It was nearly 4 years back when I had finished my 2nd PUC and I didn’t know what to do next . I’ve remained pretty aimless in life .Science was never a topic of great intrigue for me . A maternal aunt told me that Telecommunication would be a great choice because of the mobile telephony revolution , internet and some other things like 3G , 4 G which makes the news for all the wrong reasons. Since I was getting it in a pretty decent college, I decided to take this up.
Until 2 years back , I always thought that the power lines that carry electricity also carry these telephone signals . I would always wonder as to why the telephone doesn’t go dead when there’s a power cut . I once asked my cousin and she ‘Go ask the BESCOM guys’ . She was as lame as me . For people who are reading this and have no idea about telecommunication , the branch is the same as electronics and communication
I’ll give you my understanding of electronics and it may/may not be right the second case being more likely. Electronics is a pretty hopeless subject to study . It all stars of with 3 things called resistors , capacitors and transistors . Your teachers deceive you be telling that these 3 things are enough to bring about a change in the word. In transistors , there’s a base , emitter and a collector and you can find out voltages between them. Different permutations and combinations of two or more transistors help you get more current / voltage and stuff like that . Resistors and capacitors are these extras in an item song. They are just there , spread out wild and far , just to make their presence felt .I’ve never found them doing any useful stuff. Take these 3 different things and arrange them in some particular order and you get creepy creatures like flip flops and op amps . Finally arrange all of them on a board and that gives you a circuit .This is basically explains the electronics part. The bad part is you never experience current or voltage physically and what I’ve explained is just the tip o the iceberg , there are a hell lot of lousy creatures like transformers , semiconductors , the lesser said about them the better. All these tiny parts make up the circuit and you can imagine how messy a circuit may look
Now comes the communication part. After you build 2 circuits , you name one as the sender and the other as the receiver . The sender sends out some data using a transmitter . Air particles just pick up the data . These air particles akin to each other keep passing the data and it’s finally caught at the receiver . In places where there’s no air , I suppose there won’t be any communication .We can’t have windmills everywhere so some intelligent people thought let’s use optic fibers and lay them under the ground. The communication part involves complex words like synthesizing , quantization , modulation and other stuff like that. The words itself are so complex, the process is even more. The problem with optic fibers is that the rodents living below the ground eat it up and then the data is lost. So after 3 years of studying this subject , you realize that there are a hell lot of problems involved in transmitting data .That is when you are asked to do a project
This project is a very phony process. Some students run to the research institutes in the city . This research is a pretty lousy process . Some guy proves a thing , other guy disproves it and the cycle continues .Finally there’s a one eyed man in the world of the blind who wins the Nobel prize. Believe me all this research never works practically . For example India’s premier organization ISRO , couldn’t track the missing helicopter of a chief minister of Arunachal Pradesh even after 5 days.
Apart from all this , before you get to understand and have a ‘feel’ for the subject the college gives you tests , assignments , quizzes . You feel like standing in front of a mirror and shouting ‘Can I go mad, just stark raving mad?’ You know , you can’t afford to do it because our parents are going to beat the shit out of you. You become like Ashish Nehra who made the famous statement ‘Body mein injury nahi , Injury mein body hai’ . There are a few good souls out there like ‘Ganesh Rao’ and ‘Giridhar’ . These guys write some amazing stuff and you can scrape through your exams. There are other foreign guys who are lead pretty frustrated lives and haven’t done any credible research .So they end up being authors. These guys must be sued for cruelty to mankind
So basically the point is, don’t join electronics or telecommunication if you don’t find it interesting or if you have an exceptionally low IQ. I fit in to both these categories . How do you find out if you have a low IQ . Try doing aerobics , if you can move your hand and feet together , you are perfectly alright.I move my hand , I forget about my feet or the vice versa .There’s some sort of coordination problem . If you cannot trace back the route by which you entered a particular road , that also means you are pretty dumb. If you feel that math with symbols like mu and epsilon is just complex calligraphy then engineering isn’t the right thing to do. Go out , become a chef , feed a few hungry souls , become a script writer and entertain the world , plant more trees or do some NGO work . Don’t do what others do , do what you feel like . The arguments may be that you won’t get a great job with a good salary and stuff but let’s debate it out another day.
