Episode 5

An Assembly Affair

Aditya Balasubramaniam couldn’t believe his ears when I told him what was wrong with me.

You have high BP at the age of 19?

Yes!

Who told you so?

Mr.Arun Ganapathy MBBS.

To hell with him. Let us get a second opinion.

And so we visited another doctor. I was least interested in the proceedings because I was sure nothing could save me. I was dying. I had to die. It was my destiny.

The doctor looked at me seriously again. I smiled. I knew what he was going to say.

There is nothing wrong with your BP levels.

What??

I checked it thrice on three different days and at three different times of the day. Your BP is just normal.

But...

Get another opinion if you want.

So we went to yet another doctor and spent about a month on the diagnosis. The result confirmed that my blood pressure was as per the book.

So I stopped gulping down the Inderals. My pulse rate improved and I started looking healthy. Nirmal was back to his senses. And he got back his fame. He was the guy who could repeat the SI definition of "second" without blinking an eyelid. It is the time taken for an electron in the outermost orbit of a Caesium-133 atom to make 9 billion 192 million 631 thousand 7 hundred and 70 transitions.

Now that the second has been formally defined, let me state that the rest of my college life was pretty monotonous. My thirtieth first love – Nitya - got engaged to some bespectacled Bay Area Desi. I shed a tear or two when I got the news and surprisingly I had to really fight hard to get the third tear out of my eyes! It was instant closure on Nitya.

In my final year, our professor came up with a very interesting project for us, "Digital Computer Simulation of a three phase Induction Motor" I was pretty excited and almost ran to the university book center to buy every "Computer Graphics" book in the store.

My professor looked at those books in icy silence for one full minute. Then he looked up at the sky. I looked at the sky too. It was a splendid day. The blue sky with all those tiny white clouds was really beautiful. I enjoyed the view but something at the back of my mind was trying to tell me that the professor might not actually be relishing the pristine beauty of the sky at that moment. I turned my attention to him.

He was staring at me now. I smelt fish.

"We are not going to do any graphics stuff" He managed to tell me finally.

"But you said we were going to do a digital simulation of the 3 phase induction motor."

"Yes"

"What does that mean?"

"It means you are going to write a program to solve a couple of simultaneous equations, a couple of partial differential equations and print a couple of hundreds of pages containing numerical data."

That was perhaps the most boring project I had ever attempted to do. I could not show my face to anybody. I was ashamed and those computer graphics books laughed every time I looked at them. I returned those books to the store and firmly told my professor that I wanted to work on some real stuff and not on a number crunching application.

“Very well!” He said and put me on an 8085 Microprocessor project instead.

It took me quite a while to figure out that the deceivingly simple-looking “2 multiplied by 2” program was one of the difficult ones to write in ALP 8085. I missed the MULT command of x86 terribly. But then I had to live with 8085 because my professor had generously put me in this so called real stuff.

Finally after a few months I could trip a circuit breaker if the line voltage exceeded a certain potential. That marked the end of that project and I was more than relieved.

Well, it was during the final viva voce that I realized the glaring error in the circuit diagram. Had the four diodes really been connected like that to form the bridge rectifier, there wouldn't have been any output – rectified or not!

The guy who did the viva voce smiled a little when he saw the circuit diagram. I sank into the chair and wished I died at that moment.

But I managed to pass the examination and I bid a final goodbye to 8085.

Sometimes I feel I shouldn't have left 8085. But of course when I remember the sixteen line program for multiplying two 8-bit numbers without the carry! I feel I'd done the right thing.

It was partly because of this experience and mostly because I loved my three phase induction motor very much that I, the righteous Electrical Engineer, decided not to look at useless software companies during the campus placements. I wanted to work and die an Electrical Engineer.

Nagarjuna Fertilizers and Chemicals Ltd, a urea manufacturing concern in Kakinada Andhra Pradesh decided to interview me one fine day.

To be continued…