Category: Personal Reflections

I wish that my rejection letters turn out to be April Fools’ jokes, but that isn’t likely. I didn’t get through in the colleges I wanted, and in some of the lower tier ones where I did have a chance they’re unviable for me because of the amount of financial aid they’re giving. Recession in the US certainly seems to have hit their financial aid funds hard forcing them to choose students who need lesser aid. I don’t see my application per se lacking much with perfect scores in SAT Subject Tests, near perfect in TOEFL, decent marks in Reasoning, and an extensive extra-curricular record.

Applying to universities in UK wasn’t something which I was pursuing actively – until now. That’s next on the cards – dispatching my applications through UCAS (although there’s still a lot of time). I’m optimistic about NTU too since I’ve opted for non-subsidised tuition fee this time.

I’m also giving a few Indian entrance exams, so projects such as Gyaan.in will be on hold for the next few months (or at least until something concrete works out). I remain committed to the Gyaan.in project but I also have to prioritise certain things right now. Expect lesser blog posts and tweets.

I think I’d say I have to agree with this:

The amount of time, energy, and verbiage being spent on making people “aware” of the energy-climate problem, and asking people to make symbolic gestures to call attention to it, is out of all proportion to the time, energy, and effort going into designing a systemic solution. We’ve had too many Live Earth concerts and Barneys “Have a Green Holiday” Christmas catalogs and too few focused lobbying efforts to enact transformational green legislation. If the money and mobilization effort spent on Live Earth had gone into lobbying the U.S. Congress for more generous and longer-term production and investment tax credits for renewable energy, and for other green legislation, the impact would have been vastly more meaningful.

Taken from here. As Sir Eric Theodore Cartman said (and which I keep repeating), “Hippies. They wanna save the Earth, but all they do is smoke pot and smell bad.” Caring about wasteful energy expenditure is fine, but think about it every goddamn day and act on it, instead of acting like a sanctimonious holier-than-thou ass and trying to get people to switch off lights for one hour on one day in a year. Use CFLs, use energy efficient devices, turn off devices in standby (they can suck up a surprising amount of energy in standby too), etc. Just be a nice person, OK?