The Chronicles of a Happy Life

..when as soon as he wants to blog about something, he discovers that somebody else has already blogged about it. I wanted to write posts about Soft skills, the pre-placement talks and bitch about the placement date and each time, Khurana got there before me.

Then, I thought that I’ll write a general post about life in general - a post titled ‘stuff‘ or one titled ‘things that make my day‘… Nah! no can do - the links work, don’t they? Sid beat me to the punch both times.

I discovered that I can’t even talk about the weather and still feel original!

I could write about the book that I’m reading. But, Selective Memory by Shobha De is something so indescribable (given the constraints of space and time) that I don’t even want to attempt it. All I can say is that she really seems like a person that I would like to have know personally.

Now, you are probably thinking that I should write a post about not finding the time to write a decent post with the pressures of CAT, FYP and placement prep. At least that will be original, you smugly suggest. Nope, no-can-do. CoolCat (I don’t like the name that she calls herself nowadays) already did that.

Oh and before you suggest me to write a post about being confused about the future, check out Ranjith’s blog.

I give up. So that’s all for now and guys (again as Rao has already said) gl and hf for the placements and CAT.

Special thanks to Nappy, Mr. Appaji, Indian Post and IIMB PGP Admissions Office. Thanks are also due to all the people who told me not to worry and kept me from gnawing my own brain off!

It was a very boring afternoon - made even more so by a Bioinformatics lecture. Since, the prof insisted that we not fall asleep (it just had to be in the ONE subject that sem in which I felt sleepy!) and that we keep noting stuff in our notebooks, the following was inevitable:

What a Greek tragedy!
Dedicated professors have we,
Even in subjects useless.
Where is the justice?

Who cares about bio-functionality?
Or a protein structure contortion.
Dense stuff about phi and psi,
Why is biochemistry the new fashion?

Helplessly we wait for 5400 seconds to tick.
While Mani SMSes to his chick,
Only IPV2 can read this limerick.
Visram is the only one who is not sick!

All along I sit and think,
about back then, when life was pink.
When we thought only about the here and now,
and biology was about the jasmine and the cow!

Back then, CAT was something which mewed.
IT Was only a pronoun we used.
Girls and women were not a big deal,
And we didn’t have to worry about a good meal.

The cheer from the heart was repeated oft,
We had only just heard of Microsoft.
Now some friends there are already placed
One of them even got his head shaved

I do have something to cheer me up,
After all, Aakash did win the cultural cup. (no it didn’t, sadly the poem was written before the revelation!)
Now my thoughts turn to love,
And dear God in the heaven’s above.

They drift to the campus election
And the process of natural selection
And you wonder how I write this
As I am already in sound sleep’s bliss.

Extract from ‘Airplane’ by Michael Crichton:

Driving in the van, Richman gave a long exhale. “Jeez,” he said. “Are they always so friendly?”
Casey shrugged. “They’re engineers,” she said. She was thinking, What did he expect? He must have dealt with engineers at GM. “Emotionally, they’re all thirteen years old, stuck at the age just before boys stop playing with toys, because they’ve discovered girls. They’re all still playing with toys. They have poor social skills, dress badly-but they’re extremely intelligent and well trained, and they are very arrogant in their way. Outsiders are definitely not allowed to play.”
“Especially lawyers …”
“Anybody. They’re like chess masters. They don’t waste time with amateurs.

Midsems. Royally screwed them. I had just two exams this time - VLSI Algorithms and Linear Algebra so there was not even a lot to study. I’ve simply lost even the slightest inclination to study for exams. I guess this is what happens when you’ve spent enough time interning in companies. Not fifteen minutes would pass after I pick up a book, and a little voice in my head would whisper, “What’s the point?!”, “marks don’t mean anything anyway”, “you’ve got by before with lesser preparation. Why be tense? After all, this is your fourth year” and so on, destroying any chances of me studying for the next half an hour. I actually read the ebooks - ‘Andromeda Strain’ and ‘Disclosure’ by Michael Crichton during the exams! And I watched innumerable music videos, a couple of documentaries and even chatted more in the three days than I had in the whole of last week.

FYP. met the people from CDAC. In the beginning all we had to do was to build the General Ledger module. Now, we find out that we need to build up the entire accounting system and even generate invoices and bills for the purchases and sales people. What the hell are the purchases and sales modules of the project for then? Luckily, we do have an open-source software (Lazy8Ledger) that we can customize for our use - but this is no easy task. In the past two weeks, we’ve been cracking our heads to even come up with the development environment for it. You see, the software we are modifying is actually not a stand-alone software but a plugin for jedit. And the jedit code is agnostic of any plugins present. So we don’t even know how to load both the codebases together in an IDE to enable us to set breakpoints at the correct locations.

My CAT application got rejected. It was an otherwise ordinary evening when I got an im from Nappy with the weblink to check the status of my CAT application. Check I did and it said that my application had been rejected since my photo was not affixed correctly. “This is insane”, I thought. I was positive that I had affixed the photo. Then I thought that it must be some kind of joke, though I knew it was highly unlikely, as Nappy wouldn’t joke about something like this. I went to their website directly, and dug out the link on my own. It was genuine. My application had indeed been rejected. Luckily, all was not lost. I could still submit a recitification form and attested copy of photo-id by the 7th and fix the problem. Then began the hunt for gazetted officers, or more precisely, batchmates who are children are gazetted officers. Found Riyaaz who assured me that his Dad could attest it for me. I also found that all university professors are qualified to attest things like these. The next morning, I rushed to the academic office. Mr. Appaji was really, really helpful. He got me a bonafide certificate with photo-attestation in one hour! We must have the most helpful administration in the whole world. Sprinted to the gachibowli post office where I speed-posted it. All of this was on the 4th of October. Meanwhile, I had also communicated with the IIMB admissions office (they answer emails very promptly and are also very helpful). Yesterday night, I emailed them asking if they had received my post and whether all things were in order. Today morning I got a reply saying that they hadn’t. In a state of panic, I rushed down to call them up. The man on the phone was patient with me. He asked me to hold while they checked to see if my post had been received. The answer was no. I was scared to death. I asked him if I should go over there to fix the problem. He excitedly interrupted me to tell me that my post had just reached them - that very minute! Yalk about luck! I asked him if all the documents were ok, but he said that he could not answer that now but that it most probably will. I’ll be able to rest easy only when I get my admit card. May God help me.

A friend of mine broke up. And her ex-boyfriend is also my friend. So now, I’m forced to sit and listen to both of them bitch about each other to me and I’m even forced to take sides. And it’s all about something so silly, that it gives me a headache. God save me from these lovers!

Winning - A title like that, with Jack Welch as the author and testimonials by the world’s two richest men on the front and the back; makes me wonder if they had just me in mind when they wrote the book! I’m a huge fan of Jack’s optimistic, no-nonsense, get-it-done mindset and the book is extremely well-written. There’s even a chapter titled - ‘Work-Life Balance: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Having It All (But Were Afraid to Hear)’ - a topic that’s conspicuously absent from most other biz books. And it’s not just about abstract business theories that are useful only for CEOs, one-fourth of the book is just for people like us - who are just starting out on their career. Oh! this was entirely a good thing. Nothing fucked up about it :D

I got the link in a yahoo im fwd. Apparently, my ‘personal day of death’ is Sunday, October 31, 2077 and that I have 2,274,437,393 seconds to live. I felt happy - a strange mix of the feeling one gets on totalling some really high scores on a CAT paper, and the feeling one gets on suddenly finding out that a deadline has been postponed and that there’s plenty of time.