Leftovers in different world

Sometime back I received a e-mail in my office stating that they have some leftovers from last night, which they have brought to share with their teammates. That was the first time I have heard some one say that. In India if someone said something like that people would probably feel offended. A little thought in this and now I think this is clearly related to historic and cultural difference.

In USA, which has a cold climate, have had access to refrigerators since 1930s, a lifestyle which does not include daily cooking of food, it is reasonable to say that I have yesterday's food and people are bound to believe it is still good. Contrary to this, in India, where refrigerators became common thing only in late 1990s, where temperature of 100+ degree F is a common event, where people cook food daily (twice a day) and prefer freshly cooked food, it is understandable that people doubt the food whether it is still fresh. Of course with changing times the habits also change. I now quite regularly eat 2 or even 3 day old food, a thing that would have never happened in my home!          

Sathya sodhanai!

For those on the other side of linguistic barrier, the title translates to test of truth (lot of "T"s here :D, that was't intentional though). Everybody must have had that moment. Let me share one such moment.  It was during my Master's class. Our professor had explained a simple MATLAB program to plot a spline, the equation of which we had manually derived from given condition. To follow up with it, he had given us an assignment which was same problem but different initial condition.

I solved it, my friends too solved it. I did the program too.  A simple 10 line code. No big deal. However my friends naively believed that programming is not a required skill set for a mechanical engineer. Hence they never really cared to learn programming. It was the submission time and I had  forgot to save my program in cloud. We were all near the class, my friends struggling to complete the program. I helped them and we did it. I thought it was a simple program and frankly there was not many ways to write the same program differently. So I asked them to get me a copy of the same program. We all submitted it.

Next class, all our program red-flagged and we were all charged with group plagiarism. I tried too speak with the Prof that this was too simple a program and I know enough MALAB to write a longer program. However evidence was against me and I was indeed wrong in submitted the same program. In oriental philosophies there is a term called prayaschitta. I had to do something to prove my Prof about my programming abilities. And indeed I did it.

[Legend has it (:P) that Pavanesh sat continuously the whole night programming. The result was a 180+ line code that could directly generate any of the four types of spline that a user selects.  It would directly derive the equation from the initial condition input;  and no manual calculation was required. That was a month of course work, over night transferred into a program. The Prof was so impressed he asked a copy of the program used it in his later as part of his classes.]