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Truth Silenced

A week ago, the whole of my facebook wall was painted with patriotism. There were profile pics with Indian Flags, many patriotic songs were posted, and I saw people liking pages like India, and some others with that name in it. And now, barely a week has passed but it seems like it has been ages. There is nothing abnormal in it, nor is it something to be ashamed of. We dont need to be reminded everytime that we are Indians, twice a year is more than enough, and it makes me overwhelmingly happy to get a glance of this patriotism twice a year.

The only thing that concerns me is that what happens to this patriotism? Where does the energy go?Is this energy only enough to post things on the wall and listen to patriotic songs? I have a feeling that these national holidays are like alcohol. You drink it, you get high, you speak your mind out, and then the next day you forget everything. Even alcohols have their hangovers, which these days fail to manifest into us.

Its easy to lecture people, especially youths like us, about the importance of standing for our nation. They very vaguely ask us to do something for our country. They ask us to fight against corruption. They ask us to follow our ethics, speak truth and become a good citizen. They ask us to go into politics and clean up the mess the politicians have created. They even tell us how to do those things, but they forget to give us a very important lesson.

The lesson is: How to survive?

Evil prevails because the truth is silenced. Either by the lies of the evils, or by the silence of the good ones. I see a girl being eve-teased by some boys, and as it is not one of those bollywood movies, if I say something, I risk being beaten by those three boys. The auto-wala is over-charging me, what do I do? Should I call the police? These auto walas have their own union, which pays in lacs to the police monthly, so do you think police would help me? I am travelling with a waiting-list ticket, with say WL-1, now should I give bribe to the TTE to secure a berth? Because if I dont do so, some other person will give, and irrespective of whether he/she has a ticket or not, he/she would get that berth.

These are the simplest cases of everyday life. We are here dealing with the players at the lowest level of the pyramid of evil. Guess what happens when we try to challenge someone at a higher level. There is no reason and I am not optimistic enough to expect that the case would be better than the likes of Satyendra Dubey or Shanmughan Manjunath. Its easy to die when you know that 21 canons will be fired to salute you on your deathbed to acknowledge your sacrifice for the nation, as compared to when you know that although you would be doing something for your country, your death will be treated no better than the deaths of those 1,50,000 other who died on the same day.

I dont have enough courage to stand alone in this kurukshetra, I need someone to hold onto, someone to support me, someone to save me when I am in trouble.

I would like you to have a look at these sites:

http://india.5thpillar.org/

http://ipaidabribe.com/

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The Wrong Choice

21 years ago, I was at god’s place. People in groups of two were sent to god to make a choice regarding their birth. So now it was me and my partner’s turn. God asked us,”Boys, you both will be blessed with a  wonderful life, you’ll have people who love you, but you have to make a choice between two things. Either you get an extraordinary brain, with a very high aptitude for logic or you’ll be born in a very rich family with no brains at all”.

I thought,”So ok! if I choose brain, I can use it to earn money and so soon I ll get what all he ll get, and who wants to be a dumb child of a very rich dad?”. So I hastily chose the first option. And the guy next to me chose the second. I laughed in my mind, “What a fool he is, no wonder he took that choice, see how dumb he is!!!”.

So as promised by god, I got what I chose. A wonderful brain, which fell in love with maths and finally I cleared the JEE. But today I saw the guy who stood next to me cruising on a bike with his hotty girlfriend holding him tightly. I thought, “so much for the whole brain thing, I should have made the other choice”! 😀

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I Can’t See

Life was going carefree until someone slammed me with a brutal truth about my country. 400 million poor live in India. That means every third person is poor. That hurt my patrotism and stole my sleep. So I woke up in the morning and did some investigation of my own.

So I wake up and prepare to go to the office. While leaving the house, I run into the landlady:
“My landlady cannot be poor, she has a big house in this posh area.”
Then I go to a shop to get some tea and snacks:
“There is no way the shopkeeper can be poor, I mean look at the shop and look at the crowd.”
Then I pick up an auto-rickshaw to the bus station:
“This auto-wala, can he be poor. Nah, he cannot, he has a mobile of his own. Oh btw, Its against the rules to talk on phone while driving!”
Then I catch a bus:
“Can this bus driver be poor? No, I dont think so, he is a government servent, government wouldn’t pay anyone below poverty line.”
I see some slums while travelling in the bus:
“So here are the poor, I finally see them. Oh no, they can’t be poor, they have satellite TVs. How can they be poor if they can afford them?”
And finally I reach into my office:
“Well, well, this place is in par with the first world standards, no one here in his wildest dreams can be poor.”
After office, I reach home and go to a restaurant:
“Can this waiter be poor?No he cannot, consider the crowd here, and the tip each one them pays, he can earn so much apart from his regular salary”
And so I go to sleep with a satisfaction:
“Ah, so they were just trying to fool. See its not so easy to fool me.”

Wish, it was true!!!

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And So It Begins

I am not very gud at and so usually I do not resort to descriptive writing where I would tour you through what all happened to me but here I am making an exception for this is the need of this post.My first day at NetApp as an interne deserves a post for itself, and I am too excited to wait for my brain to create an imaginative version out of it.

So the day began and after following the same old routine which I have been following for the 19 years of my life(there have been some exceptions in the last two years 😀 ), I went out of my PG, bought a tea for myself and went on a 1-km marathon to catch a bus. Now I was handicapped with kannada and so the conductor could not understand that I wanted him to let me know where my stop would be, although his money oriented mind did figure out where I would leave the bus so as to give me the ticket. So I ended up at the next stop to my actual location and had to walk back for my office. And finally after filling entries at three security checks one including the reception at NetApp, I finally sat on the sofa waiting for an escort for orientation.

So not very late the escort came, a charming lady. She led us first to the canteen where we were supposed to take free tropicanas and coffees as per our will and then through a bunch of documents which were to be read and signed and that was the time I remembered that I forgot to bring my pen. 😀 So was the case with 1-2 more boys. But as we all know girls are saviours in such cases for they never leave their homes with less than two pens, so our problem was solved as one of our fellow interne was a girl. Then we were taken to be snapped for our ID cards, and there I got my most ridiculous snap taken all thanks to the camerawoman who was asking me questions while taking the photograph. And so finally after completion of all the formalities, I was taken to my team manager and then finally to my team and then to lunch. Lunch was iitg mess style, the only difference being that we had to pay before we ate, and the food was 10 times better.

Then I was provided with my cubicle, with a laptop in it, which I was supposed to carry home with me, a user account to log onto all the shells which I was permitted to and from that time onwards the boring period began, for I was supposed to learn to use the shell but my user account was not configured properly and so I couldnt do a thing. Same was the case with a fellow interne, and so we went on to update status on fb and when that was over we went on to play fussball. At the beginning of the day, that fellow interne was my team mate in the project but by the end of the day, I was shifted to another project. So I got shifted from perl to java. And then at 5:30 we left from the office and I met shikhar bhaiya.

I had some delicious chicken pieces at KFC with bhaiya, a glass of mango juice and a lot of bakar, then he escorted me halfway to my home where soon after entering the room I started creating this boring piece of work. Although boring its still worth it, for all the firsts are worth remembering. 🙂

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The New Boy

So the day has arrived and the new boy has entered into the class which would turn out to be the source of his sweetest memories.

This would be the place where a shorter than dwarf girl would be in war with a footballer, and both of them would turn to be his sweetest friends.

This would be the place where his relationship with a girl would start with her dialogue, “you look like the dobby of harry potter!” and turn into that of best buddies.

This would be the place where though initially indifferent to a beauty with brain, he would later turn to be one of her most caring friend.

This would be the place where he would share punishment infront of the whole school with a boy destined to be in army.

This would be the place where he would meet a harry potter fan, call him ‘Netaji’ and afterwards lose his alocohol-ginity with his help.

This would be the place where his sadness would turn into happiness just by these two words of a girl,”udaas ho?”.

This would be the place where though very boldly taking the phone number of a gal, he would never muster the courage to call her until she does it first.

This place would witness his adolescent infatuations developing and turning into his greatest heartache for he would never be able to express them to the one he has fallen for and would later on regret it maybe for his whole life.

This would be the place where his fatty friend would sprinkle on him the words of wisdom that 96% of the love stories started in school never make it to the end and instead of wondering about the source of this statistic, he would wish that his story would be in the rest 4%.

This would be the place where he would be fascinated by the ribs vibrating sound of fighter planes landing and taking off from a runway nearby.

This would be the place where he would have his first bomb making lessons by dropping sodium in the wet wash basins of chemistry lab.

This would be the place where he would be summoned upon by the principal to question whether he was involved in making any virus and deploying it into the computer lab, and he would very innocently ask the question,”Is it possible for a student like me to write a virus of my own?”

This would be the place where he would be left dumbstruck by the beauties of his class when they show up in sarees for the teachers day and the farewell.

This would be the place he would never forget for the rest of his life.

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So Finally The Better Arrives

Lifes a roller-coaster ride. When I look at the past few months, I cant help but smile. Even in my most imaginative dreams I coudnt have thought of wat all happened in these past four months. And so finally the better has arrived. Now I ll spend my summers in the AC rooms of bangalore(hopefully :D) coding. Have fun with all my friends whose summers are destined in the same city.I can even get a free cook for myself, if his office is not very far from mine. 😉 Its better than Germany I suppose where I would have been the only one in the University, and ofcourse a lot better than hyderabad(2 months without linux :O).

Life is irrational. Nothing follows a logical sequence. Its all about crazyness and weird decisions. Somehow interviewing till 2 in the night, they dropped the plan of taking anyone, although I was quite sure to get through after the interviews. Somehow the cutoff for germany increased to a level higher than I could have afforded. Somehow without giving a thought I chose this company for interview which wound up everything in a single day and let out the results while the other one hasnt even started off with its. Somehow I dint plan to go home from Kanpur, or Id have missed my interview.

So I am happy again. Lifes beautiful again. Lets see what all life has to offer. Now I have something else to worry about. I have a bangalorite whom I have to enlighten about the streets of bangalore :P.

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Confessions of a Back-Bencher

I am a back-bencher and am proud to be one. Let me show you those 15 hrs of week in class through my eyes.

1. The Tedious Machine: Some make wonders happen, some see wonders happen, and I wonder what happened. If every single word that comes out from the mouth of the prof were to be visible, imagine how the classroom would be. That reminds me of those video games where we had to catch the bricks falling from the top, only in this case the game is 3D, the arena is horizontal and except for catching a few words which fall down owing to the grace of gravity(notice grace :D), I dont even try to catch the words as they seem to be going so high over the head that even if I stand over the bench(dont worry I wont fall, the new ones are wonderful!) I wont be able to catch them. I just admire the scene where the words are flowing like flocks of birds all over the sky and finally crash into the walls. Some people have adapted their antenna to go high over into the sky to catch those words, others like me catch watever gets scattered by crashing into those antenna.

So lets come to the course itself. We are supposed and expected to just throw away the number system which our ancestors invented after a hell lot of toiling and sweating and embrace the “Cave Man Calculus :P”. You know nothing but a symbol zero, so now you have to generate all the numbers which you can think of by repeatedly operating on zero as many number of times as you wish or you can endure :P. Even the cave men were better I suppose. They just had to put a line to indicate an increment, and not a weird mathematical formula with those weird signs provided by the Romans. Oh God, why dint India colonise Europe. 😛

Then comes the world famous Tedious Machine. Theoretically it can solve any problem of the world, though I have no idea whether it would solve your problem of gf or not. 😀 But lets skip it, so I was saying that it can theoretically solve any problem of the world but practically none. 😛 To solve even the simplest problem, You have to rely upon that bulky magnetic tape which is supposed to be infinite(God knows how!), and a greater problem is if the tape goes into an infinite loop, its not the tape’s fault, its actually tape’s method of saying, “What the hell! Cant you give me a correct input!”. OK! even if I somehow figure out how to detect whether the tape is working or it is in an infinite loop, I have no guarantee that I would get my result in a reasonably good time. “Efficiency to Moh-Maya hai”. You should solve the problem, however inefficient it may be, just solve it. Just start the tape and let your grandson or great-grandson take the credit of the result.(Hope theres no syntax error :D). Thank God those EC people came up with the idea of IC or I d have shifted to arts or commerce :P.

2. Network-Timed out: When speaking of networks, speak as network administrators do. Its easy to imagine the class, Just imagine the AIR(All India Radio) Vivid Bharati Prasaran. With each class, the AIR broadcast centre begins its broadcast which lasts for 1 hour. And sooner or later or never, we radios(dumb nodes in terms of networks :D) tune up to the correct signal. To respect the fact that we are IITians, Id like to give a better title than dumb radios. So the class consists of some near about 70 IBM Desktops and 5 Apple PCs(our gals, remember those adds a few years back where the PCs appear in red green blue colors :P), hopelessly trying to communicate with the base station, the AIR broadcast station.

The basestation, a mainframe computer, with its monotonous broadcasting, interrupted again and again by some of the desktops, reminds me of Lord Ganesha, scribe of story tellers, though in this case the story is more of network protocols and topologies. And among those 75 desktops, I am sure 74 of them have their OS as linux, stable and secure, so secure that some even block their listening ports and dont even allow the broadcast to enter into the system. Who knows it might be a malicious code sent to cause harm to the system. 😀 And of one I am damn sure its windows. Remember how the windows comes up to you seeking permission to send a list of 140 or so error reports, none of which ever get solved. 😛 Now I know what happens to those 140 error reports. They all get so messed up that when unicasted to the mainframe, the mainframe hangs, and even those 74 other desktops which had their ports blocked open their ports to listen to the conversation. 😛 It would be a great degree of generalisation if I mention all the desktops to be of the same shape and size. But if I get into details, I ll have to afford a whole range of desktops available in the market to cover each and every person. Though I d just like to mention that atleast one of the 70 IBM desktops and one of the 5 Apple PCs do not actually fall into the category of desktops, they can actually be counted as laptops or palmtops( 😀 guess who!!).

3. The Dreamworks: A suitable name for this course, for everything happens in dreams. You come to class to dream(some call it sleep but thats so wrong), you build a model of IITG in you dreams(which wen coded in OpenGL as we do, has no resemblance to the real IITG even in dreams :D), and the more you watch the movies like Avatar and Finding Nemo, the more you feel that you can do something like that only in dreams.
There is nothing animating about this course of animation, oops I overrated it, its actually just a course of graphics which is supposed to be a base for animations. I entered into this course expecting to discover my aesthetic side, the sense of beauty within me. But as and when I enter into the class, I feel myself dumped into a dungeon with all the light suffocated out, though the tubelights are always on. I remember the days when I was small and I used to be so scared of the command-line based DOS mode. I used to feel blinded, suffocated, handicapped, with no “graphics” to support me. Well thats the same feeling in this dreamworks class. 😀 As of now, I am a command line enthusiast. And I think that even the Younger Sanmukh would prefer the MS-DOS class to this dreamworks class. 😛

4. YACC(Yet Another Cursed Course): Nothing much to say about this course as nothing much happens in this course. Remember the game I mentioned before. Its the same game being playing here. The only difference is that in this case the words are not thrown to hit the wall, but they are just slipped off the tongue to let fall by themselves. They dont even manage to reach the first benches, leave alone the last bench. And even if somehow they could be caught in bits and pieces, I have got no idea how to compile them. Its like asking a C compiler to compile the language of JAVA. 😛

As apparent, it contains highly exaggerated and fictitious content. So dont take it seriously :P, just enjoy. And one more note, I am not truly a back-bencher. 🙂

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3 Days To Fall Out of Love for Dummies

You are reading this post so I assume that you read my previous post “7 days to fall in love for dummies” and you established yourself as a romantic couple. So now you think you are no more a dummy. But then bitter truths falls on us at the time least expected. So ofcourse not surprisingly for me, you want to throw away this title. Reason might be you got bored, or your subject’s friend is getting hotter and hotter day by day or whatever it might be but you are again having that very feeling of dumbness for you dont know how to breakup. Dont worry, I am again there to rescue you from this cruelty. 😛

Some of the readers of the previous post, for reasons so obvious, were eagerly waiting for my next post on “7 days to fall out of love for dummies”. For those readers, I owe my apologies, for I got delayed by the midsems which were playing havoc with my CPI. Though I dont know whether I was successful in saving my CPI from that butcher’s knife, but I sure do have some good news for you guys and gals(you were the ones eagerly waiting. :P).

Before I even started to run my highly intelligent brain(sorry for boasting, but you atleast owe me this 😛 ) on this extremely urgent topic, I got a proposal for the algorithm. It was about the break-up week, where you get to breakup in 7 days, the days being: Missing day, Jhagda day, Confession Day, Slap Day, Kick Day, Hate Day and finally Break Day, I thought, “huh!Do you really require 7 day to breakup. What a waste of time.”. Now the urgency was further increased for the humanity was in wrong hands. I had to bring forth a better algorithm to save the humanity. And so I invented this efficient step by step guide to breakup in 3 days. So lets directly get to it for a lot many of you must be cursing me for this long buildup. 😀

3 Days to Fall Out of Love for Dummies

PROLOGUE: You proved your mettle by becoming an established romantic couple, some credit to me ofcourse. 😀 But now you are in trouble.Its impossible to bear the torture.You desperately need a change. So you again resort to me. To get you out of trouble, I conjure this guide,step by step instructions to successfully have a breakup. Similar to the previous guide, this one is also based on credit system, the credits lead you to breakup.

DAY-1: The Decision Day.

So you decide to have a breakup. My suggestion to you for this day is to enjoy this day as much as you can. 😉 Just utilize the credits you gained as recklessly as you want. Just pour them like water.By doing so, you may infact gain some breakup-credits. 😉 Morover once you breakup, the credits would be no more valid, they would expire. And I know that you all agree that its better to use them than to throw them away in trash. 😛

DAY-2: The Provocation Day.

You might be wondering what credits have to do here in breakup. I ll tell you now. I believe that it was you who toiled during the valentine’s week. So why not let her have the command during this breakup week. So the more credits you gain, the more easier the breakup will be.

Today is the provocation day. You have to provocate your subject. Do something which doesnt please her. Try to flirt with her friends, ignore her to stare at a hot gal. Use your imagination. Prove her you can win over any gal.:P The more you provocate her, the more credits you gain. Bonus if you could tell her on her face that you are not interested in her, but ofcourse I dont recommend that, for I dont want it to be your last day. 😀

DAY-3: The BreakUp Day.

So the day of freedom arrives. You have provocated her, you have gained credits, now you just need an ignition. Just irritate her somehow, and you are done. “I need to talk to you.” Those very words which you were so eager to listen.She begins the fight, dont let it stop. Just keep on fuelling it by suitable punch lines. You may even praise her friends if you feel the heat subsiding. Just keep in mind that if you fail today, you ll again have to bear the torture for 3 more days. Fight as if you ll die if you lose.

As there is no three word protocol like “I love you” for breaking up so you might get to listen a lot many variants. Just assume they all mean “I am breaking up with you”. Hurray you are out of it finally. Congrats! Just a note, atleast inform your friends about the plans for this day, because if things go wrong, you dont want to be late to be fetched to the hospital. 😀

EPILOGUE: So now you are a free bird. You have mastered in the makeup, breakup. You may now want to consider decreasing the establishment time, for 7 days is a hell lot of a time. So keep me updated if you get an even better algo. You’d be serving the humanity. 😛

Analysis of my Algo: Consider the previous algo where you need 7 days to breakup. In a year, you could be with just 24 gals. But considering the reduced time of my algo, you can be with 36 gals a year. Thats a great improvement I assume. 😛

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Failure is not that bad

Life is not a bed of roses, neither is it fair. I had my own moments of victory, I had my own moments of defeat. Victories used to fill me up with a fresh wave of confidence, while the defeats used to suck it all up. The cycle used to go on until recently.

Surprisingly and paradoxically, the last few defeats have had a completely different effect on me. Eventually I gained confidence through them instead of losing it. Being asked for my password to app on my behalf, getting calls which were to make sure that I was fine, receiving messages from half-expected persons, nullified the effects of defeat. I laughed at myself for being so stupid.

“dont worry, lag jayegi intern. And I believe something better is waiting for u. :)”

The last two lines of this message struck me. The last one made me smile for I imagined the smile on the sender’s face and the second last one led me into thinking. My whole life had been marked by last moment decision changes mostly which were not under my control. And everytime, I thanked god for these decisive moment decision changes for they have always proved correct. The courses which I took at the decisive points dint even used to be in the inventory list. I admit that I have a very poor foresight. I dont want to decide where will I be 15 years from now, because even at the end of 14th year I wont be so sure about it. I believe life is not just a set of completely independent co-incidences, but each event in life carries some significance associated with it. And maybe this one has its own share of significance too.

Now I ve started believing that something better is waiting for me. I just have to prove myself by working even harder. I have to increase my level of excellence for the one on which I am standing now is not enough, as has been proved repeatedly. Now I dont fear failures, for I know I have people to catch me if I fall. 🙂

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Valentine’s Day

So another valentine’s day without a valentine. I entered this day cursing the course of Compilers. While the book was trying hard to tell me how to build an LL-1 parser(dont bother about wat it is :P), my heart was wondering about the keywords love, rose, kiss, valentine and hoping someone would let me know the grammar to generate them.

Meanwhile the world around too was entering into this day. Some were calling their bfs/gfs(god knows how they decided which one to call first ;)), some lucky ones might even be kissing their valentines and a not-so-some-but-a-many must have been sleeping or watching a movie or doing something which in no way has anything to do with entering into the valentines day.

But four of my friends, some thousand and five hundres miles away were doing something very different, not unique though, but a strange way to enter into this day. I d refer to them as “The one who pukes”, “The one with many gfs”,”The resistant one” and “The abstinant one”. And lets call this group as the “I am not drunk army”. 500 ml of a clear liquid or “This thing”(now u know what it means) consumed by four minus ones of this army’s jawans. God knows what they were thinking, or were they even thinking, because now there was no scope of going back to their homes. And so to fight for their existence(for they would have been killed if they had gone home in such a condition :D) they had to now encroach upon one of their friend’s hostel-room.So lets look at how each one of them entered into this world.

1.The Ones Who Pukes:- I hope the name is self-explanatory itself, for the “This Thing” was clearing here digestive tracks. She entered the valentines day fresh and new with all the dirt inside her thrown out. 😀 Lucy gal. :P. She had to be carried to the room from the car. And for a note, I was not at all surprised to hear it.

2.The one with many gfs:- Contrary to you guesses, he was not working on any algorithm to decide which one to call first, rather he was reciting the names of maybe hundreds of gals whom he had met, not met, seen, not seen, kissed not kissed, slept with not slept with ;). Maybe it was some hymn to please God valentine, or maybe he was just drunk. 😀 But if the latter is true, I am surprised. 😛

3.The abstinant one:- I know its difficult to relate the word abstinant to this gal, but ya its true. She dint drink the “This Thing”. God knows how it occured, but she dint. And its not hard for me to imagine how this drama gal entered into this day, for she was giving those saas-bahu dialogues where you get to say “I told you so” but telling it so bluntly and tactlessly wouldnt add up to your viewership.

4. The Resistant One:- As the names suggests, this Darua or u may call alcoholic, was not affected by the ill aftereffects of “This Thing”. He was the one arranging for their night stay, by making the owner of the hostel sleep in the verandah. He entered into this day by babysitting the other three(Ya three is correct, because the abstinant one always requires babysitting even though she might not be drunk :P), and calling me and asking me to write a blog post on it.

So, I sighed, I wish I could have been there. Happy Valentine’s Day to all my friends. I love you all. 🙂