Saturday, July 4, 2009

Can you please explain?

Bangalore's weather is AWESOME! My internship is progressing nicely. Weekends have been fun as well!

Last Friday, we (the interns and the research team at Bell Labs India) did a bit of trekking, rowing and river-bathing in the Cauvery Wildlife Sanctuary. The trekking was adventurous, the destination (peak of Bheemagiri) was a delight, the banks of river Cauvery presented a serene sight! A psychology game on a tree-hammock on the Cauvery banks surprisingly revealed that Shamik sees 'beauty' in 'beasts' and Adhiraj finds 'thoughts' 'dirty'! :P

What I am more interested in describing articulately in this article are incidents that occurred during the next couple of days. Some of us had been to Puttaparthi to have a darshan of Sri Sathya Sai Baba, considered to be the spiritual guru common to all religions. Frankly speaking, I do not have much belief in the saying that he can perform miracles; what I admire about him though are his teachings, which offer so many good things to learn, his simple messages "Love all, serve all" and "Be good, do good" that have won him followers across the globe and the large number of social initiatives that he has undertaken for the betterment of mankind in general and the people of Puttaparthi in particular.

But a couple of incidents there have left me somewhat disturbed!
  1. After a satisfying morning darshan and just before the evening darshan, I realized that my phone’s battery was totally discharged. Since I had not called home since quite a long time and also had a train-trip to make to Bangalore later that night, I thought it was better to charge it at the earliest. I struggled to find a plug-point (it's not very easy to find one!) and placed my phone for charging. When it had charged to 63% in about 20 minutes, I removed it, switched it off, placed it back in my bag (phones are not allowed into the darshan hall) and ran for the darshan, only to reach late and miss the initial part of the session. When I came back and switched the phone on, the charge was just 6%!! Such a thing had never happened before...and has never happened again since then!

  2. Later that night, when I tried playing songs on my phone-walkman, I could hear no audio. I thought there might be a problem with the walkman. I tried setting an alarm to hear the alarm-tone; there was none. I asked one of my friends to give me a call, there was no sound of the ring-tone! I tried re-inserting the battery and resetting the phone, nothing worked! I believed my phone-speakers had somehow got screwed. Back in Bangalore, I tried connecting an earphone to see if I could hear any sound; I couldn't! The problem then definitely didn't lie in the speakers but somewhere else. A service centre was the only option to get it repaired at.

    Next day, Monday, I went to a nearby service centre but it was closed by the time I reached there. That night, frustrated, I again tried removing the battery to see if I could be lucky. And surprise, the sound was back! Everything worked PERFECTLY!!

I could come up with some sort of an explanation for the first incident. When I removed the charger, it was damn hot! I do not clearly know how a charger or the charging process functions, but perhaps some current limiter somewhere had got screwed up, thereby allowing a large current to flow through and causing the charge-level to be shown high when actually it wasn't! Or probably something similar! Or maybe something entirely different!

But I have absolutely no explanation for the second incident. This, even after having studied cell phones, their hardware and software aspects, for nearly two years!

I’ll be the last person to say that these incidents were miracles or occurred due to divine intervention or anything similar! But they certainly can't happen without an explanation! And I have still not been able to find any. Can you please explain?