c# - ODP.NET Oracle.ManagedDataAccess causes ORA-12537 network session end of file -

We are well into our Indian summer and for teenagers this is a time to recuperate from the slogging drudgery of tuitions, coaching crammers, computer classes, board exams and college entrance tests. The summer job has not yet arrived in India. So, what does one do for "time-pass" in desi-land? My secret recipe for the enviably happy summer is to draw the curtains, turn on the cooler, sit in a comfortable old cane chair and begin to read. Feel your youth like a nimbus, and start to create a self. You don't inherit a self; you build it. One way to do it is to read the great books. Take a break at noon with lassi. Read some more after lunch and in the evenings treat your friends to dahi chaat and gossip-in part, about the books you are reading. For you never accept a text passively; you interrogate it. Smell the jasmine at night and go to sleep reading. There is no royal road to nirvana but only the many roads large and small, the innumerable curving paths, a thousand steps and turns leading to education. Begin with the Mahabharata, and feel the brute vitality of the air, the magnificence of chariots, wind, and fires; the raging battles, the plains charged with terrified warriors, the beasts unstrung and falling. Like the brilliant first scene in the Oscar-winning Gladiator, see the men flung facedown in the dust, the ravaged longing for home and family and the rituals of peace, as the two sets of cousins, bitter enemies descended from King Bharata, fall into rapt admiration of each other's nobility and beauty. It is an apocalyptic war poem, with an excruciating vividness, an obsessive observation of horror that causes almost disbelief. Since you are unlikely to read it in the original Sanskrit, look for R.K. Narayan's readable translation, and if that is not available try C.V. Narsimhan's version. Feast also on the great books of the West. Begin with Homer's Iliad and Odyssey in the Lattimore translation. Follow it up with the great tragedians--read Aeschylus' Oresteia, Sophocles' Oedipus and Antigone in the Grene translation and Euripides' Electra in the Vermeule translation. Then a bit of history-read Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War in Penguin classics. Finally, philosophy-read Plato's Symposium, Apology, and The Republic in the Hackett translation, and end with Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics in the elegant Ross translation. The magic of an American undergraduate education is that it breathes life into the humanistic classics. Whether your field is chemistry or engineering, you are required to read the great books and learn that life and literature are inseparable. With a good teacher like Edward Tayler at Columbia you learn to read as though your life depended on it, and you are carried along on the crest of excitement and high adventure of ideas that will resonate throughout your life. Indian students are not so lucky. Not only does our traditional insecurity for jobs push our youth early into careers, our silo-like curriculum does not permit cross fertilisation of disciplines. Now, I ask you honestly, Shri Murli Manohar Joshi, isn't this what our mandarins in the Ministry ought to be thinking about? Instead of dabbling in the dubious mysteries of astrology, let's make our students immeasurably richer by breathing life into the great books of the East and the West. To experience the romance of a liberal education, I recommend David Denby's Great Books: My Adventure with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World. In 1991, thirty years after graduating from Columbia University, Denby went back to college and sat with eighteen-year-olds and read the same books that they read. Not just the ancient classics above, but also modern ones. Together they read Goethe, Kant, Milton, Cervantes, Marx, Conrad, Woolf and others. Denby was certainly a most unlikely student: forty-eight years old, film critic of New York magazine, a husband and father, a settled man who was nevertheless unsettled in someway. Was it just knowledge he wanted? He had read many of the books before. Yet nothing in life seemed more important to him than reading these books and sitting in on those discussions. Denby's book is an account of his journey, sometimes perilous, sometimes serene, through the momentous ideas he consumed with such hunger in middle age. He took the two "great books" courses, devised earlier in the century at Columbia, which spread to the University of Chicago, and in the 1940s to other colleges in America. In India, the triumph of the IIT-IIM culture and our current mania for computers, is producing too many graduates with a tunnel vision. We are not producing leaders for tomorrow's challenges. Reading great books is one way to make it happen.