Studying at a seemingly secluded engineering institute like JUIT, you seldom get chance to have guest lectures delivered by distinguished people from their respective fields. Our own lectures consume a lot of our 'precious' time and getting the nod from ' the guests' to come thus far for a one-off interaction may not be easy for the administration too.

So, it was a rather nice deviation from the routine on Tuesday, when Dr. Thareja, HOD, Deptt. of Metallurgical Engineering Punjab Engineering College, Chandigarh came over to our University to deliver a guest lecture in quality control. Now, I am no wannabe entrepreneur, interested in knowing techniques of always having my products and services in the good books of customers all the time. So, all the interest that I had in the lecture pertained to the fact that I was able to stay away from a regular class, thanks to the gentleman's visit. But, ten minutes into the lecture and I was already nodding my head to, or questioning some of the points being raised by the our guest faculty. In fact, he made it interesting in every possible way, by quoting examples that were rather familiar, and yet seemed fresh of the shelf, because I had never cared to delve deeper into all the occurrences that had surrounded the event being quoted. But that was not what made me dedicate a blog post to the man of the day.

Every now and then, between his funny examples and serious points to ponder over, he made us go through some of his own compositions. And these compositions were no work of the hour coming from an amateur, but well composed poems with all poetic tools that you learn about in school, put to good use. And here was the catch, the theme, and moreover the vocabulary put to use was entirely - to say the least - technical.
I was too lazy to jot down something to reproduce over here on the iNFINITY, but believe me his short poems, which conveyed the message well enough consisted of words like - boiler, shaft, beam, furnace to go with what you call normal poetic words like poise. And time and again he reminded us of the poetic tools like metaphor and alliteration that he had been putting to use. A technocrat to the core and a poet at heart, or, maybe the other way round?

They called Frédéric Chopin 'The Poet of The Piano' indeed a genius at making people feel what he wanted them to feel, just by the way his fingers worked the piano, no <strings> attached! As I sit in front of my PC, tinkering with the system files after a laborious OS reinstall, and feel the need to pen down my frustrated thoughts at a not- so-reliable operating system, I have an innovative idea - why not try technical poetry! Coming soon to the iNFINITY, The Poet of The PC...

And, if you thought you'll have to bear with a psycho's ramblings, don't worry, these posts would have a separate Tag!