Half filled vessels travel the farthest…

Everybody would have heard this age old saying “empty vessels make the most noise”… and it has often been my retort when some wiseguy’s wisecracks have left me tongue tied… I am not here to dispute that… but then today I discovered a new thought provoking statement…

“half-filled vessels travel the farthest”

Well how did that happen ? I got damn thirsty and went up the stairs to fetch a bottle of water… and my great big bottle was taking a real long time to fill… a 2 ltr bottle fills at the rate of 2cc per min, then how long would I have to hold the bottle and also press the nozzle… suddenly some color on the floor, reflected in the beautiful moonlight brought me out of the reverie of solving this IIT-JEE level complex problem… they were some of the 500ml plastic bottles probably left over from some forbidden party, though the party animals have done a good job of making it look like an innocent birthday bash… I picked up a bottle and was in no hurry to get back to my room and into bed… so I decided to fill up the bottle and throw it. I seemed to have understood somewhere that the bottle if it were empty would not travel far, and would probably fall right next the hostel-guard sitting right below the 6 floors… this understanding of physics was not what made me fill up the bottle, but it was the understanding of the guardian angel in me which often got neglected when I landed in trouble… so I filled the bottle – a transparent bisleri-type (it had some weird name which I didn’t bother to read)… then making sure that there was no one on the roads at this time of the night, I threw the bottle as far as I could with all my might… (hey that was an accidental rhyme, I always thought I was a born poet, maybe my next blog I should focus on poetry…)

Well the bottle landed somewhere just beyond the walls of the hostel compound… actually translated to engineering terms, would have traveled a horizontal distance of maybe about 10mtrs… well I could clearly understand that it was a futile throw and I was clearly out of the competition for any shot-put events and so was getting that defeatist attitude… the second bottle was almost lucky, but then I thought “wot the hell, I am already bent halfway to pick it up… “ so I took it and started filling it, but then I lost interest halfway and decided to just throw it away fearing the unlikely event of some poor thirsty soul drinking the dirty water… so I decide to throw it in the similar way as the previous bottle but in a half hearted way…

But wonder of wonders… the bottle crossed the wall and did not stop there… it soared over the road and the gutter on the other side of the road, hit the wall of a neglected landspace and stopped… now I am practical enough to understand that god did not decide to give me such great strengths to throw the lighter bottle so far so that I could enter the shot-put contests… that is when some weird physics logic dawned upon me… the water in the half filled bottle seemed to focus the light bottle to travel that extra mile (er… I mean that extra 5 mtrs…) and the bottle was just light enough for that flight and just heavy enough to travel the distance…

What is worse than the physicswala funda striking me at the wrong hour (if only it had come sometime in my engineering days… not that I would have won a nobel prize in physics, but at least I would have appeared to be alive and thinking in front of my physics profs out there… ) anyways what actually struck me was the parallel to life that I could draw… now my dear readers, I am a daydreamer or visionary as I would like to call myself and I relate anything I think of to the philosophy of life (whatever that means). So you will have to bear the parallelisms of life I write about here… even if it sounds like utter crap please don’t break my blissful ignorance that you are all enjoying my blogs…

So what is this great “tatthuvam” (tamil word for wise sayings of life defining themes)… well let us assume 3 different kinds of people – one who has little or no knowledge, the other a little bit of knowledge and the last is an expert in the domain… let us call them novice, intermediate and expert for the sake of typing convenience…

now the novice knows that he does not have much knowledge and the real fact that he has not much knowledge about the topic cannot achieve anything great in that field… basically he cannot ask intelligent questions and nor can he know much by himself… hence like the empty bottle he makes a lot of noise and also does not travel too far… practically buffeted by other forces he lands in the same place and makes a loud uproar…

the expert on the other hand knows more than the novice and the intermediate and hence would certainly be expected to go far more than them… he does too to some extent… but he falls short because he fails to ask the right questions mainly because he already “knows” the answers… thus he may not get what the customers are actually asking for… instead he gives them what he “knows” they want… and since he is heavy with knowledge, falls flat due to the downward force F = mg which is higher for heavier masses.

the intermediate on the other hand is like the half filled bottle of water… light enough to use the external forces to guide his path and the little weight to provide him the required focus to travel that extra distance… to go out of his way to please the customer and gains in the knowledge… and who are these “half-baked” professionals ? of course we MBAs… we know the right questions to ask our customers and of course the customer is the king…

“wow, dude, you are one of the greatest thinkers this world has ever produced…”, I hear an inner-voice telling me… and I also hear some external voices shouting my name… must be my thirsty roomie. Well some sacrifices have to be made after all such strokes of brilliance don’t come very often… say only about once every 5 minutes…