Bhains Ki Post

Q. 9: What do you know about foot and mouth disease of African Buffalo? Explain with an elaborate diagram.                              (15 Marks)

(Note: Blogger has no idea whats so special about African Buffaloes and what on earth is foot and mouth disease)

Ans: 

Introduction

• Buffalo is one of the widely used or in other words, employed cattle in the World, especially in poor developing countries which are primarily based on Agriculture.
• Almost all the buffaloes are black, In fact, black color is considered the distinguishing features of the buffalo; but color variation can occur with regional changes and other metaphysical factors.
• Buffalo is popular with different names. In India (one of the largest buffalo producer) it is primarily called 'bhains' in the Hindi-speaking Northern plains, and 'Yerumai' in southern plateau region. In ancient Indian scriptures it has been addressed "Mahishi", while in Greek Mythology it has been mentioned as "Beta o u Beta Alpha Lambda" which may seem like a code name but it is phonetically correct.

Reasons for raising buffalo

• Buffalo being a mammal has got breasts, which are used to squeeze out milk at dusk and dawn period.
• Buffalo has been traditionally used as a grazer, so it can work as your natural dustbin (but the quality of milk can degrade proportionally)
• Its dung ('gobar' in Hindi) is multipurpose and is used in villages for polishing the earthen floors, as fuel (in the form of cakes) or even as a quick fix to broken walls and so on.

Injustice to Buffalo

• In Indian tradition, Buffalo has always been considered inferior to Holy cow. It has been used only as a substitute to cow in field and have never been given a chance to demonstrate her full potential.
• This can be attributed to her black color. In comparison cow is usually spotless white or can have designer tattoos by birth. So, this can be considered as a racial behavior on the part of man.
• Man (especially modern alpha male) have been guilty of abusing buffaloes in many ways. "Bhains ki Aankh Nikalana", "Mari Bhains Ki Poonch Paadna", "Bhains Ki Taang", "Bull's (Buffalo's Daddy) Eye" etc. have been used as slang without caring for the emotions of the mute buffalo. While the hypocritical man reasons it as a way of giving respect to buffalo, in reality he is disrespecting the buffalo and giving her emotional harassment.

Buffaloes in Africa

• Buffaloes in Africa are no special, after all they are buffaloes only.
• But one distinguishing features of African buffaloes is that they are heavily built as compared to the Indians. And they are quite fast too, which may be a result of the naturally green patches there.
• But African buffaloes are usually considered second to Subcontinental ones especially Indian buffaloes which though may not be as strong as their African counterparts but are equally aggressive if challenged.

Foot and Mouth Disease

• Foot and Mouth Disease is a very serious disease found in cattle especially buffaloes.
• It is caused by a certain virus, and though the disease is curable, the recovery rate and period are discouraging.
• Foot and Mouth Disease as the name suggests occurs in foot and as well as mouth. The disease is so infectious, that it is difficult to differentiate b/w foot and mouth.

Diagram 

(On page http://bit.ly/myBuFellow) 

These African buffaloes are called Hippo owing to their size and this particular buffalo is suffering from foot & mouth disease.

Paper Setter's Mindset

"Let her/him attempt this paper and pass it"

"Did they copy the paper from another university?"

"WTF was that, was the paper of some other subject?"

"Did they got this paper made from the peon or from the lab assistant?"

Sound familiar? Heard of them? Well these are a few things either I have said or heard people talking about whenever the conversation turns to exams. And these days, I can't really blame anyone for thinking or talking like that. When one works really hard (well cramming GBs of data is not easy!), you expect to get rewarded for it by an easy paper (Of course, when you know the answer, the question is easy) and then some good paper checking, making the hard work successful and giving the mind the right signals that hard work is rewarded.

OK?? NOT OK

But the way we (OK, at least 'I') get the exam papers, my mind gets the signal that it is OK, if I don't work hard. It is OK, if I don't prepare fully for the exam. It is OK, if I bank on my general knowledge of the topic rather than actually knowing the answers to questions. It is OK, to just study a topic 5 mins before the exam and go and write the paper (ask me, I did it in my exam on 31st December 2010). But everyone including me knows, in reality it is NOT OK.

Ideally

(please take note of the word) the exam should be taken to check your 'general' understanding of the subject (not everybody is an expert in Analog Electronics alright). But the paper setter seems to think as if we would have become an expert in 3 months of studying the subject, like it was the only subject that we had to study.

Ground Reality

I find it most ridiculous when you get a 15 marks question when all 'you know' AND/OR 'it can be written about' is of 5-7 marks. So, what options do we have? • Growing the limbs and redundant body parts of the answers which should have only got the mid-gut (read core).• Choosing larger font size (16 rather than normal 11 or 12). Also making use of cryptic fonts (think Webdings or Monotype Corsiva). • Making the text 'centered' rather than 'justified' (leaving margins on both sides of sheet.) • Leaving a blank line after every 3 lines or so of text, on the pretext of making the answer seem legible and neat.

Size Does Matter

And teachers also seem to go for the length rather than the content of the answer. 

"You see, he has written 7" answer so he gets 8 marks while your answer is just 6.25" inch, I still gave you 6 marks, what else do you want?"

"You should have explained this also (even if it means going out of context). This is not enough for a 10 mark question (crap some more)"

Choices. Really?

I don't know which syllabus the paper setter follows, because you almost always get 10% or more of question paper 'out of syllabus'. What's hilarious is that those questions will be given as a choice. So, you exhaust all your choices in 'don't-know-from-where-the-MoFo-gave' questions. So, now all you are left with are the questions that are 'compulsory'. Hey, don't blame the paper setter, he/she gave you a 'choice'. It's you who didn't take it. The choices between questions is also horrible (See my this time's ACN paper to know what I mean).

And what's more ridiculous

...is the way the question paper is set. Instead of asking the question in a simple manner, they will twist it like Jigsaw Puzzle. There will be wrong or incomplete information provided in the question (shame for an end term question paper). The paper seems like has been made at the last moment, just like we prepare near the judgement day. So, whichever question is seen first is given without caring that it is actually going to be attempted by thousands of students in coming days and may be the deciding question for whether the student passes. Recently, a friend told me that his question paper contained significant number of questions from a single page of a book!

I know

...what I have written here is not 100% applicable for all the papers we get. I was quite impressed by the way last paper I gave was set. And University exam papers can't exactly be set like School Board exam papers, all scientifically prepared because they don't have that much resource or time. Also, some of what I have said might be the result of some bad exam experiences (lack of preparation, lack of intelligence, hard luck etc.). But what I have said is not entirely wrong. If you have ever faced University Semester style exams, you will agree with that.

PS: Now that I am all bossing around here like I know how to set the perfect paper, I wonder how I would have set the exam paper. Hmm.. Interesting! Well all I know is that I would have definitely experimented with different styles, like I do in blogging and life in general!

My Experiments with -Truth- Life (during exams)

Well 3 weeks ago I had my exam week. But hey, every student has exams. Whats so special about them? Well, exams days are special to me. Because during these days only, I don't know why, I do all kinds of experiments with my life, exams. Some of these experiments are pretty trivial like using black pen rather than usual blue ones, but some of them are so weird, I better not discuss them here. So, what all experiments did I perform during these exams? Lets see them:

Well, for all I know, the biggest time wasters for me are newspapers, Google reader, Gmail and Buzz. So, this time I decided to ditch them for the whole week (I repeat all four of them for the whole week ). Here are the results:

1. Newspaper: Well, ditching newspaper was actually the hardest thing to do of them. I have been reading newspaper since I have been reading. And I feel incomplete without going through them once in the day, no matter whether I have exams and a mile of syllabus to cover. Well, later I rue the fact that I spent I 90 mins on the newspaper, which could have proved to be golden if utilized for revision. This time also, I almost failed the experiment on the first day itself. Thankfully, I controlled myself and was able to successfully go without newspaper for the whole week. (And as luck would have it, I have been super-busy since, so haven't been reading newspaper regularly). 

Cheating: OK, I wasn't allowed to read the newspaper, but I can hear the news! So, spent 5-10 mins listening to news while having breakfast. 

2. Google Reader: Google Reader is the latest fad for me. Its almost rare that I go without having a look at the latest feeds any day. And if I don't control, I can go on spending hours reading blogs and bookmarking stuffs. But amazingly it turned out to be quite easy to ditch Reader for the week. (But had to lose on a lot of feeds for the week, as reading 1000+ feeds in one go was simply impossible later).

Cheating: I use Reader to follow the latest in the tech. Well, that can be done using newsletters too. Thank you Gmail!

3. Gmail: If my browser is open, most probably Gmail would be open in one of the tabs. Now, it wasn't practical to let go of Gmail for the whole week. So, I decided to have a look at mails only once in the whole day that too not for more than 15 mins. And well, though it wasn't easy I was able to do that.

Cheating: Well, I won't lie. I did fail in this experiment. On Thursday, I didn't study anything for exams. So, had a lot of time. As a result, did spend a lot of time inside Gmail. Lets not include Thursday into this experiment, OK!

4. Buzz: Another Google product that I use diligently and can spend a lot of time sharing stuffs here. I had tried to ditch Buzz for one week earlier also. And like last time I used Twitter only during the week. But unlike last time, I didn't turn off Buzz inside Gmail. As a result the no. of unread buzz post kept piling. It reached 14, but I resisted my desires to see what others were saying/discussing. Oh, how proud I feel.

Cheating: Actually on the first day itself, I tried to take a sneak peak into one of the Buzz post (just to find out the replier) delivered in the inbox (by right clicking). Couldn't actually see the content but the post got registered as read. Damn it. 

Well I stayed away from the above mentioned things to save some time to study. But wasted the saved time on other stuffs (why don't I fall short of reasons to waste time). But, what I got from performing these experiments is that, ' If I want, I can live without the above mentioned stuffs. They are not necessary for my survival '. Anyway, there were a few more experiments that I tried:

5. Programming: I tried to do/read about programming everyday (and you thought everything I write in my posts are just for namesake). Well, to tell the truth I could manage to do that on 5 days only. But the main aim was to get myself back on track as far as programming is concerned, which I think was accomplished to some extent.

6. Stationery will remain Stationary: Every exam week, I lose some of my stationery because of sharing it with my benchmate/neighbours, who blissfully take it with them after exams get over. This time I decided not to share anything, and to keep track of things in case I had to share. Curiously, I got to share stationery of my benchmate this time (kept mine under wraps, hehe)! But holy hell, I did lose my pencil this time too, not in the examination hall but at home. Damn it. So, as you can see none of the experiments was executed with 100% accuracy. But ask teachers, they will tell that 100% accuracy means you are cheating!