The Chronicles of a Happy Life

1) Went on a fundoo batch trip. Thanks to Pranav, Rama (no, I don’t blame you for all those delays), Ravishankar and others for organizing this.

2) Gave a party to some juniors.

3) Got a party from juniors – Alankar (I don’t call him any other name :|), Grawl, Mangla, Jaiswal, Maachis – thank you for showing that Escape could be recreated in IIIT(just realized that you could probably ask your juniors to have music when your time comes to make it even better)

4) The official farewell function got over a few days ago.

5) Got in touch with quite a few friends through orkut.

6) Wrote testimonials for a lot of people in the yearbook that Shiben put up. Writing stuff about somebody can be either very hard or very easy and this is sometimes irrespective of whether you hang out with that person a lot or not. If there is one piece of uncertain advice that I can give my juniors, it would be that you better start filling the yearbook way ahead of time.

7) A lot of people wrote testimonials for me and I was like - ‘Awwww’ - with a stupid goofy smile when I read each and every one of them. Oh! The pure bliss of narcissism :D

8) Was coerced into agreeing that Neal and Nikki is a bad movie. My defense that it was a sweet story about a girl who’s a control freak and that it showed how the ‘greater independence’ and ‘liberal mindset’ of modern times was actually making things more difficult instead of easier was brutally hushed :(. ;)

9) After watching this, I’m having second thoughts about my dream career ;)

10) Finished a century of blog posts.

P.S. Khurana, thanks for the links :D

This year’s Holi was the best ever. 27 of us friends celebrated at Pragati Resorts (a mini water park thing). There were slides, good music and a rain disco. I had the maximum fun playing HB (secret game ;)) and water polo cum rugby. Thanks to IIITian ingenuity - research with a difference ;) we were able to avoid paying Rs. 175 for the buffet and had a picnic lunch with our own snacks. The bus ride was also awesome fun with some innovative (see, we do it all the time) games like ‘Company dance’ (we had to dance in alphabetical order of the companies that had selected us and so the Adobe dance was first :D) and general leg-pulling. We then went to the Chilkur Balaji temple. It’s said that this god specializes in granting wishes. The procedure is to do eleven revolutions of the temple when the request is made and to come back and do 108 revolutions when the wish is fulfilled. I like the concept. This forces one to make SMART (specific, meaurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound) goals and this requires one to make a total of 119 revolutions to make the goal come true, it makes sure that one is dedicated to that goal too. Thanks to Arpit, Abhay and of course, Rumeet for organizing the whole thing. A friendly ‘Fuck you’ to Smiley Singh for this.

Boot Camp @ Nagarjuna Sagar
CL arranged a trip for all its PDP (Personality Development Programme - basically, GD/PI prep) students with IIM calls to Nagarjuna Sagar. The resort, Punnami resorts was simply amazing. The AC/TV equipped rooms were simply amazing and a pleasant surprise (I’d been expecting a poorly-lighted dorm!). I knew that such royal treatment would be routine after an IIM education - but before?!

We had a lot of fun and also learnt a lot. They showed us a video about IIMA (the video was meant for recruiters) - and one dialogue stuck in my mind - “Students from IIMA are expected to behave in no different a manner than people from royal families. They are supposed to take initiative, aim high and achieve their goals and there’s no stopping them.” I’m really inspired.

Felicity
Won third prize in IT quiz. I was overjoyed as Satvik’s team came fourth >:-). There’s nothing I like better than defeating a worthy adversary :-D

Also, won third prize in BizUnderstanding. I was heartbroken as there’s nothing worse than doing badly at something that you thought you were good at :-(

Mr and Miss Felicity was good. I esp liked the ‘bad dog, mad dog’ song. Contrary to some people, I really think Himanshu Agarwal deserved to win. I agree that all the answers in the ‘question round’ were ‘world peace’ answers but his answers were simply better.

The best browser
Using opera is so cool. It’s quick to open. There’s the easiest possible shortcut for increasing the text-size (+) and there’s even one for increasing it in large jumps (C^+). It also eats up lesser RAM than Firefox. And importing bookmarks from Firefox into Opera is so easy…

Open FireFox -> Bookmarks -> Manage Bookmarks -> File -> Export -> Save (as html).
Open Opera -> File -> Import and Export -> Import Netscape/Firefox Bookmarks.

I just realized that some of my earliest blog posts were on finding a good browser. I feel so stupid for using firefox for an entire year X-( Btw, all my blogger posts have been successfully imported to wordpress. Thanks, Pati. Also, now that I copied and pasted this text from notepad onto wordpress editor - the wordpress editor looks primitive. Opera is also not perfect :-(

GD/PI prep
I really need to build content. And I need to get at least a basic understanding of _primitive_ sports like cricket, olymics, etc. And I hate keeping abreast of current events unrelated to business and technology - like reading about two brothers who’re fighting, again! There are also several subjects that I need to brush up study (why did I take up Project Management?!!) before I go in for the interview.

At least, I’m happy that I’m ok with the introspection questions - One tough question was, “Why MBA?”. I did a lot of soul searching to zoom in on my answer, “blah blah tech consultant blah blah”. As for the other tough question, “What are your chief weaknesses?”, friends and family quickly rose to the ocassion. My mom gave me _five_ major weaknesses in a flash - she didn’t even have to think for a second :-|

Fate?
Ever come across a person, or heard about one that you think could’ve been you had just a few things in your life turned out differently? Last night, I was cleaning out my ‘Bookmark’ archives and stumbled onto Ashish Kumar’s blog. Check out his profile:

IITK, B.Tech, CSE -> Microsoft, Redmond -> Entreprenuer, Tekriti
Tekriti has one product so far: TekUnity a solution for managing a housing society (corny? I know!). They also provide services - outsourcing and product development.

Cool Links
Make money by selling companies, not products!
Find music that you’ll like. (It didn’t work for me - I disliked two out of every three songs their engine recommended, but I think it was a nifty idea)

Bill, watch your back!
New Google Desktop grabs more of MS’ turf
Google Sidebar
Google launches operations in India

Help Wanted
Does anybody know how to make sure that smiley’s remain in ASCII form? The pic-form completely distorts the text, esp for someone like me, who uses them extensively.

SOLVED: There is a checkbox in ‘Writing Options’.

Also, is there a way I can get a paragraph format (the first sentence is indented to the left for each para) in wordpress?

Mani : ‘ML :)’ (Machine Learning for the non-iiitian :D)

Dharam : ‘What matters is Metaaaaaa wins or not :))’ (long story, will explain later ;))

Keerthi Kiran : ‘In the End {Sems}; it doesn’t even matter’ (how true!)

Rama : ‘looking arnd for an fyp’ (if only you knew the whole story :D)

Ravishankar : ‘Corporate Social Responsibility… why has it become my responsibility :(’ (We have a ‘Industry and Society’ test sometime soon. The worst part is: I have taken that course too!)

Shiben : Ring + Matrix = FEAR! How? play the game! i finished it (Shiben is a true gamer :D)

Kesu : ‘Oh! Sympathy, Where have you gone? I’m getting older, I need something to rely on…’ (I’ve given up trying to understand this guy’s status messages. Ever since, he has become a rock star, he has risen above us mere mortals)

Venkat : ‘Quix at 8:30 :(’ (Some solace in finding that it’s not only the iiitians that have endsems!)

Rao : ” (It’s a pity Rao has stopped putting on his trademark status messages… Dunno what’s the matter with him).

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.

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

Found ‘Lady, hear me tonight’ by Modjo. I used to love that song but weirdly, I remembered that artist’s name as Moby and so all my efforts at Ctrl+Sing at DC++ for it came to naught. (Just remembered a poster for world environment day) Now, if only I could find the song - ‘Tricky, Tricky’ by Lou Bega, life would be heaven!

I got 19/25 in Linear Algebra. I feel so relieved :) Of course, Bunny had taken the course as a PCO and still got 22, the highest in our batch!

I’m sick and tired of friends acting arrogant/irritating/unreasonable and then claiming that they were only joking. There is a time for joking and it is not when a friend seriously needs help. Have I ever ‘jokingly’ refused to help someone, claiming that I needed to comb my hair?! I’m angry at them and angry at myself for getting angry.

This stupid VLSI Algos project is eating up my time. It is too simple to justify the amount of time I’ve already spent on it and that irritates me to no end. There were so many better things that I could do with that time.

Funny, how one gets so many ideas to blog about (I’ve about 12 of them in a .txt file on my desktop) all of a sudden and sometimes there are just none.

A few things I learnt over the past four days

1) Not all volunteers are voluntary! Sometimes your name appears first in the list of volunteers just because a particular friend thinks that he can force you to work when you don’t want to. Even more strangely, he is right.
2) Do not eat out on the day before an exam… even when it is free, delicious and non-vegetarian. If you do it once, for heaven’s sake, don’t do it again on the same day… and if you do, at least don’t read Agatha Christie at night.
3) Three hours is a lot of time without a PC nearby, even when you are with eight friends, a car, a bike and lots of money.
4) A pub is a really good place to chill out… even if you only sip water, especially if it involves watching Formula 1 with an expert beside you and sitting on a really, really comfortable couch.

Yesterday, a bunch of us went to Dola-ri-dhani, an artificially created Rajasthani village on the outskirts of the city. It was awesome. For the first time, so many of us went out together on a picnic. We started the journey packed in 2-seven-seaters. After two hours of non-stop joking, leg-pulling, drinking from Rumeet’s water bottle (to his utter dismay) and throwing projectiles at the other seven seater (we won 2-1 :D), we reached the place. The ‘welcome Jal-jeera’ was much looked forward to and it did not disappoint. Sadly, the puppet show (”Hathon ki karamaat, dhage ki safai”) was not a lot of fun to a bunch of guys who watched movies with billion-dollar special-effects every other day. Ice candy was! I had three of them - I don’t know why it’s not more popular. The camel ride and the boat ride were ok. There was even a magic show in which Amit ‘uncle’ couldn’t figure out how to take ribbons out of a bag and Rahul had one-rupee-coins come out of his ass :)) Rumeet was most interested in the ‘babes’ (many thought that they were actually men dressed as women) in the Rajasthani folk dance. The best part for most of us though, was the disco. The traditional Rajasthani dinner was simply awesome. When I got up (gasping for air, not unlike a beached whale), I knew that I would regret the act everytime I felt hungry for a long time. An astrologer told Priyanshu that he was going to have a love marriage by the time he was 25 =)). Anyway, a word is only a thousandth of a picture :) and so I’ll stop blabbering now and let the photos do the talking. Nayak saab and others, get them scanned quick.

A few days ago, a friend decided to write a series of controversial posts describing people he knew. For some reason, I was his first subject. Thankfully, it contained more good things than bad (unfortunately, for another friend who was the subject of his next post, his didn’t). Unfortunately, the post showed that he does not know me very well. This is not surprising since for various reasons, we have not interacted much through these three years we’ve been classmates. To be fair, I don’t think anybody I know, knows me fully. While some friends do know about the girls in my life (questions about whom are apparently the standard content in emails-from-old-friends-to-guy-in-new-college!), not many know how much I really study (or don’t study?!). What everybody (at least my friends in IIIT) knows is that I happen to have a high CGPA and presto - they form a preconceived notion of me. It’s not that I feel wronged or even disappointed, it’s just the way things are on this planet. After all, even I have some preconceived notions about people which are not fully justified.

In some ways, I feel good about the whole thing. It certainly made my day when I read stuff like “he is one of those fellows whom God has created to look upon and feel jealous of . He makes you feel what a waste of human efficiency we all are.” It also gave me a glimpse of what people generally think of me which is always good as even the greatest amongst us (not that I’m one of them) would do well to pay attention to feedback from his peers. Thank you, Lu.