I slogged, I blogged, and I went to bed!

We are testing our design in the lab, and of course, nothing works. So the last weekend was spent at work. I mean, the last weekend was really spent at work:I landed up there at 9 am on Saturday and left at 3 am on Monday, with two breaks of 4 and 2 hours respectively. Of course, one might say I slogged because I'm an anti-social, despo seengle luzaar (that's single loser in Bengali), who needs to get a life. Well, that's clearly true, but it's so boring that one should come up with a different explanation.

One might think I slogged because I wanted to be thaa man,and shine in Heaven's glorious light, and be considered a superhero, and get a raise and climb up the ladder, and gain recognition among my peers, and be known to upper management as the Rock on which the company stands, and all that. But this is not only boring, it's also untrue. You see, from generations of hiding in the forests from the invading Bhaiyas, South Indians have evolved to be camouflaged by wood. Like my other South Indian brethren, I just blend into the office furniture. Maybe I'd be noticed if I went to work in pink shirt and purple pants, but I seriously doubt it. Heck, even if I went naked, I don't think it'll register a blip on anybody's radar. The good thing, of course, is that I won't be fired, because nobody even knows I exist.

Let it also be said that I've been very understated about my weekend's achievements. The only time I talked about it was this morning:

Colleague : Hey, it's hot today, man.
Badri : True. I think it's 95, which is slightly less than 36 degrees celsius, which is actually less than the number of hours I spent at work this weekend.

Strange, things have been quiet at work today. Very little conversation with anyone. I guess everyone must be awed by my sincerity.

Anyway, the really amazing thing, and I guess the point of this blog, is that I absolutely, thoroughly, completely enjoyed the weekend slog in the lab, and I've been wondering why.

Well, first of all, there's the existential pleasure of engineering. (Yes, I use the word existential in everyday conversation, and no, I don't know what it really means, and no-ho-ho, I don't intend to find out! RIP!). I'm not one of those practical make-it-yourself blokes. I don't know a spanner from a rat's arse, and I usually call for qualified help when light bulbs need changing. When I set about removing an airhole in the electric motor at home, I flooded the room, caused a district-wide power failure (that soured Tamil Nadu's relations with Karnataka and almost made us secede from the Union), and launched my cousin's literary career. But even I can feel the thrill of wrestling with something real.

When you solve a cool math problem or answer a quiz question, you feel kicks, of course. In fact, it requires intelligence, so you'd think it's better than engineering, which doesn't really tax a man's, or even a woman's, brain. But making practical stuff work is not really the same thing as solving a difficult problem. For one thing, if you've been working with any reasonably complex system, you don't understand the whole of it, and like all reasonable people, you know that the parts that you didn't design will not work. Worse, like all truly enlightened people, you secretly fear that the Devil exists, and He's punishing you for not believing in Him by messing up the system. Finally, like all good engineers, you distrust logical thinking and believe that the scientific method should be restricted to developing extra-reach toothbrushes and effective contraceptives.

Out of a million random things, you pick one after the other, and after much trial and even greater error, some thing finally works. You know that this was pure chance and it'll stop working soon. If you're a hopeless optimist, you think it'll work again sometime that night. In any case, you try again, and hmm, it works still. And then you try again, and you reset everything and try again, and you go take a leak and try again, and go to bed and come back in the morning, and try again. Finally, you're convinced it really works, and then you cook up some logical explanation and tell your colleagues that you finally figured out the real reason.

In fact, I think all this goes back to our origin as hunter-gatherers. You see, in the old times, they didn't have central heating, and life was really challenging. Nature was not just some place you took your kids to for fun. It was something that you didn't understand or control, but had to work with. Blokes who liked to fight the good fight with muscles straining, brows sweating and hearts singing had a selective advantage over intellectual types who thought about the Human Condition. Thus it is that Nature taught Man to love fighting her, and thus it is that bull-fighting is more popular than chess. We all instintively thrill in working with complex, irrational, intractable systems. Why else would men marry and have children?

In fact, when you dig a little deeper, it's clear that anybody who genuinely loves engineering also loves Nature and believes in God, because he knows a complex system when he sees one, and he knows that there obviously must have been a designer to optimize the amplifier gain in the forward path, the time constant of the feedback path and the probabilities of detection and false alarm in the controller.

Even in a completely corny movie scene, like the bulb lighting up in Swades, you feel a secret thrill when some contraption works. When you spend 5 hours and finally see zero BER (or whatever) on the screen, you can almost hear Beethoven in the background.

That, my friends, is real kicks. Sex, drugs, mud-wresting and mountain climbing are nothing compared to it. (Yeah, I would know. I've seen all these on TV, and everyone knows that things are better on TV than in real life.)

There is, I think, one more reason why this weekend was so much fun. It's the same reason why people were happier during the War than they're now, and why we'll all end up killing each other. But that's for another blog. So much for now.