Monday, October 17, 2011

WONDER KID"S



INSIDE A SCIENTIFIC MIND


On April 30, 2011, India's biggest inter-school IT quiz forayed into the desert turfs of the UAE. The TCS IT Wiz quiz is a venture started by one of India's IT major TCS in 1999. Since 1999, this quiz has been held every year in different cities in India, for pupils in the higher secondary grades(8-12). In a bid to enhance IT awareness, groom IT skills among the young local and expatriate population and widen the perspective of students, the TCS initiated the TCS IT Wiz here in Dubai. The quiz was held at the sprawling Sheikh Rashid Auditorium, Indian High School. Students from schools across UAE (Dubai, Sharjah and Abu Dhabi) thronged to participate and cheer their teams. 

It was a pleasure to watch the amazingly well-informed and analytical young minds. Giri Pickbrain Balasubramaniam, the head of Greycaps India Pvt Ltd, played the perfect quizmaster, orchestrating the proceeding and instilling it with the right amount of humor, logic and factual inputs. It was an awe-inspiring experience to watch the length of knowledge and grip over facts, which the young students had. As parents and audience, we watched wide mouthed as the participants as well as the juvenile audience fielded questions from the quizmaster. One particular question was about the origin of the name EPSON. A student in the audience analyzed and put across his view that, EP meant electronic printer and when a different version of it came along latter, it was named as the son of EP, namely EPSON. We found out that there are some thousands of people who search in an alien language (not in any known Earthlanguage) on the Google. Scary? Are the aliens preparing for an Earth raid? It was a relief that a couple of questions were within the reach of our analytical minds. There was one question on tempo garment. I made a wild guess about it (only in my mind) and it turned out to be correct. Let us see if any of the readers can guess what a tempo garment is. 

IT-related inventions got me thinking about one thing, there is a very thin line between genius and insanity. Inventions are, of course, the work of geniuses. Well here are a few inventions that makes one wonder if that is the case always.