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2008-09-01T22:44:00.000+05:30

have shifted to wordpress

sidbadshah.wordpress.com

Cribs

2008-08-14T23:09:00.002+05:30

I kept cribbing over broken relationships till I saw this girl. She is 18, part of an SHG, She has an year old child but has lost her husband.

Could see the fear in her eyes, but there was always a smile on her face... Just felt like giving her a hug!!!

The chemistry of a break up

2008-07-02T22:52:00.006+05:30

Although I title this as "Chemistry" of a break up, what follows also has elements of mathematics, psychology and what not... Have seen quite a few of them now, some very close, but have somehow been able to see a kind of a pattern. May be I am right, may be I am wrong...

So its starts with the couple whom I would call X and Y. X is of the nature of I-want-to-live-my-life-my-way and Y is of the nature of I-will-do-anything-for-you.

Ofcourse X and Y do not know about this characteristic of theirs.

Stage 1: X, Y meet. Date. Talk to each other for long hours (Oh, telecom operators benefit the most here). X is all fida over Y. Y starts to think that X is the soulmate. They go out of the way to help each other. They go out of the way to spend moments with each other. And there are sacrifices made by both X and Y. This makes them believe that there could be nothing better than this relationship. It makes them believe that this is all we needed.

X forgets the characteristic and the way X is now is an ideal situation for Y. So things move on smoothly.

The couple is happy and the story moves on like this for a couple of days, weeks, months and may be years as well...

Stage 2: The couple feel good in each others company. X does not mind being totally dedicated to Y. Thats X's way of life right now. Y is under the impression that X will continue to stay like this. Life is rosy. No thorns attached... There are occasional disturbances here and there but love overwhelms them all.

Stage 3: X and Y get separated for some time. X finds it difficult to shower the same love on Y. Y finds it odd as X does not behave the same way.

The Final Stage: This is when the actual characteristics come out. X goes on the "I-want-to-be-myself" and "you-be-yourself". Y says that "I-like-to-live-for-you-and-expect-the-same-from-you". And both of them have a difference in approach. All those sacrifices that they did for each other are now valued against other trivial things. Questions like "Why-should-I-do-something-for-Y?". "Why-doesn't-X-love-me-so-much?" and such stuff start cropping in their minds. Personal happiness becomes a major factor. There is an opportunity cost attached to each element that X or Y does with each other.

X starts to enjoy life sans Y, Y starts to live life with beautiful memories of the past. Y feels that X loves Y the same way as it was before. X starts to feel strained by the relationship as X cannot live an independent life.

And then comes what they dreaded the most.... BREAK UP!!!

But then if you see what was wrong... Well, the very first thing... Where they make promises to each other, build hopes, live lives that they don't endorse just to keep the other happy. Well, all this feels good temporarily, but unfortunately its not sustainable. That is the fault!!!

PS: This post intentionally lacks attention to detail... to make the as generic as possible.

Best way out ?

2008-06-15T07:48:00.000+05:30

Sometimes you wonder whether being correct or making sure that you are right is the apt way to go about doing things!!! Whether doing things right when the world around has made its own laws really makes sense!!!

Say for example on the road. Most of us do not follow majority of the traffic rules. We dont maintain a distance, we dont horn (or sometimes horn excessively), we dont use a signal before changing lanes, we dont listen to horns , no seatbelts and somehow this has got into us that if there is an inch space for my vehicle to fit in, I would!!!
Now the question that lies in front of me is whether I join the crowd and do as it does or do I be the loner following all the rules.

Digging further deep, this is something like the Game Theory problem where in if everyone follows the rules, each one is benefitted but if no one follows the rules and you try to be saint, you are at a loss. So if everyone follows the rules, there is no locking of vehicles and hence no jams. However, this needs cooperation from everybody and even if one person tries to "act smart" (for personal gains), the equilibrium is disturbed. Infact, this is what happens even on the road. We try to cover each and every inch of space that we can and hence locking the traffic many a times. And hence all of us try and "act smart" and in the end all of them lose.

But then what is the way out?
Surely the best way out is the equilibrium route. But the question arises as to why a driver not disturb the equilibrium for personal gains? I guess proper traffic monitoring would be required to ensure that drivers follow the equilibrium.

I am aware of the school of thought which says that "you be good and the world will be good to you", I am also aware of the school of thought which says that "you-be-right-come-what-may" but then so equally I am aware of the fact that "while in Rome, do as what Romans do".

Bad bad banking!!!

2008-06-15T07:47:00.000+05:30

12:00 AM, Sid goes to SBI to deposit money for his fees. He gets a token number from the bank (really impressed by the token system, thankfully no more waiting in lines with people leaving you with no personal space and with no space to even turn around). But then what does he see, the number he gets is 460 and the number going on is 210 which means another 250 people to be attended to before him. He decides to walk out and come some other time as he was supposed to meet friends at lunch.

Decides to come early the next day.
Comes at 10:15 (branch opens at 10:30). Takes the token and awaits his turn. And what does he see
1) Most of the employees catering to us behind the counters do not come before 11.
2) It takes 15 minutes for each employee to settle down (after all initial greeting etc...)
and Sid is pissed off with the system. Only to see this...

"A madam across the counter shamelessly got some sarees and showing it off to her colleagues sitting adjacent to her and engaging them in a discussion"....

And sid gets pissed off... Holy fuck!!! Seems like these guys dont value our time at all... Lady, If ever I had to quote a bad example of professionalism, I would quote you.

And he does nothing but grumbles to himself... And await his turn.

I was also being sent from one counter to other, from one officer to other for some sicko verification. Somehow, no one was ready to take responsibility of this. Somehow the whole experience leaves a bad taste in your mouth. And no wonder one would lose customers because of this.
It is surely gonna lose this one.

Am aging

2008-06-09T00:23:00.002+05:30

So many new things happening around me. Sometimes makes me feel am aging... Makes me feel time is running out...

I have taken up a job, have gone for meetings far and wide, have been interacting with people, have been losing hair, have been putting on weight, have started having regular diets with the fear of body not adjusting to the food!! Signs of aging huh!!!

But never felt that old till I heard that a lot of my school friends have either got married or are engaged and due to get married soon... And I thought I was still a 23 year old kid... and there's a long way to go!!!

funny world this!!!

The Last Mile Connectivity Problem

2008-06-06T02:05:00.002+05:30

Gurgaon to IIT, South Delhi costs me Rs. 10 by the BPO Cab, IIT to IIFT (in the same area) costs me Rs. 30 by auto.

Calcutta to Tatanagar Station costs me Rs. 97 by train, Tatanagar station to XLRI costs me Rs. 80.

The Last Mile Connectivity Problem has bothered telecommunication engineers for long, but the problem has been around in other domains as well. To speak of it, Last Mile invariably becomes expensive in most of the domains.

I believe, this is primarily because upto the last mile, the resources are shared. The cab is shared by many passengers, the train is shared where as the auto is not. And hence connecting to the last mile becomes expensive.

The problem can be solved if the extent to which the shared resources are used is increased. Perhaps a shared auto from Tatanagar station to somewhere close to XLRI might help.

In the field of communications, wireless systems have come to the rescue. Laying wires to the last mile (from junction box to home) is an expensive affair, instead a wireless system placed at the junction box serves the purpose.

Wonder if such a thing could be done in other areas as well!!!

Convocation

2008-01-26T09:49:00.000+05:30

Procrastination is the thief of time... and I have been procrastinating big time!!

CONVOCATION.... One event we all were so very looking forward to... Not because we were getting our degrees, but because we wanted to get back to college, we wanted to stay there, be with friends, enjoy the canteen... and do all that we so very much enjoyed each day of our 4 years at DA-IICT. We were there because it was also a mini reunion of sorts.

DA-IICT has been a very special place for me. I can go on and on writing abt it. but shall leave it for a later date. The DA-IICT hangover still continues to be there.

Plans for convocation and reaching DA-IICT were being made far in advance. We kept exchanging scraps, sending mails and offliners as to when we would reach there and what plans after reaching there. It kind of gave us something we could look forward to.

17 Jan 07
Yours Truly reaches ahmedabad, takes an auto to reach DA-IICT. Was such a nice feeling, the roads, city pulse, galla, and I finally reach DA-IICT. See Shweta and DC near the lotus pond. And the atmosphere lit again. We were such an exited bunch. Shouting literally (Shweta almost crying). We drop Shweta to the girls hostel and meet Jeeta and bakar and bakar and bakar. Then I go to the EWing via canteen (where I met parag and ashin). Wow such a nice feeling.

I opened each door to in that wing to see who's staying there. Had to really knock at each door, something that I would not have done otherwise. But felt good to see those rooms, some of the memories, some of the writings still intact. Went to my room, met the current habitants. All this felt really nice.

Then put my luggage in Ravin's place and went back to canteen to HOG. Was good to see manu again. Met Mishra who has so very much embraced DA-IICT. Had some food and by then the mindtree minds and others from Bangalore arrived and now the canteen was full of US. Lots of hugs and hand shakes. Shared food, felt good.

Then yours truly took a walk with his truly. Felt so good. Oh, I just held my tears back!!! I could see the life in me coming back.

Went back to canteen, hogged again and more and more and more bakar. Go back to EWing, and more bakar with EWingers. Dozed off!!!

18th January 2007
Surprise 1: See Mr. Racket Mohan, dressed up and ready while I am just woke up. Wow!! what a change can a job get in ur life. The MOST lazy guy is up and ready by 8. Unbelieveable.
(then i come to know that it was primary fuelled by a bet he had with Nikhil, I feel relaxed)

Get ready and canteen! Meet more and more people. Meet Dj (Surprise No. 2: Unshaved), meet vasu, tanu dhadda... See a lot of juniors around and a lot of fresh and new faces (1st years). Some of them come up and greet, met some GWingers, and gawd I am loving this.

By now all the infoscions from pune arrive (had met them just 10 days back). Canteen was full of us. Met Sawhney finally, absolutely 0 change. Collected Convocation Gowns, met trevor michael... Met Chutki. You could see the excitement in each of us.

Had our lunch in Brajwasi. A thali. Then had our convo rehearsal. Prof. Amin was shouting desparately but no one was ready to listen, all of us were very busy chatting with each other. He somehow manages to control the chaos and give us some instructions for 2moro.

Then we have a dress rehearsal. Realized then that the gown was too big for me. Looked around and found all of them to be the same. Had a group photo taken. People were so exited. Lots of photos being taken all round.

We make queues and go to the ground to take our seats.

We have a dummy ceremony where the director was handing away the degrees. That was prolly the longest time for which I saw our director. All the professors also came for the ceremony, met chakka there. Some parents also seen.

Each name was called out. And we called out their petnames, wild names!!! Fun time it was. More and more pictures being taken now.
Go to city pulse to watch The Kingdom, and have dinner at sardars. Mikey calls up to say he has arrived (Surprise No. 3). Sardars was good. Met Sarkar Sir there.

More and more bakar in EWing. Fall asleep

19 Jan 2007
This time I wake up first. Canteen!! Meet mikey, speak to him for long time. Feels nice. A good bunch we were (Mikey, Jeeta and Me). Sit in CEP and wait for Mikeys gown. Bakar and bakar and bakar with Mikey.

Go to chakka sir, and all smiles he is. The same bunch!!! Felt so nice to see so many DSP books, Mikey talks and talks and talks... Tells him about the latest that he is doing. Feels so nice to be able to connect to everything. WOW!!! I want to get back to DSP now. We (incl. Chakka Sir), bakar for 2 hours and then take his leave to go to chilli coriander. Another favourite place. Good food.

Go back and rush to the convocation. Man what a feeling. Amazing.

We realign ourselves and take our seats. Wait for the professors, the chief guest and the director to take their seats. Convocation Begins.

As names are called out, each person comes to the dias and recieves his degree. We cheered for each student as his/her name was being called out. Such a nice feeling. I actually dont have words to describe the whole thing appropriately. And as my name draws closer, i join the queue to receive the degree.
At 5: 04 pm, my name is called out and I reach the dias. I almost cried out. It was so over whelming. Am awarded the degree, have a little chat with the person awarding and I bow out. God!!!
Come back to my seat.
Gold medals awarded to sandy and mikey.
We then take oath. Some speeches. High Tea!!!
Lots and lots of photos.

The sad part now begins. People start to leave so that they can join work on monday. Seeing off people, with a sad face and a promise that we shall meet soon.
Missed all of them who were not there. :)

Exposed!!

2007-12-04T03:56:00.000+05:30

Was wondering how exposed, how vulnerable I am in case someone wants to track me (why they would do so is a different question altogether).

My Orkut account has details like address, telephone number, current location. It also has a lot of details like my friends, colleagues.... So anyone who has an intent to track can easily do so and can easily cause harm.

Wonder whats the way out!! Blocking content would defeat the whole purpose of orkut.

XL kaisa hai?

2007-07-09T02:24:00.001+05:30

So how does it feel being in XL? This is one question which has increased my orkut scrap count by atleast a 50. How does it feel being in XL? And then I cook up an answer depending on what mood I am in. Its about a month since I have come to this place and I can say that I have had good fun. We were told that the life is really hectic and you get very little time, but I dont share the same opinion (or may be I have not got into the groove).
So how does it feel being in XL? How are XL ki kudiyan (read auntiyan)? How does it feel being with uncles and aunties (we have people who are called uncle and papa, and I feel lost.)? How does it feel having timings for food after experiencing Brajwasi? How does it feel responding to answers just for the heck of class participation? How do you feel staying in a hostel 60 years old after staying at a place which was given to you brand new? How does it feel to have just 10 users(max) logged on to DC++? How does it feel when there is no daddu's shop around? How does it feel when you cannot take your own book to read in the library?
Anyway the picture is not as sorry as I project it. The food is good and UNLIMITED. So its good. And they have a real good variety. So have not got bored of it as yet. Net is real fast and there are no proxies. So we get a download speed of 120Kbps too. The profs are really good and there is a LOT of student-faculty interaction. Lots of tournaments between students and profs. Lots of dinners hosted by either. Good lecture theatres. Everything (other than the hostel) is airconditioned. Library is awesome. The campus will be wifi enabled soon and believe me having a wifi connectivity makes your life so much easy. People are good, thats what matters. Everything is in control of the student. There are a lot of "Gyan" sessions by seniors and they do help.
A lot of things happen here because of what is called "XL Bonding". Ok, its 2:30 and I am very sleepy. So logging off. Have three 90 min lectures 2moro morning.

First impressions... in pictures...

2007-06-24T10:43:00.000+05:30

All the pics have been taken in XLRI, some from my cam and some from jeevan's.
Sorry for the shabby way things are put up... thats pretty much the condition my room is in...

XLRI... First impressions

2007-06-15T07:05:00.000+05:30

Another chapter of my life begins. The next two years at XLRI.

XLRI is a Jesuit institute. The boys hostel here is named after its founder. The hostel was constructed way back in 1968 or so. And has not been renovated much since. So one can imagine how the hostels are, but the rooms are spacious and thats a good thing. Besides the location of my room is quite good, with most of the commonly used things nearby. So am happy abt it.

Theres a mess in the groundfloor of the hostel. This is a common mess for boys and girls, waise girls hostel is adjacent to ours. And one is allowed in the others hostel. Food is quite ok but I am sure I will get bored of it soon. So finding alternatives already. The worst part is taht the mess has timings and so if u miss that, you might as well sleep hungry.

The library is really nice, completely air conditioned and wifi enabled. We cannot borrow books for some time as we are not registered yet.

Classes started from yesterday, the schedule is quite hectic... for some days we have classes from 8:30 Am to 9:15pm. Each class is of 90 min duration, dunno how i will manage such long attention span. We have already got an assignment to do some market survey.

City markets are about 3 Km from the insti. Auto guys charge heavily but theres no other alternative. Most of my friends here are from bangalore or mumbai and so they find everything very cheap from food to beer.

Bulk of the people here have a fair amount of workex. There seem to be very few freshers around here. So seems like I am gonna have a tough time. All the best to me.

Some Pics..

2007-04-10T21:55:00.000+05:30

They say laughter is the best medicine. (9th Apr '07)

The E-Wingers,
thats what we call ourselves (9th Apr '07)

Mehsana Water Park (mar '07)

Mehsana Water Park (mar '07)

Hiranandani St., Mumbai. One place to be!!
(mar '07)

2007-04-02T12:58:00.000+05:30

Lots of stuff happenening in the past one week.

Farewell
So the next big activity on campus will be our farewell. And preparations have started. Seems like its gonna be in the next week. But there have been rumours that farewell will be in the college itself. Now that will be a spoiler.

Batch Shirt
One more activity in the college is abt the batch momento. Hope we have a good nice sweat shirt

XLRI (Waitlisted)
Have been waitlisted in XLRI. Going by the past trends, I should be able to convert this. Its my first convert of the season (and I fear that it will be the only one). Now gotta decide whether to join or not. Thats a million dollar question. Lets c.

Mehsana Trip
Had an awesome time at the water park in Mehsana. Shall post the pics soon. Got back old memories (we had been to mehsana 2 yrs back). To beat the heat it is one place to be. Rs. 150 is the entry fee. And you are charged extra just in case u rent a costume. However I strongly recommend you to buy one rather than rent.

Maninagar
Had heard a lot abt the work our people are doing there. And am lucky to have got a chance to see it. It was an overwhelming experience. Good work mishra, way to go..

BTP
And after all that fun comes the work part. BTP has just started (again). We are trying to implement stuff and have got some breakthroughs. Hope we finish it all on time.

coaching instis

2007-03-25T20:07:00.000+05:30

Never knew my blog was so famous.... got three, yes three requests for a new post!!! well for a writer of my calibre this is something like winning the oscars.

With all my interviews done, there is something I think I have to look back upon. No doubt this season has been a bad one for me as far as interviews are concerned... I have my own set of reasons but lets not get into that.

The more I learn about the coaching centres and their working, the more I get repelled from it. The main reason why I hate them is that the coaching centres which prepare you for these enterances to MBA colleges teach you how to fake. To begin with they give you fake APTITUDE. Well cat is an exam to test your aptitude. Now what these coaching centres do is that instead of teaching you how to approach a problem, how the problem works, and how can a solution be derived, they teach you the solution and just that. They bombard you with a thousand problems (plagiarism zindabad!!) and ask you to solve them. And hope that you get a similar problem in CAT or any such enterance. This is what I call faking APTITUDE.

I am not saying that I did not practice these problems, I am not saying that I have not faked, but the very feeling to sit in a coaching class trying to master that art is disgusting. I feel it disgusting because I have studied from the very best when I was preparing for IIT JEEs, the Ramaiah Coaching Centre. They unlike the coaching institutes were problem setters and did not plagiarise. They taught the very basics (I still remember learning the proof of 1 + 0 = 1 altho it would never be required in IITJEE) and then how to make the problems, coz when u know how to make it, you know how to solve it. This unfortunately is not the case with these MBA coaching institutes.

Well another place they ask you to fake is in the GD/PI process. I am against this also. People on the other side of the table in an interview are among the best in the country. They know what kind of a student they need. Its something like faking about the symptoms to a doctor, you would never get a desired treatment. I had decided that I will not lie come what may... even if I seem rude. If they cannot accept me the way I am, they are at a loss.

XLRI Interview

2007-03-04T07:48:00.000+05:30

Had my BM interview yesterday in mumbai
fresher, BTech in ICT, good percentiles, good acads, decent extracurriculars.

panel:Prof. Rajeev Sharma(L), Prof. Supriya Kumar De(C) and Prof. J.Singh(R)

R: So Siddharth, are u from Gujarat?
Me: Yes sir
R: Has Parzania released in Gujarat, did u get a chance to watch it?
Me: It has not released in Gujarat, it is being shown to the MPs here. I did not get a chance to watch it.
R: How do u rate ur performance in college.
Me: Good, Gave some statistics.
R: Whats ICT?
Me: Told
R: Why is it easy to eavesdrop in mobile phones.
Me: Gave the reason, told that CDMA has better security.
R: why is CDMA not popular then?
Me: told
R: why MBA?(in some other language and words)
Me: Told. Told abt entreprenuership and all.
R: In which area?
Me: DSP. Also told him why I wanted to be an entreprenuer.
R: Do you think govt must give tax holidays to entreprenuers
Me: Agreed and gave reasons

All this while [C] was going thru my file.

C: You have got all A's and B's, why have you got 2 D's.
Me: Gave him the reasons for that
R: But you will have such courses in MBA too..
Me: told him that I had improved then, in fact the last two courses I had got an A. In this I mentioned that I had taken a course on Satyajit Ray
C: Compare Ray and Ritwik Ghatak
Me: Sir, I donot know any movies of Ritwik Ghatak.
C: How do u see Ray as an artist?
Me: Told
C: Which Ray movies have you seen
Me: Told
C: What do you interpret from Aparajito and Apur Sansar
Me: Told

C: tell me what is Linear Dependence and Linear Independence of signals
Me: told, mentioned abt basis vectors
C: What are basis vectors and what are its properties
Me: Told
C: Asked for an example to explain the same.
Me: Gave an example to show linear dependency.
C: Give a practical example, where it can be used.
Me: Gave another example in which I used the word variables

Another few questions on variables.

L: Question on probability
Me: Am not really sure if he was convinced with my answer.
L: Something abt entreprenuership
Me: Gave an answer
L: What is your ultimate aim, beyond all this
Me: Told.
L: You may leave now.

21st Feb

2007-02-21T23:35:00.000+05:30

First trip to delhi alone. This time unlike the mumbai train, this train stopped only at 7 stations and most of them at night. So you wont find too many peddlers/beggars/free ride passengers in the train.
Also most of ur co-passengers are hindi speaking people. This is also for the first time.
Stood in a long queue to get a return ticket cancelled only to realise that I was in the wrong queue. The good thing was that the room was air conditioned which was quite a relied from the hot amdavadi sun.

I was hungry since the only thing I had for the day was the lunch at 12. The dinner served was good. In fact excellent. It was hot, tasty and adequate. This was for the first time I had such good food in train. It was expensive tho.

Went off to sleep for 9hrs straight. Longest I have slept for some time now. Felt good.
Got down the train, got the ticket canceled and took a bus going to Mehrauli. Thats somewhere near IIT.

I dont know if I am right but people in delhi seem more colorful than those in bombay. U find most of them in bright clothes. May be its the complexion, may be its the weather, may be its that time of the day but I felt so.

Took an auto to IIT campus.

Entered another IIT campus, A place where I could have belonged to. A place where I thot I deserved to belong. I could have been one of those students carrying their bags walking and talking about string theory and thermodynamics and what not. Somehow felt sad for a moment. Felt bad.

Anyways, got down at the Nilgiri hostel. The hostel naming system is worthy of note. All hostels are named on the mountains, Nilgiri, karakoram, kumaon, aravali... and the hostel lobbies are named after rivers probably originating or passing through those mountains.

There are some good things abt the hostel, each hostel has a common room where u can watch tv or read newspapers and magazines. Each hostel has an std booth and a xerox shop. Each hostel has a tt table. there is a public address system for mail collection. And each hostel has a guard.

Was allotted a room. A two-bed-room. 'twas small. It had a bed, a computer table and a cup board and almost no place to walk. As soon as u get out of the bed, u are out of the room.

Food was good, satisfying but yes in the long run(which could be as short as a week), one would get bored of the food.

Slept for some time. And then moved out of campus. Saw people smoking in campus, you would rarely find one at DA-IICT. Surfed net. Had chat with people, am happy :)

U get special food on thursdays, just like we have monday morning brajwasi's. There was unlimited maggi, pure ketchup, cutlet and bread and pastry. Had another stomachful dinner.

walked along the streets for almost 2 hrs with my roomie(JMET 2nd ranker). Walked till we were dead tired. Then went back and slept.

Vishwakarma Bhavan, My centre for GD/PI 2moro.

11 Feb

2007-02-11T16:14:00.000+05:30

Some things are funny.

One prepares for an exam, studies hard, puts in a lot of time and effort to understand, probably the biggest investment in terms of money and time. And fails. Fails so bad that one does not even realise that he's gonna fail.

And the same person writes other exams with zilch preparation and gets thru not one but all of them. Ya, I got thru FMS also. One more exam with '0' preparation.

And then one wonders what really went wrong, how did this happen. Its frustrating to say the least. Its not like my IIT exam where I did not know what I was doing and that I was doing just because everyone was doing. Here every decision I took, I took it consciously. So what it means is that I was wrong in judging something. And what frustrates you more is that you have no idea of what went wrong.

But then why am I not satisfied with what I got? to simply put it, its because I did not prepare for it.

I see myself and I see my roomie, that guy studied hard and planned for every mark. The kind of preparation he had done was amazing. I got thru the same with near zilch preparation. And so I will never be able to relish the sweet success as there was no hard work, no planning involved. Its just that I also got thru.

And the funniest part is.... My CAT percentile is 70.31 and my XAT percentile is 97.93... Now if these exams were a test of standard english language. How do you explain this? I am sure luck has not played a role in either....

Another day wasted.

2007-02-09T20:09:00.000+05:30

Have a lot of work listed in my to - do list of my Google Desktop. But just dont feel like working. This sem has made me very lazy. There's no time table. Discipline has gone to dogs. There's nothing you are looking forward to.

As one of my friends said "This sem is like unemployment".

SIBM GD/PI

2007-02-03T08:37:00.000+05:30

So then first interview of the season? How will it be? what will they ask? Whatever happens I hope I don't loose confidence...

Took a lift to baner phatak(pune) and then an auto to SIBM. People in pune give lifts readily... It saves a lot of money.

A not so impressive building but a huge huge logo. Parents and candidates waiting outside. I entered the building. Was asked for my call letter. And was directed to first floor.
One small room where people were arranged in groups. I met m group members here. We had to write an essay on "Ethics of Profit Making". Had done a mock GD on similar lines. So did not have much trouble in writing the essay. Then we had some time before group task and group discussion. All the team members sat in a circle introducing ourselves... The coordinator did a good job in putting the group in sync.

We introduced ourselves. There were two of them who got 5 IIM calls and for whom this was like a mock process (one of them had the same percentile as mine, 99.73) . There was one with English Honors and 2 years work ex. Some with a workex of over 3 years. Some with infy. A classical dancer, a drummer from delhi. I guess there were only two freshers including me.

Then we were directed to a room to perform a group task. Each one of us was blindfolded and randomly placed in the room and we had to form a square using a rope. We were given 7 minutes. And we could not form a square. We came no where close to it. So a bad start.

Then we played another game and I fared bad in that as well.

Next we had breakfast for ourselves. Cheese sandwich and chips.. Had two courses. Felt good. We bakared with our coordinator for some time. And then we went for the GD.

It was a case study, a dilemma situation. One had to choose between ethics and job.
I was in a bad position there. With 4 members in the same line as mine, I could not see them well. And the moderator right in front of me.

Spoke a good point. It was discussed for some time. Tried to speak in between for a couple of times but was stopped. It was decent overall.

We came back to the room and had to wait there for the PI's. My number was 8th.
Three interviewers I1(who did all the talking) , I2 (who never spoke, probably just observed), I3(came in late, only sat for some time).

I: May I come in?
I1yes
I: Good Morning Sir.
I1: So Siddharth (looking at my forms etc..) born in Raipur and Hyderabad??
I: Explained him my story... Raipur -> Hyderabad and all that.
I1: Is your father in Railways?
I: No Sir, explained him where he is..
I1: You have good marks, why do u want to do an MBA...
I: Some gyan..
I1: Why not MTech?
I: Not interested in research.
I1: Why not MSc?
I: (Frankly did not know the difference between the two) Sir after my btech what I understand is that I like to work with end products and I am not interested in research.
I1: But there are a lot of institutes in Gandhinagar..
I: Gave some gyan. Told him that I was not interested in Advertising and so not MICA.
I1: What was your snap score?
I: Blah
I1: Did you write any exams?
I: Yes sir, CAT and XAT. Got a good percentile in cat but could not clear cutoffs. Shortlisted in XAT.
I1: Looking at my photograph in the form. This does not seem like you.
I: Sir that is because of laziness.. I did not shave for long time.
and some more blah on that.
Then I left.
A very short one, very general. No acads, no achievements... Dont know what will they judge me on.

Came back, started chatting with group members again. Went back home. Thot of taking a lift, but was very exhausted.

31st Jan 2007

2007-02-03T08:17:00.000+05:30

Had to start off at 3:20 AM to board a train from Kalupur. Train was an hour late but made up for the loss during the journey. The train journey was quite an experience, lots of things to learn/observe.

I was in a SC (not scheduled caste but seating chair) compartment which was more or less like a general one. The only difference being you had to pay more for ur seat and that you could claim your seat. The similarity being that you will have to share that seat anyways.

One good thing was that people were clean and did not throw groundnut peels, empty snack packets, last drops of tea on the floor. And that there was movement always, old faces going, new faces coming. All in all I was not getting bored.

After some time I saw an old couple standing at the door and asked them to occupy my seat instead. I did not mind because I was bored of sitting at the same place unable to stretch myself. There was absolutely no personal space.

I stood beside a peddler who was selling bread cutlet. After getting his booty from my compartment he moved towards the next one. And since there was no connecting lobby between my compartment and the other, he had to go out standing on the hook which connects one compartment to the other. And in the process he was hanging in mid air while train was at its maximum speed, thereby risking his life. While I saw him do that I was almost stunned at how much risk these people take just to make a small income.

And then I get an SMS that there's an interview call from CGI. So plan to attend that too.

Got down at Dadar, took a bus to pune... Felt good stretching in an AC Volvo after the train journey.
Had a filling dinner (I did not have anything except a samosa for one whole day). Went off to sleep coz I had an interview the next day.

BCS TA

2007-01-18T22:40:00.000+05:30

A new year. A new semester. A new course. A new bunch of students.

Yes TA for BCS (Basics of Communication Systems).
Finally got a communications course. Huh. DSA (my prev. adventure as a TA) was sick.

But it does not seem all that easy for I have forgotten how I used PSpice and CRO sometimes throws unexpected outputs. Gets difficult to debug since you dont know the proper working. And all you know is how to deal with expected errors in the circuit and in the CRO. But this will be much better than DSA.

So then I had my first lab. It was a cake walk. Just playing with a capacitor and a resistor. Had fun soldering broken wires of CRO probes. It was fun see people line up for getting their lab journals signed. It was only some time later that I figured out the reason for the same. The MTech TA was asking questions to students like viva when they went for correction. Hence the line. Anyways... it was fun giving autographs.

Whats more, I get to design the next lab. Hurray.

2007

2007-01-17T09:36:00.000+05:30

Its been long since I have written an entry here. Can't give an excuse that I was busy for I have been lazing around all the time doing nothing significant.
Cat scorecard was a big blow. My expectations were high. They were not baseless, coz I was clearing the cutoffs in all sections and in the math and DI sections by a huge huge margin. It was not until I looked at my scorecard that reality dawned on me. New year did not start well for me. Bad news on the very second day.

I had decided not to mention all this on my blog. But its a painful thing. Difficult to come to terms with. But life has to move on.
Then came the goodie goodie results a rank 91, a rank 99, a good score with would easily give me a rank below 50. More results awaited and hope they are good too.

So then I am undecided as to where to go, job + another try or one of these institutes.
A plausible solution is give your best shot and crack GD/PIs and leave your decision to a later date. Well then I started to prepare for GD/PIs. At a snail pace though.

Bermuda Triangle
Philanthrophy
DA-IICT
Iran
Anne frank
Jhumpa Lahiri
Dhirubhai Ambani
Mahatma Gandhi
Guru
Lage Raho Munnabhai
Indo US Nuclear Deal
NP Completeness
Satyajit Ray
ADAG
Communications

Business today
Economic times
Indian Express
Times Of India
Frontline

This is what I have been doing these days. Add to it a few hours of BTP. And loads and loads of sleep.

Merry Christmas

2006-12-25T09:49:00.000+05:30

Source

187 Mumbai Life Stories

2006-12-24T08:49:00.000+05:30

The Indian Express carries a daily column on 187 deaths as a result of the Bombay Blasts on July 7, 2006. Every day there is an article about the life of one person who died in these blasts. Sometimes he is the sole bread earner. Sometimes he is the only son of his aging parents. Sometimes he leaves behind a 2 yr old son who doesn’t realize the loss of his father.

What these blasts did is that it left a void in many people’s lives, something that can never be filled.

This campaign by Indian Express is really nice in the sense that it makes those whose lives remain untouched by the blasts feel for those who are suffering because of it. One of the most heartening stories I had read was the death of a person who left behind a 5-month old kid who had a hole in his heart(read this ). And his mother did not have enough money to fund the operation. I wish I could do something about it, more than that I wish someone has done something about it by now.

Read the 187 Life Stories

My 2 cents on Reservation

2006-12-23T17:09:00.000+05:30

Motive:

To bring in equality between people of lower class and that of the upper class by providing easy access to education.

Well it is a fact that for admissions into most of the premiere institutes there is lot of competition and that people resort to n-number of coaching and training programmes spending thousands of rupees on the same. And no doubt that the coaching programmes help the student to a great extent. So a low class boy will not get access to these training programmes and hence not a seat in the premiere institutes.

Well here what is assumed that the people from the OBC/SC/ST quota are poor and that the poor are the ones from OBC/SC/ST quota.
This assumption is flawed.

A lot of people (may not be high in percentage terms) have taken the benefit of the quota system and have become rich enough to support their family. What has not changed is that they still are called OBC's. What has not changed is that they or their family is still entitled to the quota benefits.

So what happens is that children of such families have access to coaching institutes as well as are entitled for quota. So they are the ones who fill the seats reserved for OBC/SC/ST's which means that the one who need cannot avail of the benefits.

So the obvious question is what is the solution?
For a country like India, with such a high population, it is IMPOSSIBLE to come up with a fool proof solution, what we could do at best is minimize such occurances.

When we look at the motive again, it is to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor by educating the poor by making access to institutes easier.

One solution that comes to my mind is that look for the assets and holdings of the family. That may give a pointer as to how poor the candidate is. All assets are declared ( I suppose). So to trace this may not be impossible. So all those rich lads with an OBC cap with them will not be able to contest for an OBC seat.
Another way could be that if a generation in a family has got the advantage of using a quota, the sucessive generations should be barred from the same.

So whats the hullaballoo all about?

Firstly, should there be a quota?
Should there be quota for higher education?
How much quota?
Who should be in and who should be out?

There are a lot more questions.

Amongst all this we must remember a few things. First that this implementation of quota is almost irreversible in nature, once implemented, there will not be any government who would dare to reverse this for the sheer reason that this will effect their votebank drastically. Probably this is also one of the reasons why political parties have been mum over this issue leave alone coming all out against quota.

IIFT Result Out

2006-12-23T16:53:00.001+05:30

IIFT result out. And I am not selected.
Cant say that I am dejected, coz I had given up half way in the exam. According to me, it was a lot of donkey work to get the answers. And I paid the price for such an attitude.

Waiting for some good results. :)

Nostalgia

2006-11-25T08:48:00.000+05:30

I do not know how to start this post.

Somethings just seem weird. Yesterday some of my friends finished with their set of lectures for BTech. Time flies off and I would finish the same very soon. And that would mean the end of Btech, a journey that I have cherished.

Sometimes things repeat. What you did yesterday, your juniors are doing today and when you see that all those nostalgic feelings come back.

Right from the start when you came to councelling, wishing praying that you get a seat. Trying to be close to your parents. Then when we come back to the college next time, we see a lot of other kids travelling the same route, make some friends in the train and some unlucky ones get a taste of ragging here itself.

Then comes the ragging episodes where you want to kick that senior in his a** but you just have to control all that temper (BTW I was never ever ragged, my claim, that I was too smart for them).

The first insems, you try your best to cover everything, the first time you get a score of zero, you get a taste of D grade, you get to hear 'what the fuck' from a professor.

Then the first insem break, everyone trying to extend his vacation by one day, spend one more day at home. Then the final exams, for which you start preparing from a month earlier (and
now, I have finals day after and still have no idea of the portion).

Then the best thing, when you come back after the semester break in january.

Those yells, those shouts, some warm welcomes. And then everyone narrates instances of narrow escapes they had at home.

And by now every thing is routine, lectures, coming late to lectures, sleeping there. And one thing you get is attitude and arrogance, that you are invincible. Something i guess most of us get but none of us shed it off.

fast tracking >>

Then comes the third semester, people consulting their seniors as to which elective to take and so on. Asking all funny questions, trying be sure they do not go on the wrong track.

And when it comes to asking questions, nothing can beat the questions asked regarding further studies. CAT or GRE? TIME or IMS? October or January? This list is endless.

We have the placements, anxious faces, not sure where they will land, each one trying to look better, smarter than the other. Each one cheering the other up. Sharing ties, shoes, belts, watches. Those moments of jubiliation, those moments of joy when the charts are hung and when your nameappears there. Then consoling your friends telling them that there is always tomorrow.

You must be wondering that why am I talking about all this. Its because I have seen my seniors do it, I have gone through the same phases, I see my juniors doing the same, people change, things don't.

What the senior batch has to do is to guide the juniors in the best possible way, I had very good senior friends, always ready to help. And I am deeply indebted to them.

I hope I am a good senior too.

TI DSP Design Contest 2006

2006-11-18T07:48:00.000+05:30

Okay, so we won the Texas Instruments DSP Design Contest 2006. That's a lot of recognition and money.

Am happy. :))

Finally I have something to write in my CV which is related to DSP.

Could not have expected anything better before CAT.

Spoke to Chakka Sir, he also seemed happy and did not mind when we told that we did all this at the cost of BTP.

So what next, First CAT, then a lot (I mean a lot) of hurdles coz the TIDC falls on 1st Dec and clashes with the exams. Oh and if we are through these, then preparing for the presentation and also preparing for the exams. If thats not all there's JMET coming. So having a really really horrible 10 days.

Just hope everything goes fine.

All the best to all the 'CAT people'. Hope we all phodofy.

http://tiidesigncontest.ext.ti.com/results.html

2006-11-11T19:24:00.000+05:30

just a week left for CAT.
The library is filled with people preparing for cat. Everywhere you find test papers and study material...
A week left and I dont know what to do. I just dont feel like doing anything. Just dont want to get over with all this.

Somehow its a very weird feeling. You prepare for something for so long and it will all get over in less than a day. Nov 19 will decide what I am, irrespective of what I have done in the past.

After the exam, Some people will be on a high, some on a low. Some may just get lucky, some may be a tad unlucky. Some who would expect calls would have their head high and those who loose out will try and find a place to hide.
There will be an invisible barrier between people. Something that I hate. One day and attitudes will change.

Competition is something I have never liked but its always been competition thats got the best out of me. I feel I have always performed whatever I have because there has been someone to compete with.

People, wish me luck.

...

2006-10-05T01:47:00.000+05:30

I was just pondering over this. Our college has set a yearly budget of about Rs. 4 Lakh for cultural activities and a similar amount for sport activities, but what is really put into use is barely a fraction of it. Reason?? Well not one but many

The 'Janta' is ignorant about all these numbers.
The people at those positions are so lazy to organise events
Even if the people are not lazy they are stuck facing difficulties from the administration side.

I have an example of what good can happen if these people are little active. One of my friends in the HMC handles administration so well that now any complaint from his wing is immediately dealt with. This has become possible onl because he knows the rules and knows whom to catch when.

Now compare the former situation with with what happens in our country. Well the magnitude of numbers involved increases manifold. The janta again being ignorant about the policies, schemes of the government.

A simple example is that of the food grains, While more than half of India starves at night the food grains are lying unused, add to it the cost of storing them. Besides this a major part of this storage is disposed off either because they get infested or are eaten by rodents. So the capacity utilisation is about 50 - 60 %. Which is quite low.

However if there was an efficient public distribution system, by efficient I mean people being actively involved, then these food items could have been put to a better use before they got spoilt and ofcourse you wold earn some revenue out of it.

I know all this is easier said than done, and there are sincere people making sincere efforts. I have a feeling that its always the administrative department which is the most lethargic one. I remember when I had gone to dubai airport for the first time I was so impressed with their speedy action. Here the powers are given in the hands of ground staff who is directly interacting with passengers. Unlike the system of hierarchy in India.
What this does is that it reduces the delays giving better performance and also reduces the number of people involved. Indian Airlines has recruited 400 employees per plane where as the international standard is 140 empoyees/plane. No wonder the airline is taking a beating when it comes to cutting costs.

vibrant Gujarat

2006-10-03T13:49:00.000+05:30

After a dreadful mock, I had gone to this place on the last day of navratri, thats yesterday.
Its a festival sponsored by the government of gujarat and gujarat tourism aiming at showcasing gujarat to the world.

The ground was well lit and completely carpeted. Dancers from many places in the country like assam, nagaland punjab and many places outside the country like Nepal gave performances on the stage.For all those latecomers who could not gain access to the front seats to watch the dances, there were projectors beaming the video.

A major part of this was similar to an exhibition where traders, artisans from all parts of Gujarat came to display and sell their products. Hence the products here came directly from the suppliers, and so were quite cheap.

Since this was a Gujarat Tourism initiative, there were a lot of stalls having models of Religious sites, heritage sites in Gujarat. These were quite innovatively done and were informative.

Food stalls were another good thing, every major hotel from Grand Bhagwati to Haveli to RasRanjan to Radhe had a stall thronged by people as if food was being distributed for free. One complaint that there were not adequate dustbins outside the food courts, so if a person buys food and decided to roam around visiting stores like we did, he would end up either holding the plate or the cup or throwing it in the corners or the buckets kept for fire fighting. No wonder India litters on roads.

And for those like me who had gone for birdwatching(other than shopping) there was plenty in store, good because you get to see and your ears are spared. :)

Google

2006-09-29T21:00:00.000+05:30

Google is perhaps the Greatest innovations in the field of IT revolutionising the internet usage. It started with its search engine and then the IGB Gmail and has been rolling out a host of services since then. From blogs (blogger.com) to orkut to google news and what not. Each of its services better than the other, and a class apart from any other competitor.

These days search is synonymous with googling.

But somehow I have started disliking its search service, for it more often than not gives me irrelavent results. The other day I had to spend nearly a day to find a site which gave a tutorial or code for bandpass sampling in matlab.

For those who are in communications must be knowing that bandpass sampling exists everywhere, and matlab is one indisposable tool for a communication engineer, so bandpass sampling in matlab must be very much possible and theres got to be enuf literature on web for google to spot out.

I tried to search for forums and in forums for the same but google gave me links to posts that were 5-6 years old and unanswered too. This accourding to me is )*(#$^)#$

Well this is not the only time... I guess there is still a lot of scope for improvement. Page ranks just dont work when forums are concerned coz they are visited by so many people that ranking them on such a basis will lead nowhere.

Asmanjhus...

2006-09-26T18:41:00.000+05:30

Sometimes the law of dichotomy does not hold good, sometimes the Aristotlian Logic which states that answer to any question can be either true or false fails.

One cannot be certain as to which path is correct, one such thing just happened to me.

The newspaper boy(npb) who delivers Hindu to our room was excessively charging us.

Hindu is not printed in Ahmendabad, so it is couriered from Delhi, and hence goes thru two middlemen, one called the 'Agent' and other the npb.

the npb charged us Rs. 1.5 as service charge on each newspaper, claiming that these were the rates set by the agent, Not knowing the facts we blindly agreed to what he said. But something was not correct.

We investigated (by finding out from library and calling the agent) and found that npb's claims were farse and that the Agent charged Rs. .5 only. This and something else together made up for Rs. 27 per month. Thats Rs. 13.5 per head, something that I spent eating chips while writing this blog.

This is a paltry amount for we hostelers, but when multiplied with volume (say 100) turns out to be substantial (given that margins for a newspaper wala are very small). Hence exposing this can burn a big hole in his pocket and not exposing means allowing him to cheat my own friends... which is also not acceptable.

I guess I will go with the former.

One of the best pics I have seen

2006-09-23T15:32:00.000+05:30

This pic manages to keep me spell bound...

tomatoes

2006-09-19T23:47:00.000+05:30

At tomatoes 17 Sep 06, this resturant has a great ambience.

This is a guitar signed by music greats...

E wing ke dost...
at tomatoes

Me!!

SHOCK VALUE!!!
This is what people had to say about the pic

ABey kya ho gaya........Kal tak to thik dikhai de raha tha......
photo mein kuch zyada hi studious lag rahe ho
wht's wid d glasses mr. nerdy??
nice pic (especially glass )
cool specs...
Looking like dexter ...
u look like a prof in this pic..
lookin gandhiji
u aping pabari?
pucca mathematician lag rahe ho!!

3 Sep 2006

2006-09-04T13:31:00.000+05:30

Its been a long time since I have attended a wedding, had a chance to attend one this sunday.

Life for most of us has become very hectic, and with so many schedules etc.... its hard for one whole
family to have a get together. Weddings are one of those occasions which the entire family attends.

It was a wedding of one of my cousins (oh btw I had never met him before) in baroda. So naturally many of my near and dear relatives were present. And so its fun time.... Lots of good food, good gals, and cousins... But the fun ENDS HERE.

The good gals have excessive make ups that make me feel out of place, I feel as if I have come to watch a cartoon fancy dress competition. Food is made according to the taste of the larger section and so is SWEET.

And if its not enuf, I need to tell every tom, dick and Harry what I am currently doing.....

P1: What are u doing Beta??
Sid: Uncle I am studing in Ahmedabad

p1: what??
Sid: ICT, information and communication technology

p1: where??
Sid: Dhirubhai Ambani Institute.... by the time I say this the other person is looking here and there showing no interest in what I am telling. Damn, Coudnt we have a short name...

So after some time and experience Sid (ya me) became smart...

P2: What are u doing Beta??
Sid: Uncle I am studing in Ahmedabad

p2: what??
Sid: Engineering, IT

p2: where??
Sid: Reliance College.

p2: Phir to placement reliance main pakka hai??
Sid: nahin, and I start making faces.

Oh and if all this is not enuf, people get some sadistic pleasures in testing my memory... Every now and then, beta mujhe pehchana.... beta yaad hain.... accha batao main kaun hoon and this and that...
And all i do is keep mum rather than telling something wrong and embarassing the other. It was after some time and after some thinking that I could set all my relations with people right, I could relate to what people had told me, thanks to some guidance given by papa.

And then there are some people who want to find fault in everything thats organised, the word adjustment seems to be absent from their dictionary, and there begins a series of euphemisms..... ufff...

Sometimes it makes me feel that i wud have been better off being a wedding crasher, then its only the food that I wud have to bother about..... lol

All in all its fun to observe and experience all this....

Wish there were more than 24 hours...

2006-08-31T12:25:00.000+05:30

24 Hours in a day just dont seem enough... yeh dil maange more!!!

Wish there were more than 24 hours...
Wish I could put genuine efforts in everything I wanted...
Wish I had time to read all the magazines that are my favourites and pursue all the articles I liked..
Wish I could relish every bit of food i ate...
Wish life was more than a monotonic curve sloping downwards in an abyss...
Wish I could stop and appreciate the minutest things....
Wish I could spend more time with my friends and loved one(s).

Oh ya, I need to manage time better....

Still Undecided

2006-08-26T01:55:00.000+05:30

It is for the nth time that I have a doubt as regards to persue MTech or MBA. What I am sure of is that it is gonna be one of them.

As of now, I am preparing for MBA. But every time we go to Chakka Sir to discuss the BTech Project, every time we are into a lengthy discussion, I feel that this is the place I belong to, this is happening... MBA is not where I want to belong. Or is everything just an illusion.... Am sure I wont be able to persue all this in the indstry. I might just end up being a slave who has to perform so and so task in so and so time. And all the enth I have regarding the subject, all the knowledge I have will go to dogs.

What makes me persue MBA apart from the glitter around is the aptitude it requires. Most of the aptitude the institutes require as a pre-requisite comes naturally to me (atleast I think so). so why not go for it...

oh god!! so confused I am!!!

MY first week as TA

2006-08-26T01:53:00.000+05:30

My first week as a TA

ya, so there I am.... selected as a TA for DSA. Not the course that I wud have liked to teach, but thats fine... I have always been obsessed with algorithms, this will be a testing time.

I have always wanted to be a TA of a subject in which I have a lot of clarity, One in which I have
command and one in which I will be able to communicate better, I dont want to be one which students abhor. But I guess not everything goes your way. TA, Teacher and criticism are part of the same boat and have to be together come what may....

Being a UG TA I do not have as many responsibilities my PG colleague, am supposed to work for just 8 hours a week which includes attending labs. And hence I also get only a fraction of what my PG counterpart gets... but thats enuf for my survival...

I have always had the feeling that I cannot be a good teacher, for I donot have the quality of "Infinite Patience", something that is a requisite for a good teacher.
whenever I used to teach my brother math, at some point I would break and give him a scale for I cudn't bear the fact that he couldnt get those logics which I thought were "obvious" and "trivial".
It is said that even the best surgeons shiver when they operate on their kins body for they cannot see even the slightest pain on their kins face.

Perhaps I have many a milestones to cross before I become a good teacher.

INDIpendence day

2006-08-15T19:28:00.000+05:30

A Happy Independence Day to All Indians..

Seems like this Independence hay has gone quite 'incident free'. Happy for all of them.
Woke up today but was not in a mood to go to the indep. day celeb coz the boil in my hand was itching. Still collected all courage and got ready to attend the flag hoisting thing. People had already arranged themselves in queues bfore I reached there and the hon. director (who is also called Mr. India, coz he is never seen altho he is around) was addressing the gathering. And my bad luck that i just went and stood right in the middle of all the professors. Unable to comment, unable to stand still.

After some time the speech was over and then came the most irritating part of it all.... group songs...
I guess these songs are sung so that one gets that feeling of one nation, unity and all that. Now what is the purpose of singing a bengali song when 90% of the audience cannot understand the song, appreciate it. Not understanding the language only makes the song a pain in the ear. Besides whats the rationale behind singing a song from one region only.
Singing a bengali song is fine if one is singing for a bengali public.

Wish I cud go and tell this to SB.

Ethics

2006-08-05T00:51:00.000+05:30

ETHICS
This time when I went to hyderabad.. one of my frnd provoked me into thinking about all this. What is ethics to me??

To me ethics is a set of rules, constraints which is not written in the book but one follows because one feels he has a moral obligation towards a society or anything else. On the other had talking about every boundary you draw for yourself as ethics is inappropriate.

It's the moral conscience in cricket that made Adam Gilchrist walk off even after he was given not out. This is not in the books and he cud continue playing but.....
Not to talk about thing X to a person Y because he may feel offended is not ethics. Its mere common sense to me.

So when we talk about ethics, we are talking about generalised constraints. But this surely differs from person to person. What may seem appropriate to someone may not seem the same to the other. There is no definitive set of constraints when we talk about ethics.

I was asked whether I can claim that person A is the best or that he/she is most suited or so. Again to me, 'BEST' is a vague term. Firstly what is the benchmark in calling someone best, is it defined if at all. I cannot call myself best in anything even though I am better than the lot. This is because there is always something, something exists that points that you are not perfect. Everytime you think that you are good, there comes out something to disprove you. So claiming someone or something is the best is stepping on shaky grounds.

I know I am good in maths, am surely in the top lot in the college, i have a very strong intutive power, touchwood, but never ever will I claim that I am best, coz I know my weak points, there are many areas I am still unaware of. So how can I be the best.

Also, when I am not the best, how can I judge the other person?? One thing I have learnt is not to comment on what a person does until u have done it all by yourself. Besides this, how can you judge a person if you donot know him/her completely. There is so much of knowledge in him/her that is latent to you.

Life according to me is too short to be the best even in one aspect, one can only try to be there. what one should do is that he must always try to be better today than what he was yesterday. Its just that we have to keep learning.
I cannot claim that I am(or for that matter anyone) best.

Finally Home

2006-08-03T22:06:00.000+05:30

Mumbai Airport: Terminal 1A. 27 Jul
So, flight rescheduled twice, finally cancelled. Am stranded trying to find an alternate(read cheap) means of transport at such short notice. Tried Indian Airlines @ 6000/-, rail - no seats, jet airways - 4800/-... now what!!
Dropped the idea of going gome, feeling sad and depressed. Called up a friend, was chatting with her for some time. Then thot that I shall give another whole hearted try. It was 5 and I could see an empty berth in a train leaving ahm at 9. So I rushed to sachivalaya in a rickety auto at the speed of .001 mac(only means of transport) and managed to book the berth. Took a quick bath, dumped stuff in my bag and rushed to get a bus. And then... it rained, literally poured so heavy that i was completely drenched.... bad omen first up.

So whatever, decided that no of this will deter me. Got into the train and prayed that I reach safe. And btw... the train was very clean.. Reached Mumbai at 6 and dunno what to do next. WOW!!!! Tried a couple of bus operators.. Dad called up and told me to check out fares of air deccan and indian...Took a train from borivali to vile parle.. one thing I noticed there was taht people had become more vigilant regarding the overhead baggages.. every now and then i saw people looking around....

Tried another air deccan... bingo.... flight for 2000. not bad at all... but to get that i had to walk all the way from one terminal building to another to go get some cash... thats coz air deccan counter didnt have a swipe card machine. man these low frill airlines... think that by offering us cheap rates rule us... there is no sense of moral obligation at all.. drenched again... fuck u deccan

Now I am in mumbai terminal.. hada nice breakfast.... watching people checking in... good stuff here.. vela people... make sure u come to the airport 6-10 hrs before departure... believe me... u wont be disappointed.
ya, forgot to mention... i guess this ones a new terminal, quite good and sexy look... unlimited supply of newspapers.. asian age, ET, TOI, Hindu, MID DAY, Mumbai Mirror and all taht.... so if u are tired of watching gals play sudoku's. And if thats not enuf... u have lightening fast bsnl broad band @ 22/hr.... damn cheap... so people go go go...

And if all this was not enuf... adding twist to it... there was an unidentified baggage left in the terminal. There are repeated announcements and the whole section and later the whole terminal was evacuated.. bomb disposal squad and sniffer dogs were pressed into service. Finally, it turned out that some absent minded passenger had left his/her bag in the terminal and that it was safe.

Sometimes you are so close to death that then do u realise the importance of every moment. The bag cud have had a bomb, it could have exploded.. but then we were just lucky... Now waiting for security check and shall fly off soon to hyd...

10 Jul

2006-07-16T00:16:00.000+05:30

After a hectic week, I took a day off and slept and slept and slept. Thot of writing a mcok after that but was too lazy. Utne main hi Corporate dekhne ka plan ban gaya.
Had heard a lot about it, story different, good and all that.. and to an extent it lived upto the hype.

I have observed that the films that have become successes lately have larger than life plots and sets. The foreign shoots, lavish lifestyles, the extravaganza's, the social gatherings, the festivities and along with it comes cut throat competition, infidelity, vampish wives and a host of such things.
One more example that I can site are the hindi TV soaps, KKSBKBT, KGGK and des main nikla.... these too have huge sets, in fact in KKSBKBT they celebrate every other episode... people just love watching such gala festivities.
So why is it that these films have become huge successess?? Its possibly because crowd loves such things. India has started to shine these days, people are getting richer by the day, stocksmarkets are blooming, economy is on a boom and people have more money to spend. And a lot of them can afford the luxuries in life they had only dreamt of. And these films just have the right content that arouses the audience. The soaps like KKSBKBT have a good mix of family virtues and traditions which keeps the elders and more religious glued.

BTW theres one thing that always lingers in my mind, if everyone is getting richer who's getting poorer. Its got to be a sum-zero game if there is no external input.

Jul 25 - Jul 30

2006-07-01T23:04:00.000+05:30

Weekly update:Last monday was counselling for the undergraduates. That was some fun time.... took a day off (from whatever work i do). Main reason of being there was to hear the director speak and face questions, besides look at the "quality" and the quantity. Offered some help there... basically just sit near the enterance of the lab building... and stop the brajvashi guy whenever hes getting food.
It rained for a couple of days... and then its been humid and sticky and sultry... Library and Labs are the most densely populated regions around.
Saw two movies in theatres this week... phir hera pheri and Superman Returns..Phir herapheri was a much needed break.. and so relished it... even tho it was a hindi movie and even tho there was some cheap comedy.... Watched superman because it was an eng. movie in theatres
after a long long time... so watched it on the first day itself. It didnt impress me that much...
'twas the standard superman stuff with different gadgets and slightly different story.

Apart from these also saw Final Destination 3. The deaths have just become lot more gruesome and they looked more realistic than FD-2. FD-1 still remains to best of the three for me. Besides this watched malgudi days... downloaded loads and loads of series... which i plan to watch in the coming month.

Picked up two books to read... one being "Kotler on Marketing".... in which the marketing Guru
writes for the Managers. Enjoyed reading the book... the first three chapters were enriching. The other book I picked up was "State of fear" by micheal cricton. This guy somehow manages to get me involved from the very beginning...

Besides this prepared a bit for cat... wrote a test but not satisfactory enuf.

All in all this week has been fun time for me. I think I will have to tighten the screws now... Work lot more for my RI...

Its june....

2006-06-21T22:38:00.000+05:30

Its June... time for running around.... intermediate passouts for a place from which they can graduate, under graduates looking for post graduation and lucrative jobs...

This time when I had gone home for about 4 days... I got calls from more than 6 parents who had got calls from DA-IICT. Beta kaisa hai, khaana to accha hai naa, padhai kaisi hai - zyada to nahi hai naa, ragging to nahi hai naa, placements kaisi hoti hain - what are the packages, hostel kaise hain, ladkiyon ke liye safe hain kya? and they want a gist of everything....and if that's not it.... mere paas ek NIT ki seat bhi hai aur ek yeh bhi aur ek woh bhi...
main kaun sa college loon....

yaar yehi to problem hai India mein.... we look for college before we look for subject. Since the undergrad. intake is so less and so much in demand that.. people are forced to take anything they have at hand. And whether civil engg. interests you or not, whether you are good at logic or not.. you are forced to take one. And that is what I try and tell parents... All of these institutes are equally good in teaching (if not in repute), so look for the insti which gives a subject of ur choice.

Once good thing that I realised abt this insti is that you have 2 more years to choose the discipline you want to specialise... You undergo a list of courses for CS, IT and CT. And then depending on ur intersts and your performance, you can choose a field. So for all those who are confused or who have no clue of which field would be the best for them... DA-IICT is the place to be.

Some people have a different school of thought. They say that finally we all wud end ur with an IT job what ever field we do our graduation in... finally you will be trained to do the job whoever you are. so why not graduate from a good place in whatever field so that atleast you end up with a good pay. I am not sure how correct that logic is... coz I have seen lots of my frndz loose interest in the courses and sometimes semesters coz they just don't relish them. Now most of them are of the kind who haven't come here because of sheer interest in ICT but for other reasons.... what I would suggest is to go with ur instincts... to persue a subject which you like the most.

Hope we get a good batch of students this time.....

at the Wadi station

2006-06-09T07:52:00.000+05:30

Wadi 6:30 PM
Its my old habit to look at the reservation chart to find out details of the co passengers travelling. Main reason being to look out for Age and Sex of co passengers, and if you find something relevant find the boarding and lighting stations. My copassenger happened to be a F,25 boarding at wadi. This journey was bound to be interesting. But unfortunately the maritial status is not written.

Anyways am at wadi.... Train has halted here for quite some time. What I see at the platform is quite pitying.A family (visibly Muslim) with a husband, wife, SIX children(3Sons and 3 daughters), grandma and grandpa sitting down on platform and having food. As I see this one girl spills sambhar on the floor making the floor and the baggage dirty. What is surprising is that the rest of the family is unperturbed and there is no attempt to clean. Just after a couple of minutes... the youngest daughter (say abt 2 years) shits right next tho them (yakkkkk) ... without being noticed. A few moments later grandpa steps on this, realises and walks straight to the drinking water tap and cleans his foot and footwear there. That is so unhygenic to say the least.

One can't generalise but this is a general trend with muslims in India. We cannot blame them for this. Because most of them are from slums and poor. Add to this their infinite capability to produce. Am sure if asked abt why so many children, they would answer that "Bacche to bhagwan ki den hain" and all that par yaar mandir ke prasad se bhi koi pet nahin bharta... matlab yaar mandir ka prasad bhi tinka bhar hi hota hai.... And yaar condoms are distributed for free by govt. of India.... so why take so much of burden.

U know this certainly gives us a bad picture of Muslims... and we associate them with unclean, unhygenic and all such kinds of things... But they certainly aren't that bad...Some of my friends in Iran are so clean that their manners can put u to shame. It reflects from their manners, clothes and way of living. Thats because they and their ancestors have been that way. They have had a sound background......

what is happening?

2006-05-25T01:44:00.000+05:30

Just read the first page of TOI today...
What is happening.... situation seems to be grim everywhere

India loosing two matches in a row to westindies of which one was lost chasing....

Sensex goes crashing. This is happening for the 4th consecutive session. It recovers a little but not enuf. The trading had to be closed to stop the free fall. The sensex fell below 10,000 mark. It fell over 1770 points.

Quota system to be implemented. which means that my chances of clearing cat look even grim. C'mon do something to prevent this. Marches and protests are not working. The UPA govt. is gonna have tough time to get votes from students next time. Read this interview of Arjun Singh on http://www.ibnlive.com/news/devils-advocate-arjun-singh/11063-4-0.html
Real eye opener. Mr. Singh doesn't seem to have a clue that he was raped by karan thapar.

Thousands of people protesting, strikes and what not.... some died when on hunger strike. All doctors still on strike. They are not being heard tho.

Price hikes of upto Rs. 10 on petrol, similar on diesel and abt 10 times more on LPG. What the hell, what is gonna happen to the common man.

The movie industry also suffering. Fanaa kept on hold in Gujarat for some very stupid reason that Mr. Aamir Khan has passed on a statement which is not liked by some politically influential people and hence the multiplexes here will not screen fanaa. I mean how can you do that. I thot is was a fundamental right given to us .... freedom of speech. I understand that someone like Aamir Khan must be careful when he speaks but so should the ministers... Who dares to check and correct what a minister speaks.

Da Vinci Code is also not being released. what the hell.... cmon.. i think sentiments must be kept away from all this. Just take it as a movie people.. just chill....

And yes how can I forget.... when it was party time for those who got selected in infy, none realised that it cud spell dooms day to those who didnt make it. Why?? thats because the people are more bothered to secure the job than to try for a new one. The result: Not many people are left without jobs and hence the companies have to be told not to expect too much, as a result companies may have to go back empty. This results in bad reputation and also people unplaced. The bosses are applying their wits to get out of this situtation without tampering with the placement policy...... All the best to all of them.

Placed...

2006-05-24T10:14:00.000+05:30

Cant be more relieved after this....
Placed at a desired place. Mindtree DSP.

Some miracles happening this time. I guess our batch is a phodu one. Infy offered jobs to 153 out of 163 who wrote the test. The other 10 were once whose CGPI's were less than 2.
Mindtree had come with intent to recruit only 5 in DSP, where as it is taking 14. Man what a figure.
Very happy for everyone, very happy for the batch. The scenes of joy when the infy guy declared that 153 were selected will remain in my mind for long. The roar was one of the largest I have heard. just too good. Tears were running down the cheeks, people started dancing. One of the most memorable moments.... wish someone has captured it.
Very happy that our college is making a name and is being recognised on the map.

Shall appreciate the efforts put in by Mr. Asim Banerjee and Prof. Parekh who have been toiling so hard every day. I really appreciate the way they handle people, Mr. Banerjee was specially very impressive.
Good luck to all not placed yet.

TCS Interview. HR Day 1

2006-05-23T07:41:00.000+05:30

Already had 2 interviews for the day. It was abt 7:15pm and most of us there were like dead tired. Waiting for all of it to get over.

There were two persons taking my HR interview, say X and Y.
Initially Only X was in the cabin
X calling someone
Sid: Hello Sir, Good evening
X: Hi, Looks at me... Siddharth, Can U knot and Unknot your tie.
Sid: Yes sir
X: Then please do it.

As I do this, he is talking to someone on phone.

Sid: This is more or less like it.
X: Please comb ur hair..
Sid: I combed. I have been running around for quite some time, That is the reason I am out of shape.

X: Ok Siddharth, so how long have you been waiting.
Sid: Sir for about 2 hours.
X: Does this mean TCS is unprofessional.
Sid: No sir, In fact I was pleased because I was fast tracked into a new panel twice.

X: So Siddharth where are u from??
Sid: Sir, its a lengthy answer.. told abt the whole family history.

Person Y had stepped in by now.
X: He sees the tech interview record. So Siddharth, you have done well in your technical interview. Would you mind another one hour interview instead of an HR.
Sid: I will not mind till the point that it is my area of interest.
X: I see that you are good in programming, now that you have done C, Java. If I give you to work on COBOL how would you work.
Sid: As I see programming is more of an algorithm implementation. So syntax of the language doesn't matter until you have an API. In fact, even after working in java, I refer to API's. I think it should not take more than a week or 10 days to learn a language with some proficiency.

X: Ok, Siddharth. Lets not have a normal interview. Let me ask you a controversial question.
Sid: Ok sir.
Had to keep my smiling face.
X: So Would you prefer your wife to be in TCS working with you.
Sid: No sir, firmly. I would prefer her to be in a different job.
X: Reason??
Sid: Sir, with whatever determination you are, there is always scope for distraction.
X: Do you know the working hours of TCS??
Sid: I presume its flexible.
X: Still have a guess
Sid: From 9 to 5.
X: looking at Y. I wish it was so.
X: It is somewhat around 15 - 16 hours a day. Plus add 2 hours of travel. So would you like to change your decision.
Sid: No sir, I would stick to it. I guess we will find time for each other.

X: So let me ask you another set of controversial questions
What the hell... you bent on grilling me.
X: Do you believe in office romance
By now I had assumed(rightly) that this was some kind of psychometry test.
Sid: Sir, I already have a girl friend ( i was in no mood for it, damn I wanted him to stop it right here... so all funny answers)
X: Thats ok. But do you believe in Office romance
Sid: No Sir, again for the same reason.

X: You are a project manager, you find two of the colleagues in your team romancing. What would you do?
Sid: Sir, its none of my business to interfere in that matter, but as I see it, if it interferes with work, I would first warn them and then take further action.

X: Ok siddharth, now tell me about your family background.
Sid: Told where my parents come from that my dad is from Raipur and blah blah. Told abt all the places I have roamed. Told some philosophy.
X: So where does your dad stay in Raipur??
Sid: Samta Colony
X: What does your dad do in TCE??
Sid: Told all that crap. what is his work and all that.
X: Why did you come to IT side rather than going into Mech. like your dad?
Sid: Made some bak here

X: Siddharth, if U are working in a group filled with tamilians, who speak in Tamil and discuss in Tamil, what would you do??
Sid: Sir, such a large majority will only be in Tamil Nadu and to survive there, i will have to learn Tamil. So I wud do that.
Y: No, this isn't the case with TN. This happens in USA also.
Sid: So sir, I could speak to them in English as they would be knowing english if they have come to states.
X: Yes, but suppose they only discuss in Tamil, they work out their problems among themselves without asking you.
Sid: Sir then I would better learn Tamil.
X: But projects could be of three months as well
Sid: So in such a case, I would try to adjust. However in other case(of 2 years) , I would learn Tamil.

Y: Okay, let me ask you one question.
Sid: Yes sir
Y: If I have two rail tracks running parallel to each other. In one rail track stands a handicapped man, in the other are 4 children playing. If train is approaching, which track will you divert the train to??
Sid: Sir, i will divert the train to track with children playing. And ask the children to run away. Since they are children, they will have better reaction time when they see the train approaching or listen to its sound or noise. This way both will be saved.

X: Let me ask you another set of controvertial questions??Sid: Yes sir... still keeping a smile on my face
X: Do you believe in Merci-killing?
Sid: What is that sir??
X: explains merci-killing
SId: yes sir, I believe
X: Why??
Sid: Sir because I feel its better to relieve the person from the permanent agony he is going thru.

X: Do you belive in abortion?
Sid: No sir,
I didnt give the answer firmly
X: So somewhat yes and no?
Sid: Yes sir

X: Siddharth, why have you flunked in class 12.
Sid: Sir, i didnt flunk in class 12. What happened is that I had to take a drop to prep. for IIT. and all that bull shit.

X: Siddharth Do you want to ask any question??
Sid: asked 2 questions.

THis was some fun time.

One more time.....

2006-05-16T21:11:00.000+05:30

So then... exams over, grades have started to come....Grades this time seem to have taken a U turn.... People who had cgpi's of less than 2 upto the last semester claim to be the 4 pointers of this semester..... What you can derive from this is the gradient in the level of grading between the professors.... U know, this sometimes encourages (unconsiously) people to choose courses based on the grades given, and not on the basis of their interest....... I believe it is on the individual to decide on which lines to go and I believe that the sole reason for choosing the subject must be the interest in it.

I am not bothered about the pointer I get, what worries me is the casualness of professors, what worries is the crippled system that cannot distinguish between the good and the bad, and what worries me is that people who get effected most are ones who work....

Now why am I talking abt all this, thats coz of the Software Engineering grades we just got....

11:20 Jeeta comes to my cubicle telling that SEN grades have come.

11:23 We check the grades to find that I have got a B. Hell broke loose. WTF? Presentation fine, marks good, final good then why a B.

11:34 I try to call up group leader so that we can go and talk to the faculty. But he is no where seen. Not reachable. So I get back to my work, physically but not mentally.

11:45 Decide to call other group members to find out their grades. Find that I am not the only one in my group. So we decide to meet faculty ourselves.

1:00pm. We go to Prof. Snigdha Ma'am room for the same. Find that literally all the groups are there... Asking her questions and demanding explainations for some callous checking done. We were asked to wait outside as she was dealing with other groups.

1:10pm We are called in for the same. Look at our marks and looks just fine. Then we ask mam abt the evaluation criterion. She explains the criterion. I was almost fuming after that, Nikhil the cooler among the two of us, explained her the flaw in the criterion. She seemed convinced but then tried to save her ass by shoting at us.... neways we drove the point in... The TA sitting in her room was also convinced with the logic (in fact she later told that she had spotted the same fault but mam had ignored it then too).

1:45pm After a long debate with Snigdha Mam, we decided to go to the other tutor, Mr. Pandya.
Seemed the more logical of the two.... We made him aware of the criterion and had long discussion abt the subject and exchanged our griviences.... He promised us that he will take up the matter with Prof. Khushuru Doctor.

Now as we come out, we find more and more people having similar problems, that of getting bad grades when they put everything into the project... and to add to it, ones who never worked got away with A's. Now how fair is that??
What we understand from this is that prof. cheated us by not telling the evaluation criterion correctly. And also that working for any such project doesnt yeild results. And that the SEN principles will go to dogs.

Neways, hope that some sense will prevail soon and Mr. Doctor will have a better judging criterion.

The current criterion for evaluation is:
The criterion for evaluation is 100 marks for exams, 100 for project and 15 for labs .... which will be scaled down by 2.15 later
Now each project is graded according to their presentation, the project is givena range. we got 60-65.
Now what this means is that person with best ranking(peer) gets 65 and one with least gets 60....What this means is that on scaling down, this accounts for only 2 marks in the final exam, which means that if I dont work on the project and work for exams only instead, i am bound to get an A. I hope u get the flaw.
Which also means that doing the project was just waste of time and effort.

The Golden Ratio - Φ

2006-05-12T10:02:00.000+05:30

Have started reading this book (The Golden Ratio by Mario Livio) on Φ and its origin and stuff.... so I shall keep posting some interesting facts, comments and related stuff.

Why Golden Ratio??
Φ = 1.6180339887
It exists at places U cudnt have guessed..... like the Delightful petal arrangement, "The sacrament of Last Supper", magnificient spiral shells of mollusks, breeding of rabbits.... These very disparate examples have in common a number or geometrical proportion, the number 'Φ'.
The pyramids of Egypt, the logarithmic spirals of Monalisa(painting) all have a bearing with the Golden number. Φ is also supposedly connected with the behavior of stock market.

Why do stars twinkle and what is its shape??
Ask a child to draw a star and he will most likely draw a pentagram. This is acurally a consequence of the fact thatwe happen to view stars thru the earths atmosphere. The turbulence of air bends starlight in constantly shifting patterns, thus causing familiar twinkling. In order to represent spikes generated by twinkling using a simple geometrical shape, humans came up with pentagram.
People who would have read The Da Vinci Code would appreciate the relation better.

The leaves along a twig of a plant tend to grow at positions that would optimise their exposure to sun, rain and air. The passage from one leaf to another is characterised by screw type displacement. Similar patterns are seen in seeds of a sunflower. This is called phyllotaxis. The number of leaves, or seeds per turn are fractions observed as alternate members of a fibonacci sequence.

The Fibonacci series is a sequence of the form x(n+1) = x(n) + x(n-1). The ratio of consecutive terms of a fibonacci sequence tends to Φ.

The ratio 1 + 1/(1 + 1/(1+1/.....)) tends to Φ as the number of iterations tend to infinity.

crashes.....

2006-05-11T12:00:00.000+05:30

Its hot summer time... time for ice creams, time for small cotton clothes, time for vacations, for dozing off in cool AC rooms, for roaming around near naked in hostels, time for hard disk crashes!!!!

Come summer and U get to hear that Mr. X's hard disk crashed.... This time I was Mr. X unfortunately. I guess hard disk crash because of over usage and heat generated is not dissipated. And once it crashes there is PANIC PANIC and PANIC.

Thanks to GetDataBack for NTFS for making a beautiful software and all those hackers and crackers who could crack it that I could (almost) recover my data back all for free. Could recover all the important documents and fotos and home videos and all that.

I would not say that I am a fan of software piracy coz I would not enjoy if someone used my software without paying me and rewarding me for all my efforts. But when it comes to using someone elses s/w the first thing you do is go to google and search for serials for that version of the software. How easy!!!

Same thing goes with audio piracy, I must be having over 10 GB of songs in my computer drive (ofcourse all pirated). Without a slightest thought or feel for the artist, we download the music files. But the case is a lil different here, what analysts say is that the artists donot get a fair share of income that is generated by CD's and cassettes as the music company eats up a big chunk of money leaving the artist poor. And spreading good music free online or otherwise would only enchance and Artists popularity. Also the not so well to do artists get a chance to showcase their talent to a larger part of the world and get a recognition........ So people no problems with audio piracy...

(
Update 1:
My hard disk crashed again and again.... three times in all.... Just imagine the frustation I would have undergone, sometimes the files seem corrupted and in next 10 minutes they run properly.... I better backup my data ASAP
)

Exams over....

2006-05-10T20:27:00.000+05:30

Am gonna bitch this time. So people not interested may skip this.
So then done with sixth semester.... well almost given that I have a whole list of submissions to make in ADSP.

This semester had been pretty easy going for me(barring the last 20 odd days where I had to slog like a dog).
Subjects weren't interesting enuf to persue them. Not very happy with the way subjects were taught.
Concept of 5 professors in MCS(with jokers like Anil Roy, Mr. Joshi) was a major blunder. Its like no professor had time to set in and just when it looked as if he had become comfortable teaching, his session had ended.

RF was no exception, we felt like spoon fed kids of class. Something most of us will not relish being. The question paper was like 90% predicatable. So there was hardly any scope of making errors.

ADSP just went above our head most of the time. Its our fault too that we didn't put in much effort this time into understanding.

SEN was a decent subject as long as it did not have labs and shit quality TA's. I am sure that the TA's didn't have a clue of what sen is about. Had they been asked to solve our paper.....................

ITM was a nice subject, understood quite a bit, the prof was good but lectures were too lengthy.
The major difference this semester was that I was looking for external help almost always in the exams. This attitude generally arises from low confidence and lack of preperation both of which was abundant in me(this time).
Anyways... its all over and the reportcard will just show our grades and that is it.

Looking ahead, I have my placements and then have my RI, looking to spend this vacation fruitfully (for a change).

Habits...

2006-05-01T19:08:00.000+05:30

When it was decided that I would come to DA-IICT, I had resolved that i would try to preserve all those habits (the good ones I mean) that I had inculcated over the past few years.

As I see myself now, I am much the same. No smoking, no drinking, no gaalian, no back biting, get up early, take bath daily...... I cannot concentrate as much as I could before but then I have much better resolve which takes care of it.

But there are somethings that have unconciously got imbibed in me. Something that I would prefer to do away with. I guess I (can say we) have started to trust what people say very easily without any verification. I am not telling that trusting people is wrong but blindly trusting people leads to having wrong knowledge of things and also leads to rumour spreading, something that I have always hated.

After coming here most of us have become gossip mongers, we can gossip about anything, anyone, anywhere. What happens here is that sometimes you go so overboard critisising somebody that you forget the basis for critisism, forget that there could be other reasons beyond your imagination for that person to act the way he/she has acted.
In a way our thinking has become restricted. We reach to conclusions without thinking of possibilities or sometimes even when we can think, we want to reach conclusions fast.

The other thing which bothers me is that I have become very impatient, any error on the other side frustates me. Powercuts, net down, slow pc, mobiles out of range make me go wild. When I see that my group is not working as properly as I think they should, I get furious.
We have a lot of freedom here unlike other colleges, freedom in the sense that there is no restriction or no big boss who will throw U out if you dont do so and so thing which means that we have become big bosses ourselves and anyone who tries to boss over is hit back. This means any fair critisism will not be appreciated.

The good part is that I have identified where I should correct myself, half the work is done. Now I need to work in that direction. I hope I will become better by the end of 4 years at DA-IICT.

Cheat Sheets

2006-04-29T14:00:00.000+05:30

Library 11:10 AM

Theres this very novel concept of 'CHEAT SHEET' where in a candidate is allowed to carry some fixd bunch of sheets (generally hand written) to the exam.

Its somewhere between closed book and open book examinations and has advantages of both. The intention behind allowing cheat sheets in the exam is that students dont have to laboriously mug up formulae and may spend that time in learning a concept without bothering to remember formulae.

As I sit here trying to stydy ADSP for the final exam, I see juniors busy preparing cheat sheets for their exams.
Guess cheat sheet for them is a completely different thing. This girl on my table opposite to me has been making her cheat sheet ever since library opened. She's been writing with a font size so small that I would need atleast 10X magnifying glass to read it strainlessly.

What I dont understand is why do you have to fill in so much. What she perhaps doesn't realise is that 80% of the crap that she has written on paper is redundant and that it could be derived effortlessly.
And I am sure what she hasn't realised and that she would painfully realise in the exam is that searching thru such a pile of sheets is gonna be a herculean task coz she hasn't indexed it nor does she have and color coding scheme nor a hashing table for quick retrival.
And then another girl pops up asking her to lend the cheat sheet so that she could photocopy. Damn! what the hell!!!

I remeber when I was taking the same course, there were my batchmates who wrote complete answers in the cheat sheet with a hope that one of those questions would be asked in the examination.

But then the sad thing is no ones bothered about what you do and how you do. All that counts is what you are at the end..... I hope some day the former will also count.

Privatization of Dams and Rivers

2006-04-27T21:34:00.000+05:30

How can you sell Dams and Rivers?? It is a ridiculous idea to privatise Dams and Rivers. Enitites like Defense, Waterbodies, nuclear facilities should never be privatised.

The private parties which would obviously be profit making organisations (often corrupt tooo) would sell thier water to places who would pay more price for it which would be the mineral water companies, the bottling plants, the theme parks and so on.. This is against public interest and will lead to a situation where water would be a commodity that flows from poor to rich areas. It will lead to an impasse where a major population is devoid of basic aminities and a few 'water lords' who would make a fortune by selling the liquid.

In India a situation where people walk for kilometers in extenso to fetch water for drinking and cooking is not uncommon. Even then the number of themeparks and waterparks are increasing.

One of the statistics I read in frontline(april 2005) was scarry to say the least. It said that the theme parks in and around Mumbai use 50 Billion Liters of water everyday.
This means that if the theme parks were closed, the water could be used by about 500 million people.

(statistics from frontline April - 2005)

Being just there --- The importance of one mark

2006-04-25T12:42:00.001+05:30

It has happened to me before. One mark would have changed my fate. I might have been a different person altogether. More importantly, I might have had a better life.

One mark makes so much of a difference. Its hard to realise sometimes, but when you realise, you realise the hard way.
And it pains a lot to know that you were just there, that you just missed by a whisker. You were like a nanometer away from your destination.
And then you curse all those days when you took it easy, you curse all those moments you just whiled away, that moment in the exam you became sluggish and messed up with a question.
You are left to a fate created by you yourself.

Its important to learn from your experiences. Just dont waste even a while coz U dont want to feel the same pain again. Just dont want to repeat the same thing again..............

Six Degrees of Seperation

2006-04-24T22:53:00.000+05:30

<<<:::An Interesting theory:::>>>

The small world phenomenon (also known as the small world effect) is the hypothesis that everyone in the world can be reached through a short chain of social acquaintances. The concept gave rise to the famous phrase six degrees of seperation after a 1967 small world experiment by social psychologist Stanley Milgram which suggested that two random US citizens were connected by an average of a chain of six acquaintances.
However, after more than thirty years its status as a description of heterogeneous social networks (such as the aforementioned "everyone in the world") still remains an open question. Little research has been done in this area since the publication of the original paper

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_world_phenomenon

Found this book on Six Degrees ... in the library @ Duncan J. Watts

Milgram wanted to show that even when I don't know someone who knows u, i still know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows u... Milgram's question was, How many someone's are there in the chain??
To answer this Milgram devised a message passing technique known as the small-world method. He gave a few hundred letters to randomly selected people from Boston, Omaha and Nebraska. The letters were sent to a single target person in Massachusetts. But letters came with an unusual rule. Recipients could only send their letter on to somebody they knew on a first name basis.
Since Milgram was teaching at Harvard, Boston for him was the other end of the universe. It was found that typically the number of steps it would take is 6. Hence the term "six degrees of seperation".

Farewell

2006-04-09T07:35:00.000+05:30

Its April and its farewell time, this time we had given a farewell to our seniors, the BTech 2002 batch. We gave it at Cambay Resort, a 3 star hotel and spa.

I have had some very good mates from this batch..... Pabari, Bhavesh, Steve, Jindal, Amod, Barve, Mathur, Ankur, Sharma, Bacchani and list is long. They have guided me all three years they have been with me and never treated me like a junior.

Pabari has been a source of inspiration always, u can always look up to him when U have a doubt in any subject. He is one guy who has a processor which supports multithreading and gives a good performance. His guidance has been invaluable.

coming back to the farewell party.......
The seniors were asked to be dressed in Formals and Sarees(ofcourse, the females). I guess this is a tradition everywhere and the giving batch in Formals and Skirts.
Most of the seniors looked good, awesome in sarees. Realised (not for the first time) that girls look SEXY in sarees. Now dont talk abt people of our batch...cheeeee....... The Wk's and LL's and co (names encrypted) looked as it they were wearing clothes for the first time. They simply dont know that they donot have a body to dress like that.
Anyways there is a brighter side to this too but lets not talk abt that now....

The next one year for us will be very crucial. We have our placements, internship, the mammoth BTP, catting and GRE...... I am not sure if we will have free time at all the next semester. Its gonna be tough but as pabari said we gotta take it higher from here.

WON DADP

2006-04-08T15:07:00.000+05:30

WON DADP MOBILE APPLICATION CONTEST
Yes, This year, this semester seems to be a lucky one for me. First INVITE and now DADP.

Its strange U know sometimes, rather many times, rather more often than not that a person goes away with a thing undeserved. It happens all the time, every where, every nook and corner, every lane, every stream.

Be it in studies, be it in competitions, be it jobs, be it opportunities, be it in standing in long queues with hot sun overhead, be it elections, be it compensation.... just anything.

The same thing happened here. There have been times where we have gone unawarded for some very special things we have done, but this time the case is totally different.
We won 50,000 for just 15 hours work, making a sick looking application which is predicted to earn huge revenues for Reliance Infocomm, if there is a reason that we won, it is this.

God, I cant thank u more for what U have done.......

This is an excerpt from the mail we got from the organisers

"Contest application selection process was carried out yesterday on 24th March at DAKC, HQ of Reliance Infocomm. Dr. Vijay Mukhi - Cyber Expert,Mr.Datta Subrahmanya from CISCO and Mr. Prashant Dogra from NOKIA were the panel of judges. Your Prashnavali application was judged no 1 unanimously by all three jury members under student category taking into considerationthe factors like Innovation, User Interface, functionality and Businesspotentials.The Award distribution ceremony will be held in the second week of April inMumbai."

BTW here's a list of what we won....

Rs. 50,000
A Silver trophy
chance to meet John Abraham
To be felicitated by Vice Chancellor of Mumbai
A share of revenue from whatever Reliance earns.
and the best of all
Our Application will be launched and can be accessed by millions of people all over India.

I must also mention some people who have always been supportive. Rahul Sharma(Java) for being helpful and available whenever I needed, the anon programmer who gave his splash screen code, Jeeta who has always been supportive and ofcourse Parents and Varun who are always cheering me up and motivating me.

(Update 1:
There is no John Abraham, No vice chancellor of Mumbai but the master Mr. Sam Pitroda.
And in a 5 star hotel (La Meridian) in Delhi, we were (almost) getting a free air tickets and 5 star accomodation. The application will be launched soon and we will get 10% of the revenue share. 5% of the same will go to the college.
And bad thing is that it is on 10th of May on which all of us are busy with 2 exams).

(Update 2:
http://www.relianceinfo.com/webapp/Infocomm/jsp/media/PressRelease.jsp?id=199
)

What's between me and God?

2006-03-20T14:49:00.000+05:30

Its a question my mom (I call her mummy) has been asking ever since I was a teen.We always had a quarrel about my reluctance to going to temples and offering prayers.
Its not that I dont believe in God, neither am I agnostic. Its just that my faith in God
doesnt confine to offering prayers and visiting one whole set of temples.

There are many reasons I avoid going to temples

U go to temple, offer prayers. No qualms with that, but then U wish for something, U start to expect that God will do things for U. And when things dont fall your way then U curse God. This is a vicious circle.
I see many people who go and offer their prayers dunno with what in mind. But once they are out of the temple premises they are the same old souls, ones who have no pity on beggars, one who earns by cheating on someone else.
This is something I have always hated, two sides of the same person. I ask them that why the hell do they have to do all this drama of visiting temples and stuff when they dont pity their own brotherhood.
Another reason I dont go to temple is that I will not be able to control my mouth if someone speaks illogical things. I just dont want to pass any derogatory comments. U know people keep telling do this and all ur sins will be washed away, do that and U will find success in ur life, I ask these people whether is this some kind of a bargain, some kind of a deal you are trying to strike with God.

I rather believe in doing good to people I know, people whom I care for and sometimes strangers too.
Its nice to have faith in God, for religion was made so that people fear the ultimate and hence donot indulge in bad things. I guess this must always be kept in mind before blindly following religious practices.

Good days come to an end....

2006-03-19T19:44:00.000+05:30

..... and so did the holidays the happy holi holidays.
Well made a lot of plans before the holidays and as it always happens most of them fall off before they get started.
Thought that I will

Complete all the backlog I have created in this semester
Read a novel or two
Work on words and RESTART word power (starting word power was my other plan which didn't see the day light.)
Do some shopping
prepare for CAT, do some DI.
and loads and loads of sleep.
Ofcourse there's SEN and ADSP projects

What I accomplished

Read a book.
Undergone a dental treatment.
Worked a lil with words.
Did some catting
Played loads and loads and loads of UNO and ESTIMATE.
Slept like a log.
Saw a couple of movies.... infact, more than a couple...

Welll..... Plans and plans, plans are meant to be made, plans are meant to be broken. They look good and satisfying on paper, at the end of the day U are disappointed when U tick what U have done.But that doesnt stop U from planning, U plan more and more.
Its all about estimation, its all about determination. Always wish of that one perfect day when I would be able to implement all that I have planned.

Guts

2006-03-14T23:31:00.000+05:30

This is taken from a book called GUTS...

Its abt how the companies have been successful, what kind of strategies they have used to stay in competition.

"You have to be gutsy enough to stand up to those who stand in your way. You have to big enough to admit your mistakes. You have to be vulnerable and say "I dont know". You have to be humble enough to surround yourself with people smarter and more capable than you. You have to be open and flexible enough to adjust to ever changing circumstances. You have to ignore those calling for quickfix or cut a corner.You have to go with your gut, the instinct that feels right and knows best."

Just Born.....

2006-03-11T20:18:00.000+05:30

Well Thats me.