Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Standards!!!!!!



After studying 5 different courses on structural mechanics (The most challenging of all undergraduate civil engineering courses!) I found it amusing that when it comes to actually designing a structure all that structure engineers do is follow Indian standards, Which dictates "the spacing between transverse reinforcement is 8 times nominal diameter of longitudinal reinforcement". By now you must be looking for something interesting on the page. But if I say above is not a fact rather a Metaphor!

I believe we are all structural engineer following standards that exits in our society, region, culture, etc. Our judgments and Inferences are based on very few standards and stereotypes. These standards exits everywhere although they vary from place to place n generations to generations. We bargain with sabjiwalas for 5-10 Rs saying that we value money. We donate same hard earned money to already billionaire temple and consider it an Altruistic act, I guess daan dhram is about helping poor people but the thousands of rupees we donate to these temples either go into ghee diyaa at the temples or in the panditji's account. We consider fasting a religious act but we don’t consider eating three times the capacity at a party as non-religious. We condemn laloo when he utilizes his opportunity n earns wealth, but we are inspired when already billionaire Bill Gates utilizes his opportunity and earns another billion dollars by acquiring a company and displacing thousands of its employees. Ya! Bill Gates owns Microsoft so does laloo, He owns* the largest railway network (*for 5 yeas). And even laloo has improved railways and made life of thousands of people easy. I am not justifying laloo's way of life. But I dont see a reason why he does not deserve to be rich. Afterall Wealth at any point of time is constant and everyone is utilizing his opportunities to get a bigger share of it.

By these examples I m not trying to justify a particular practice or belief. All I want to say is that we all learn and understand so many things but when it comes to actually applying it we follow the standards like any other structural engineer. And the best example of it is you think everything written above is sarcasm.