Avinash Meetoo

Teachers of RCC around 1989-1990

4 February 2018 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

I have just stumbled upon that photo in the Royal College Curepipe Friends group on Facebook.

What can I say? The photo brings back a lot of fond memories. Having spent eight years in the college, I had the pleasure to have a lot of them as teachers. Let me try to remember their names:

Miss Dupont (who really understood immature boys),
Miss Gopaul (Ruby or Castafiore pour les intimes),
Mrs Runghen (one day I will remit to her the tens of French essays due…),
Mrs Nabheebuccus (who I didn’t have as teacher but who, as you can easily imagine, we were all appreciative of…),
Mrs Jeewoolall (who did Social Studies with us),
Mrs Chunnoo (who was the mum of one of my classmates),
Mrs Girdhari/Fulena (who we all revered when we were Form I kids),
Mr Mungur (a very nice Economics teacher who I still meet from time to time),
Mr Subadhu (an excellent Chemistry teacher who knew how to deal with rebels),
Mr Boolaky (whom I liked a lot even though I don’t remember what subject he taught),
Mr Ng Wong Hing (an excellent Physics teacher who now is at the Ministry of Education),
Mr Law Pak Chung (who was my Biology teacher in Form V),
Mr Beeharry (Carlos pour les intimes who I am ’cause we are related),
Mr Ramsurrun (the very well known Hindi teacher — he saw very very little of me…),
Mr Harmon (the hood aka wood teacher),
Mr Amandine (the desperate music teacher who played guitar really well),
Mr Saverethiar (a very severe Maths teacher),
Mr Mawjee (an English teacher if my memory is right)
+
Mr Wan Hok Chee (a formidable Maths teacher who does not seem to appear in the photo)

And, of course, the rector and his deputy:

Mr Gopaul (who was instrumental into making us Royalistes. I distinctly remember him coming to our Form I class on admission day and telling us: “You are the future of the country”. From very early, we were groomed to (depending on the point of view) become spoiled brats or people with the capacity to contribute a lot for the development of Mauritius.)
Mr Rampadaruth (the enforcer of discipline except that, if I remember correctly, we all knew how to disappear when he got near. But I have to confess that he managed to get me twice: (1) when I was in Form II, I left school on the sports day to go and play Pac Man. A friend, Henri, told him and he came to fetch me. I got a Saturday arrest. (2) In Form IV, I showed Hansley how to break the legs of a table to fabricate a drum kit. For some reason, he gave both of us an arrest for “damaging school property”.)

I wonder whether it would be possible to organise something where we could all meet again. Maybe for the next Old Royals meeting?

Merry Christmas to all of you

25 December 2017 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

Today is the 25th of December 2017 and Christina, Anya, Kyan and myself wish you all a Merry Christmas.

Interestingly, do you know that Father Christmas originally wore green and, in fact, appeared to announce the coming of spring? This would imply that he came around March every year. But he became red when Coca-Cola decided that it would be good to have Father Christmas on an advert for them and that he should wear red instead of green. That’s a pity because well, I believe, green looks much better than the overwhelming red… As you can see below, Google agrees:

A second thing I would like to mention is that I hope you all got the gifts you asked for but only if you asked reasonably. According to statistics, most Mauritian households have massive debts and it would be a pity if, for the sake of having the flashiest phone or the flashiest car, people keep on taking more and more debts. I wonder what percentage of the population has a positive net worth in Mauritius? That’s a study which needs to be made because I was reading an article the other day about the fact that, the less net worth you have, the more stressed you are.

A lot of studies show that, generally, those who have positive net worths, i.e. the millionaires, are not flashy at all. They don’t drive the latest BMW or have the latest iPhone. Real millionaires are frugal. Heck, that’s why they are millionaires. This would imply that those around us who like to show off are, as a matter of fact, poor.

Merry Christmas!

How to reduce the amount of disk space used by the systemd journal

6 October 2017 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

We, Linux people, generally use systemd now and one of its components is the journal controlled by the journalctl command line tool.

As explained on the Arch wiki,

systemd has its own logging system called the journal. The /var/log/journal/directory is a part of the systemd package and the journal will write to /var/log/journal/

The journal is always appended and therefore grows in size. On my laptop, the journal was taking 1.8Gb of space and was full of details which, I believe, I’ll never need. So I decided to clear all old contents (which the systemd people call a vacuum). I issued:

journalctl --disk-usage
journalctl --vacuum-size=64M
journalctl --disk-usage

And the journal immediately became smaller. I then issued a

journalctl --verify

which made me realise that some of the remaining journal files were corrupted (for some reason). There is no journal repair tool in systemd so I simply removed the offending files (with rm).

Now, I can easily check my journal entries for today and I know everything will be all fine:

journalctl --since today