Reflections on a lazy weekend..

It has been two weeks now. Since that night I boarded my first international flight with a medley of feelings- apprehension, excitement and of course missing family and friends- on going to a strange place to take up a role in an area where I had little expertise. Hong Kong is not really that far from India and my communication channels with near and dear ones are still intact, thanks to the fact that I live in 2012. But with me being yet another normal human being- a creature of habit- any change in my life is generally not met with a warm welcome.

The travel was smooth; the accommodation, though small (as every place in HK is), is comfortable enough. The only problem I faced (and still face, to an extent) was with the most primal means of survival- food. In a place where chicken is considered vegetarian food, we had to go around explaining that what we wanted was something with "No meat; No chicken; No Pork; No beef; No egg". In most places we were met with weird looks from the hotel waiters. One particular guy, who was totally shocked, shook his head vigorously thinking of how such homo sapiens could exist in the same place that he inhabited.

Hong Kong is cleaner, more regulated and definitely more automated than India is. It is a pleasure to travel to anywhere here. I do not see India even nearing this place's standards in the above criteria any time in the next decade. But, are all those needed for India? There is some fun and excitement in life back there. Uncertainty over public transport, unruly traffic and people who always think of ways to surpass rules- don't these make living in India exciting and lively, using one's senses all the time, being alert and in short, being human and not a robot?! 

Any day, I'd prefer living in my dirty and non-automated India eating dosa, sambhar and vada instead of a pack of microwave-heated bread that was purchased after carefully reading the ingredients.

Hong Kong is very good as a holiday destination- not as a place for everyday living. 

But, a bit ironical as this may be with what I have written above, it is living in Hong Kong that has taught me some basic daily household chores! Whether my knowledge of financial markets has increased or not, my ability to cook my own rice and wash my own clothes has been honed really well :) Looking forward to 7 more weeks of this different way of living!

    

A Fortnight later!

The fervent packing, the farewell, the train journey, the visits to all relatives and finally, the ride to my home for the next two years! It has been two weeks since I spent my first night here in this cozy room (I am one of the lucky few who got the new block rooms at the hostel here) but everything that happened since then seems to be one crazy blur in my memory, with no sense of date or time. 

The Orientation week had me freaking out (Ah! Proof that I am a normal human being!) and wondering why I even thought of CAT in the first place. What seemed to be endless hours of torturous sleep deprivation, now seems fun! The "official" team activities were both enjoyable and enriching!

The next week was a faster whirl of cherished memories. The classes - some good, some globe - end here at mid-day. Aarambh 2011's drama practice, general body meetings and activities extending well into the next day had us well-occupied. There was a point when, walking alone amidst the trees at 3 a.m., not unlike a zombie, I wondered what had ever happened to that kid Shilpa who was afraid of ghosts in the dark!! 

Aarambh happened yesterday and was a runaway success with our skit being very well appreciated! :) The Exhilaration was fantastic after all the group effort! 

As I gear myself up to face the tsunami of Assignments, tutorials and quizzes, amidst other stuff here, I shall do whatever is within my capacity to visit this space with updates on life @ IIMB or some of my insights which shall truthfully obey Sturgeon's Law!

An Insomniac's Rant

I may not know the Theory of Relativity perfectly. But, definitely, Time is Relative! 

One week before an interview seems so short a span, while the same week before a result seems endless.

The Sine Curve called Life

Life is such an amazing thing! It has put me through a vast gamut of emotions in the past one week.

The week last started with a visit to the lab where we do our project, with the least of hopes, for we had been going in circles, trying to resolve a recurring and seemingly incorrigible error. We had no hopes of wrapping up the project and were sad that we may have to disappoint the most wonderful project guide one may get. But wonder of wonders! A slight change to enhance the compatibility between certain sampling rates and there we were with our almost accurately working code. We later learnt that a 100% accuracy can never be obtained in practice! :D 

Then came the trip to Delhi. I was a little tensed and the usual thrill of visiting a city for the first time was somewhat missing. The vast Delhi University campus left me in total awe! The Group Discussion and Extempore (where I was lucky to speak on Hogwarts!!) processes went decently well. The Interview's gruelling last part left me apprehensive and I returned, with no big hopes. 

On return, a news of a certain unjust occurrence reached my ears. Though I knew the right way to handle it, I was also aware that I was not mature enough to accept injustice with nonchalance. The declaration of the final admit list of a B school (whose written test I had failed to clear by a whisker) added to my woes and I felt that I was at the very rock bottom, then. No words of consolation or advices of "ignore-it-it-doesn't-matter" could penetrate my thick skull. 

The next day dawned and I was sure that the soon-to-be-declared results of my Delhi trip would be negative. After all, I had run out of luck long back, in my opinion. But I was ready to face anything. Talking to a respectable person who gave me neither consolation nor advice but just hard facts from her life, made me bold enough. 

The dreaded results came in due time. Opening the pdf, I found the names of some famous Puys and felt happy for them. Suddenly, just beneath the name of one of the most respected people in Pagalguy, I found my name and roll number!! I couldn't believe it. I reopened and refreshed the pdf some ten times and took out my admit card to verify my roll no.

I am getting to do an MBA this year!!!  

Well, the sine curve of life has started moving upwards for me. I am well aware of the fact that it will start falling again, sooner or later, but I am prepared for it :)          

The Case of The Missing Blogger

'The Social Network' won Three Oscars today. But its real victory has been on a much larger scale, over this very Blogosphere. 

I joined Facebook around the end of May 2010, basically to get in touch with my old schoolmates and relatives who live far away. But it turned out to be nothing but a pointless chat platform, with most of the people commenting on your statuses and photos being the ones you actually interact with daily! 

The popularity of these social networking sites is mainly attributed to the human mindset. We tend to get bored, looking at long pages of text which will require more time than what our average attention span lasts for. A mere :) or :( on your wall will attract a good number of likes and appropriate comments (albeit in inappropriate cool or rather kewl lingo). 

Sharing photos of everything from your latest lunch with friends in a nearby hotel to a random bee on a flower in your garden, eagerly pressing the F5 button for comments and likes and visiting friends' profiles for updates- can easily be a very popular pastime today. 

Facebook also has other apps. Farmville and Mafia Wars provide gaming attractions while you can create/like any number of pages, describing anything from a popular personality to an institution at the corner of your street. 

Sharing videos, writing notes (by far, the closest to blogs) and getting to send your friends virtual gifts on their birthdays and anniversaries.. Mark Zuckerberg has created (even if not conceptualized) a revolution of sorts in the human interest domain.

Each creation has an equal and opposite destruction. The victim of the latter is the free flow of thought that leads to enjoyable prose in blogs. My blog has been a victim, yes. And I have been distracted and diverted by fb. 

Still, thanking the rusted iron gates of my mind for not being permeable to Twitter usage and subscription to further social networking sites, I shall end on a hopeful note that I shall be back on Blogger sooner rather than later ;)  

Joblessness- Or is it?

The romance with this began two years ago..

As we tried (in vain) to fool the rickety kits in the Communication Engineering Lab into functioning agreeably, I used to throw jealous glances at those super-seniors seated in the Impact Lab, with not a single care in the world- yes, no observations/records,no classes, no assignments and absolutely no written tests! "Wow!! What won't I give to be in their shoes now.." used to play at the back of my mind every now and then.

Come sixth semester, and there was a fresh batch of insouciant seniors out there in the Impact lab! By then, I had made up my mind- No Internship! This kind of joblessness needs to be experienced before I plunge deep into the corporate world, not to resurface for a good forty years or so. 

And Now.... I sit in the same Impact Lab, not knowing what to do, chit-chatting, shuttling between TestFunda and PagalGuy, checking mails every fifteen minutes and of course discussing means to bypass the attendance system. Work on the Project shall resume in due course of time, but as of now, it's just time to chill out and actually sort out those things I've always wanted to do, but never did, citing a lame lack-of-time as reason. These six months, I hope, shall see me learning a few life-lessons (for instance, a life-sustaining skill such as cooking!) and working towards the realization of some long-cherished dreams..        

So Long!

Consistency.. Competition.. Confusion.. Apprehension.. Accuracy.. Inspiration.. Disappointment.. Surprise..

Well I am in my own muddled world... Shall be off this space for sometime while I hope to......

In Muse Mode...

As I read Jan's text on friendship day, realization suddenly dawned on me. This is the last chance for most of us to celebrate the first Sunday of August, as students!
I take a trip down the memory lane, though the heavy Forouzan textbook on my lap suggests a different form of activity for now.

I do not remember when exactly we started celebrating Friendship Day. I never knew its purpose and did not care enough to find out. It just meant fun, pure and absolute, in our good old school days. Running around on the First Monday of August, a scissor in one hand and a roll of "Friendship Band" in another hand, we used to tie the cut out pieces of the band around the hand of anyone we even remotely knew. There was a lot of competition on who got the maximum number of bands on her hand. Some even had bands extending upto their elbows on both hands! Cycling back from school, I remember trying to show off my hand and seeing how many people noticed the "Status Symbol" of any middle/high school kid.
Those days of innocence were gone soon enough and there occured two phenomena in my life- College and Cell Phone. Text messages on the value of friendship became substitutes for the affectionate and eager fingers that tied the colourful bands around my hands. Tying bands in college was "childish" and never practised. We had once contemplated tying Rakhis to all guys in the class ;) but Friendship bands were obsolete!
I feel sad as I respond in the negative to the messages from my school friends asking if I'd attend the Alumni meet scheduled for tomorrow. Though I had been looking forward to this meet for months, it must be postponed now. Whether or not I shall succeed in the endeavour I plan to pursue instead of attending the meet, No One Knows! Hoping for the Best!
Shall update this space on my Cisco-adventure, even if it becomes a misadventure, resulting in my having lunch at home on Monday with alternate plans buzzing around my head...

Did You Know that...

1. There are 10 sequential steps to be followed in overtaking a vehicle on the road?
2. There are 3 types of Parking?
3. You must check 6 parts within the bonnet of the car before driving away in it each morning?
4. The minimum distance between your vehicle and the one in front must differ with the speed as follows:

one car's length at 15 kmph
two cars' length at 30 kmph
three cars' length at 45 kmph
..........and so on?????

Well there are more such rules. But in a country like ours, these are useless, at least until a mammoth revolution takes place, changing the way we think, act and yes, DRIVE. Till then, these rules (especially the last one which is the most unfeasible, IMO ;) ) shall find their uses only in putting pitiable 20 yr-olds to sleep, when they take the effort of waking early during a vacation and in consuming a few minutes of your precious time spent in reading this post ;)

It's fun :)

Thanks to John who re-introduced me to this world of indomitable Gauls. Reading their adventures, untiringly even at this hour, brings a smile to my lips and a freshness to my mind which has nothing to look forward to but the bleak prospect of having to start the "come to college at 9.30 sharp. Hall will be informed later" regimen again.

Life is So!

Faster than the Fastest,
The Winged Being-
So very existent,
Yet so intangible-
Flying by, brings
a rush-
Leading to Melancholy.

Why so fast?
Why so late?
Seemingly contradictory-
Yet so meaningful.
A part of life-
Painful, yet inevitable.

The Third Entity!

The most unique person I have met so far in life:

• The one who works hard to ensure good jobs for his juniors ( well, the reciprocal sincerity of the juniors in that aspect cannot be discussed by me of all people!).
• The one who can brave a bruise on one arm and a painful swelling in another, yet sleep for just about half an hour in a whole night to set tech questions which he rates "sub-standard" (and which the juniors are to be found gaping and gawking at, the following evening).
  
• An extremely sensitive person who takes care to see to that no one gets hurt, even in the remotest sense.
• The one who is Shy^(infinity).
• The one who is deeply religious.
• The Genius beyond excellence in OS, who actually achieved the near-impossible feat of knocking some OS concepts into a mind that is as dumb and closed towards that subject as mine.
• The Master of languages- French, German, English, Tamil, Malayalam and many more to come...
• The one who has not, in his almost 4 years of college life, eaten anywhere outside the hostel mess! Yes you read that right and it's not the other way (the pretty common one) around.
• The sincerest guy who calls himself Lazy and hence undeserving of lavish food! (well would you call a Puff/Roll in R.V. or N.M.B. or even a ten-percent-cooked chapathi in the college canteen lavish??)
• The one who doesn't eat chocolates because the cocoa mostly comes from slave-employing plantations. (well the reason is pretty good and humanitarian, but not many 20-year olds think of anything other than the wonderful taste when the choc is inside the mouth!)

Well, despite the fact that the similarities between me and the above described person are akin to those found between a gorilla and a polar bear, we have gelled well and I am extremely happy to introduce my Dearest Brother through this post!
99 percent of the readers of my bore of a blog know whom I have been talking about.

Truer words couldn't have been spoken by his tutor: "There are three entities in ECE- G1, G2 and Amalan!"

Grumbling, Complaining, Cursing...call it whatever!

Load Shedding duration increased to 3 hours per day! Insufficient funds to obtain the required amount of electric power!
Why can't they cut down on the extravaganza allowances while some high profile politician visits the city? Is it needed to put up tens of thousands' worth of hoardings calling out- "Thalapathiye" "Idhaya Dheivamey" "thunai MUDHALVAREY" etc. each time the person described visits (the frequency of which has now become nearly once in 15 days due to the Tamil Conference) ?? And why on earth should the city resemble a brightly-lit and ostentatiously decorated Christmas Tree when the Chief Minister visits, while the poor tax-payers there swelter in the summer day's heat without electricity for fans and earnest students preparing for exams are deprived of lights during the night?
Oh the Weird Ways of the Wicked World!!

Inching towards the end of the Golden Period...

It was during a recent EVS class that this thought first hit me hard. The class was having fun, as usual, with Mr. SRK having given us the free rein he usually gives. "All this won't last long", told something within me. A few days later, someone casually said, "I'm scared to think of the future". Scared- an adjective I never use for myself - (well unless a lizard in considerable proximity glares at me menacingly) - seemed like it would describe my situation then too.
Inadvertently, the thoughts of "Where would I really be in another year?" started to gain a deeper perspective in my idling mind, to the extent that I had some kind of a gloomy dream even as I slept in a crowded bus on the way home one day and woke up feeling unnecessarily miserable.
Job or MBA- either way, will add a definite fullstop to the childish days and child-like ways. I will be expected to be a professional. My jumpy walk has to sober. My loud laughter has to tone down. No more pranks like tying up the duppattas of two girls sitting in front of you. Oh my!! And no freedom to doze off as per will like in class :-/
Why am I writing this now? Isn't it premature by a year?? Still, the serious placement preparations (by people around me of course) and the get-serious-about-CAT pep-talks I listen to, appear to have taken that element of carefree attitude away from me.
School was Heaven. Bliss. Then came college. It doesn't qualify as being even 10 percent as much great but I did enjoy a few precious moments in these three years. To think that the future will be even less entertaining is inexplicably sad.
Childhood- Adoloscence- the times of fun and frolic are slipping through my fingers and a future full of responsibilty (and unfinished Quant Books :-P) is beckoning...

P.S: Though I may think like a philosopher during post-lunch EVS classes and pre-lunch OS classes to fill up the blog-spaces like above, I am not yet ready to give up my childhood! A full year remains :)
Make Hay while the Sun Shines (or in my friend's words- "We have just reached the intermission. Sit back and enjoy the rest of the movie to the max!") :)

The People I Loathe on the Road

This is a post that has been in my mind for quite a long time. I was reminded of it just as I was driving this evening.

1. The first kind poses a potential risk to every two-wheeler rider (more importantly to one sans a helmet) who has to stop at traffic signals next to buses. The poor rider can anytime become the target of an inadvertent game of Hit-the-Spitoon by the passengers in the six-wheeler.
   
2. This is a more dangerous lot. The Murderers, I would call them. "If you want to kill yourself filling your lungs with nicotine, then go do it alone. Why try to kill us too?" is what I feel like shouting at them, especially in public places like Bus Stops. There have been many instances when I've woken up bright and left for college with a fresh mind, to only end up holding my breath or taking in the foul smell in the Bus stop early in the morning. Implementation of the 'Ban on Smoking in Public Places'? My foot.
   
3. This lot, resembles the previous one in its proposed threats. But the people here mostly do not harm themselves more than the riders behind them. Yes, these are the people who don't bother with the emission control norms for two-wheelers. I wouldn't have mentioned them had I not been afflicted with cough for over a month after an instance of having to wait at a signal just behind a dragon in a motorbike's form for about 100 seconds. The most irritating part came when the guy driving the contraption turned and gave a meek grin at all of us, the sufferers behind. Since then, I have conscientiously started checking my own scooter's emission (though Appa leaves no room for doubt there, normally).
   

So there we go! If I find more kind of people to hate, I shall update this list.

CONFUSED!

Seriousness flew out of my life exactly three years back. After I wrote the last digit on the Math Paper in the XII board, life has been a joy-ride for me. Going uphill, having fun, most of the time. Small valleys during semesters (that don't require any fervent preparation) and during internals (that always have the lovely best two out of three policy).
But the dreaded hour has arrived now. Fear and apprehension are undergoing an inflationary phase, fuelled by the release of CAT'09 results. Freshers are allegedly not many in number in the selected list. The tests were not fair (too many reasons which are already quite well-known. Will blog on them if I find time). And now the selection criteria have come under criticism. Today I heard a shattering news that a 99.6 percentiler (a fresher) has not got any call so far!
Where will everything lead to??!! What is going to be my position in a year's time??

Philosophy

Thank the jobless troublemakers. They are giving you a sample experience of how tough a woman's life as a leader would be.

B'day Fun in I Block..

Ups and Downs

Almost a year.. Few improvements, remarkable regressions and mostly the constant state of ignorance (which is bliss only as long as you are ignorant of the ignorance itself).

The fog has cleared!

All other options have been positively ruled out. Belling the CAT will be my first and foremost goal.

While I had realized that I am no scientist-material after attending a workshop on Research last weekend, a sudden clarity of thought came about two days ago in a post-lunch DSP class and that was when it dawned upon me that I had fallen for a managing-related career somewhere along the tumultuous path of frustrating indecision that I had been traversing, for the past several months. Now that I see the light at the end of the tunnel, I must make out my path (which by the way is pretty tortuous and not as straight as it seems) to reach it, overcoming distracting obstacles and learning (by practice) the art of multi-tasking.