The Chronicles of a Happy Life

The killer schedule… the sub-5 hour sleep cycles facchas (as PGP first yearites are called) have… the super-duper ‘junta’ that studies here.. the godliness of the profs that teach here… Will write more when there’s LAN in the room. Btw, my cell number has changed - it’s 93 7500 9001.

Things don't always go your way. Things don't always turn out the way you expected them to. Sometimes well laid plans are destroyed. Sometimes you are unlucky. At these times, the experiences are tough and even sad. However, one must realise that failure is a much better teacher than success. Actually, I firmly believe that everything that does not kill me, only makes me stronger.

Can memorable experiences be sad?
I think so.

Sorry Rama, but will write in more detail only when I have more time.

All of us have constraints - strong boundaries in our heads separating things we can and cannot do; things we can tolerate, and things which we cannot. Some of us can't eat meat, some can't not eat meat! Some people die in battle while others find the idea of giving up their lives for a mere idea ridiculous. In most (all?) cases there is no logic to these constraints - they just are. Sometimes I think that one should strive to remove each of one's constraints so that the function of happiness (or any other function for that matter) can be further optimized (as any student of linear programming and even anybody else with some common sense will reason). At other times, I wonder that if these are part of what make us unique and special; does it make sense to sacrifice them?

Rama (not Lord Rama, my friend Rama/d0d0/mythalez) once observed that people like us usually blog only when they have lots of work to do. I think I blog only when the work I have lies between a narrow zone between minimum work levels and maximum work levels. Too little work and there is just no motivation to blog. Too much work, and there is just no time to blog. Having or not having stuff to blog about is completely irrelevant.

Thanks to Dr. Kamal (my fyp guide), my work-level is now in this 'divine-blog-zone'. I'm in Hyderabad now working on the fyp. A long time ago, somebody I know drew a graph of the high and low points of my career uptill then. The high peaks were 'getting As in tough comp sci subjects' (hey, this was his judgement, not mine) and the lowest point was that moment when I was writing php scripts to fetch and display data from a database. Right now is a fine Sunday morning, a few days before I join the best management institute on the planet (I'm sure that every single one of my future classmates is having the time of his/her life right now) and I'm working on making the design documents for my software, which serve absolutely no purpose but still have to be made for bureaucratic reasons. So, people, if in the future, I ever groan about how pathetic my work is, feel free to remind me of this lowest point :(

Things people expect me to blog about:

1. I converted all my 6 IIM calls. I'm joining A because: (i) My Dad graduated from that very institute 26 years ago. (ii) It has the biggest brand according to most popular literature (India Today/ Businessworld) on the subject (iii) There is really no correct way to rank A, B or C (junta interested in advantages and disadavantages of each can refer to pagalguy) which make reasons (i) and (ii) enough to justify my decision.
2. A lot of my friends are gone. I miss them a lot.
3. This was my longest summer vacation in three years, but I feel sad that I spent too little time in Mumbai. On the brighter side, I felt great after meeting lots of friends after many years. Way too many of them are going to the US :( God knows when we'll meet again.

Things I wanted to blog about but then didn't:

1. Catch-22, the best book I've ever read in my entire life - I wish I had read it before this guy.
2. How people change! I met this old-school-friend who I remembered as the least hard-working person on the planet. And today, he works 14 hours a day, 6 days a week, _standing_, as a worker in a small manufacturing company. On Sundays, he works at his Dad's company learning the business from him. His dad will let him take over the family business only after he knows everything about it from top to bottom.
3. Several random deep observations about life - Nature designed a very buggy data storage and retrieval system :(
4. Bitch about how there is no blogger-like plugin so that I can directly post to wordpress from Microsoft Word.
5. On wriitng - TheSophist already put it better than I could ever have - "Writing's like penance - a very introverted activity, cleansing, cathartic, embracing lucidity. Honoring images with words can be fullfilling; it can also be frustrating if the translation isn't faithful, and the contrast between the picture in one's head and the one painted by one's words is there for one's sensibilities to wince at. But I suppose it is enough in most instances that the picture is remembered."