciously, as some sort of perversity, like not wanting to become an engineer or scientist. 

If we don't like chemistry in high school (by that I mean FIITJEE and kindred organizations, which don't deserve to be called schools, and are certainly not moral enough to deserve being called "high" in any sense of the word - except that of being stoned to complete stultification), we are injoined to "condition" ourselves to like it. And what do I remember from chemistry in FIITJEE? Absolutely nothing, save a few isolated threads of information that mean nothing without other information that I don't remember. I only remember stuff from physics and math because I liked those classes anyway, and the teachers were young enough not to have been intellectually deflowered by the crawling, writhing corruption that throbbed in every wall, in every classroom of that depraved organization. Organic chemistry is interesting, you might say, because it has some kind of reliable internal logic (with exceptions that often have exceptions, which in all probability could have exceptions with exceptions, and so forth) in spite of being totally cut off from the real world. But so is playing with blocks in preschool, and I think that would have been a decidedly better use for my time. In short, sending a retard to FIITJEE might make him a more useful tool, but it does nothing for those who are smart enough to pursue knowledge by themselves, without having to be straitjacketed by a course in which none of the complicated topics is given enough attention to justify expecting a student to be an expert in it after two short years (or five or six, if you count the prep classes for what is essentially a prep concentration camp) of being waterboarded. Thussall for now.

On an unrelated note, the Indian Broadcasting Federation, or whatever that organization of people so retarded that they can scarcely be said to be organic, let alone living things, is called, asterisk'd out "Gandhi" in the subtitles for The  Big Bang Theory on Star World. This was so hilarious that I laughed blood.