The Chronicles of a Happy Life

It was a hard paper. It was not a CAT paper. It was more like a tiger paper! I didn’t do very well. Noone who I know did very well. I suppose that makes things okay. Parents, friends, relatives have all been very sweet in asking how I did. They appear to be more anxious about how I feel right now than about the final outcome. It would suck to let all these people down. I know that some people must be anxious to know my scores. I’ve decided not to compute them for now. Not because I’m depressed or sth but for other reasons. Hope everybody understands.

It’s been a helluva ride. We’ve been together for ages now. I can’t even remember the first time we met. They’ve been very nice to me as I try to be to them. I’ve been late for our meetings once in a while and of late, I’ve been leaving before our time is up, but I hope they understand.

Of course, we’ve had our share of tiffs and misunderstandings but we always make up (sometimes their close relatives, ‘the results’ help, and sometimes they don’t). After all, I can’t do without them, can I?

They’ve been extra-nice to me since the past three and a half years. I guess they wanted to make up for that one big misunderstanding we had) Obviously, it’s all forgiven and forgotten now), or maybe it’s because of the greater numbers of ‘Best of Lucks’ that I get.

I just realized that tomorrow’s date will determine if we continue to see each other, in the near future. I, for one, would like to do so. Hope they do too.

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

Simply can’t manage to. I watched a lot of episodes of ‘Lost’ today. Really interesting stuff. Hats off to the people behind it for doing such a truly different show. For the past two hours I’ve been surfing the net - reading blogs mostly.

Here’s a nice link- saw it on Sanyam’s blog

The thing is.. I have a Linear Algebra exam tomorrow and I don’t feel like studying at all. It’s funny how one always discovers interesting things to do immediately before or doing the exams and is usually devoid of ideas when there is a lot of time at hand. Just one of the many little ironies of life. *sigh*

Yesterday, I was just wondering about the paucity of ‘completely useless, ridiculous, creative, spam mails’ to my batch yesterday, when ORB (I need time to think of some creative teasing name for him :D) decided to CTRL-X to the ocassion. The replies came quickly - as people, with the knowledge of ‘Philosophy of Human Desires’ fresh in their minds responded. Along with much leg-pulling of our batch topper Romeo, the idea of a Quake tourney was mooted. I hope it does go through.. I used to play a lot of Quake earlier. Then, I installed SP2 and it stopped working on my PC. Most people had anyway lost interest in it and moved on to CZ. In the first tourney, I didn’t even get through the first round.. I had only started playing then… But that only means that I can only improve this time :D