My first job refusal

Lately, I too joined the ranks of people who can claim to have the honors of refusing at least one job in their career. Trianz, the Bangalore company for which my "Video streaming to a PDA" was going on, offered me a position in their company, which of course I refused. I have to complete my MS at my institute. But it feels good!

3 things my batchmates will miss terribly

There remains a mere 5 days before the end-sem exams end and my batch people start leaving, many of them forever. I try to enlist 3 things @ IIIT that people will miss terribly. But the good thing about life is that it goes on; people forget things, adapt to changing situtations and woes or otherwise, most things are forgotten.

1. Internet & Computer Services
A reasonably fast 24x7 internet connection. Even though an internet connection is perceived as a do-or-die necessity for a computer institute, there still are so many institutes that don't have a browseable internet and workable computing services. Besides, every user generally has near-to-nobody privileges on his/her system so that all that one might be able to do without interacting with the sysadmin is chat, browse, etc. But at IIIT, a student is the master of his lab system, and it's no surprise that all experiments of formatting, partitioning, OS-ventures are done on lab systems with illustrative efficacy.

The habits of pine, w, talk, write won't be forgotten easily as will the habit of being online on 200, the number which has a meaning quite different from just a double-century. It's our primary mail server (the IP actually) and every soul in IIIT beats with the same resonance when mentioned of 200.

2. DigLib and other collections
Want a software, song, or document/documentary? The idea of \\ will take time to evaporate from the minds. Apart from the ghostly gigantic DigLib, the numerous local collection have so much an integral part of life at IIIT that one doesn't realize the necessity of copying things onto one's own system before viewing. For most, such distributed access of docs/videos will remain forlorn sweet memories to sigh upon.

Starting with windows simple sharing and moving to advanced NFS file sharing and versatile samba sharing graduating over to the DC++ sharing, the network provides an ocean of its own timbre.

3. Hostels
Our hostel is remarkably different from those in other institutes. We have no warden. Even the one who would answer to the call of a warden isn't exactly what one expects from wardens: he isn't involved in dictating terms or even framing unecessary curbing rules. The hostel doors welcome round the clock (I've never seen it closed ever). A 24x7 unlimited supply of electricity and water is more than enough for ANY political party to claim victory. For long after coming to IIIT, I used to notice that even on the rare occasions when electricity used to blink off, it invariably came back before the fan hopelessly ceased its turns.

As the ticks of the clock grazes forward, it leaves behind some bitter, some sweet memories. Life doesn't stop. Nostalgic memories of college life will forever be related as one of the most exciting times where the mind is without fear and the head is held high.

Farewell '05

It was my batch's (UG2k1's) farewell on March 30th. The gaudy atmosphere was dazzling with the suits and sarees that my batch mates put on. Aditya Maheshwari, with his speech, went like:
I'm Aditya Maheshwari, Roll number 200101xxx. Very soon, this roll number will no longer be called out during attendance....
The already nostalgic air around gripped with intense feelings of the realization of separation after 4 years of company. Every human, however rough-hearted would have got sentimental at the occasion.

Then followed Imran, a bit nervous, but with the hefty personality of his, his speech worked a charm of its own, as he carried on with his characteristic tapori style talk.

The speech from the students were followed by speech from the Director and PJN sir's speech was filled with characteristic sarcasm and it lightened the atmosphere after the hefty nostalgic-mesmerization that had preceded: "Aditya Maheshwari spoke as if someone was dying," began sir, "but every weekend I see hoards of alumni in our campus; so they'll always keep coming..."

The formal stuff lightened to an informal students-only gathering, which had the quiver and provocation of an occasion such as a farewell and also forms an interesting part.

Basanti Hawa

"Basanti Hawa" by Kedarnath Agrawal

Blog: from the horse's mouth

The google and blogger developers blog about the development and status
if their services.

Status: http://blogger-status.blogspot.com/
Buzz: http://buzz.blogger.com/

Thunderbird ideal to use gmail for mail storage

Since long I had been eying gmail as a perfect repository for all mails
I receive, even those I delete. However, the catch was that my official
id is nirnimesh_AT_students.iiit.net and I receive mails on this id. I
can forward all my mails and retain a local copy but then I'd have to
visit the same mail twice and forwarding to gmail each time I receive a
mail doesn't seem very nice. I can forward without retaining a local
copy (to avoid repeated checking) but this still necessitates me to
check my mails on gmail, which for reasons obvious enough, I don't want.

Now, however, I've found this feature in Thunderbird which keeps a local
copy of my mails in "Trash" whenever I delete them. So I don't consume a
lot of space on my mail server. Periodically, I can now bounce all my
Trash-ed mails to gmail and that makes my backing up possible too. I use
pine for bouncing these mails, however. I wish Thunderbird provided me
the feature to bounce a mail as well.

Misremembering Kunal's b'day.

A funny thing happened today. Since 4-5 days now I had marked in my mind
that today (18th March) was Kunal Kant's birthday and that I needed to
post him his present. However, I didn't seem to have his address,
luckily. I say "luckily" coz when I called him up and started hinting
about bumps, et al, he added two and two together to decipher that I had
obviously misremembered 18th March to be his birthday instead of the
actual 18th May. Now what a chop it was! Teri googly ho gayi..he mused
and I acquisced (couldn't do anything else). I always wanted to be able
to remember a lot of dates but to mis-remember...well, that wasn't the
idea, I guess.

Nostalgic, the air around.

My batch (UG2k1) is to leave the institute in about a month's time now.
I have to stay back since I switched to the dual-degree MS/R programme
(with B.Tech, of course). The air in the ground floor of OBH is
nostalgic these days. Every now and then you can overhear someone
saying.. only 20 days left.. only 25 days more. Excited about their
future life that anyway they might be, everyone is nostalgic about the
almost 4-years now that they've spent here. Time passes and eats away
most of these feelings, but still the process has to be passed through.
Soon there'll be time when all these people will be packing their
luggage and be gone. Some won't be seen for the rest of the life. Some
will be in touch. However, the thing called UG2k1 will move to the
sacred ranks of alumni.

Friends part with heavy hearts, foes part with unconcerned looks.
Everyone wants to live every moment of one's college life before it
comes to a final end, forever. Of course, these days will be remembered
as one of the most liveliest days when there's complete freedom in most
respects (more so in our campus). The joy of proudly missing classes,
the sleepless nights watching movies in succession, the nights spent
studying, the days spent sleeping, the good things in life, the bad
things in life, this congregation.... we sure will miss things and miss
some people... A LOT.

R & D Schocase '05 @ IIIT

My Institute's R & D showcase
concluded today. For several souls in campus, it was a two-day sleep and
fun bonanza with nothing bothersome to do -- no classes, no assignments,
nothing, whereas for others it was the D-day of hours of toil and burning,
counts of sleepless nights, and more. This time there was quite an
increase in the number of projects that were showcased. Severl corportate
representatives and students from several colleges arrive in campus to
have a look at the demons and interact with the people.

First Love

For many, First Love is a phenomenon the realization of which takes too
long a time but for some others, it takes as much a time as it takes a
pair of eyes to meet another pair of them. In whatever sweet or sour way
the proceedings at heart in such a juncture be, an innate sweet feeling
always lingers in the heart. From dawn to dusk, from noon to night, a
constant longing always immerses the heart in thoughts for your beloved.

Very few things in life appear as personal to as the First Love. It's at
this stage that one begins to realize how deep the meaning of love is and
how it glues two people together with vows for unity for ever and ever. At
times, these hopes materializes, while at other times it doesn't. In
several cases, the channel of love becomes two-way whereas in others it
remains a one-way. The feeling, however, doesn't mitigate; it lives with
you all your life.

When the realization of being in love dawns one's mind, suddenly the world
gets a lot sweeter. You start noticing the drops of rain pattering on the
window panes. You start noticing them making sinous ripples on the water
surface. You start hearing the distant cukoo sounding whereas at other
times you'd not heed even the blares of a sounding horn. All of a sudden
the smell of the first rain doesn't go unnoticed, and you can see the
rainbow stretching it's arms from heaven to the earth as if inviting you
to climb over it. When these things happen, realizing that one's in love
isn't rocket science.

Imposter Indiatimes on Sex Sells

I landed to this article titled "Too much sleaze spoils the song" on Times
of India, Indiatimes.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1025714,curpg-1.cms

Though yet another count+1 for an article in this
preserve-society-and-heritage category, the article shamelessly vomits out
the gossip, quite (conveniently) ignoring its own pages (www.indiatimes.com).

The author (VINITA A SHETTY) talks about the changing face of the Indian
music videos, that they get raunchier and sleazier day by day, and that
since nothing sells like sex, these upcoming music videos belittle the
already tiny clothes their cute ladies put up to harvest more are more.
Interesting however, is the fact that on the very same page where
authoress preaches DJ Doll being sleazy in Kaanta Lagaa and Sanober
gyrating provocatively to Meri Beri Ke Ber, the very same "sleazy" and
provocatively gyrating pictures are posted. Oh, they are just for
reference? I see. That's why the article had to span 3 pages so as to
envision the world with the sleaziness of all these girls!. And did we
forget that www.Indiatimes.com itself opens with a new semi-nude picture
enchanting your eye every day? Or did we miss the provocative pictures
that practically every page on this site displays? Now, don't tell me all
of your articles need a back-reference to the likes of Sanober's hips!

Grow up. Don't preach just for the sake of it. At least, follow as you
preach.

Indian ancient discovery and heritate: an example I found.

Often, unconsciously, we dismiss our ancient tradition as superstitious
and ignorant, but there do occur several instances when this view is
shattered.

I was going through some bioinformatics essay on Diabetes at nih.gov and at
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?rid=diabetes.section.5 I found
that the symptoms of Diabetes was discovered as early as 400 BC by the
Indian physician Sushruta. He described the sweet taste of urine from
affected individuals lending to black ants and flies attracted to the
urine of diabetics. This sweet taste of urine was key to its diagnosis.

The sparkle of diamonds

I landed myself to a diamond jewelery shop yesterday evening. Tanishq,
the shop, bore the enchanting dim of an exotic place. The ambiance was
just right. Several small counters were segregately placed at a number
of places. Soon we were attended by the salesperson at one of these
counters. He showed us an earring, 22 carat gold studded with diamonds
in the middle. I held the diamond earring in my hand and gave it a look
and that was it -- I was mesmerized. The diamond shattered light into so
many sparkling colors several of them into my eyes and I was sure that
I'd buy it. The only pinch was -- it cost Rs 6600/- I know I'll have to
invest several months of my TAship money to fork that amount but the
thousand watt smile that'd light up the person to whom I'll give this is
totally worth it. Now I just need the money.

Truly enough, Diamonds are forever.

World: Big or small

Sometimes we feel the world is so big and huge that we can get lost so
easily. There's scope for so much randomness and anonymity and
haphazardness that nothing at all can be predicted; nothing can be
relied upon.

However, equally probable are the surprises that so often greet you.
Quite often you feel that something magical has happened and you knew it
happening; randomness wasn't truly unpredictable. I just had one of
these feelings. I had sent a mail to my professor Dr P J Narayanan and
was sure that I'd be getting a reply but when -- I could never tell. And
all of a sudden I felt as if a mail had just dropped to my mailbox and
so I fired up my mail client and lo and behold there it was. It wasn't
there for long. I somehow came to know that the reply had come.

WoW! -- the human instincts.

Love

Love, the divine feeling, the inexplicable sense of being that surrounds
everyone of us, the one thing everyone really craves for, the one
language everyone unanimously comprehends unobscured. Love, the feeling
whose medium of expression we do not understand. Love, the word which
fetches 149 million Google results.

I won't be utterly surprised if it's discovered that love is the
ultimate cause that keeps life moving; that it is for love that one
lives, works, eats, dances, cries, laughs, or does anything else for
that matter. It could be quite possible that it is love that answers the
cause for existence.

A newborn baby cries. Why? Admittedly, it's all that he/she can probably
do. And a gentle hug from his/her mother suffices to calm it down from
the unrest. A lover yearns for his darling, impatiently, heart beating
loud. Why? A gentle sight of his beloved extinguishes all speculations
and serenity condescends in his heart.

To talk of historic stories and epics, several deeds and misdeeds have
been done for love and we all know about it. Taj Mahal, the singular
monument of love for a wife. Imagine how much grit it must have taken
for ailing Shah Jahan to create something in memory for his darling.
Nostalgic the presence of love is. Why does one want to remember things?
Isn't there love in that?

A single thought of a gentle kiss on the forehead from one's mother
spreads the lips in way of a smile and further thoughts sure elongate it
to a grin. An eye-closed remembrance of the first time one saw one's
beloved sends the heart doing several beats faster than normal and a
strange but soothing calmness and serenity looms large in the mind and
heart.

Love, the whatever which has a presence in everyone and everything
however small of big, however busy of unemployed, is yet so little
understood. Poets try to replicate the soothing feeling in words. They
sure know how bitterly words fall short of expression in their composition.

Love reigns supreme.

Who are we? --Sankrant Sanu

I've just now returned from a singularly distinct and existentiality
provoking talk by Sankrant Sanu at the Seminar Hall in the institute. He
had been one of Dr Sangal, our director's, students. As a consultant and
freelance writer he has this website www.sulekha.com

It was befitting what he talked about..totally.
He began with how the West world chooses to study us Indians and dictate
terms, history, rules, vision, for us. And how carefully manipulated
their-presented facts have been as the once rulers of India to shatter
the self-esteem of the people. They, through their historians,
propagated that India, per se, didn't have any solidarity or the sense
of Indian-ness by itself and that it were the Britishers who
consolidated all the fallen pieces into one India. How more untrue could
they be when the West, England and United States included, themselves
have hardly a history to boast about. They themselves are hardly
one-and-a-half century old to boast about the solidarity of their nation.

Sanu went on to bring out the need to realize the latent talent amongst
the people and that our system, most of it a follow-up of the British
system forcefully huddled on our back, needs to improvise into a
confident and sustained self. We hardly need to blindly follow their
ideals and dismiss all our traditions as superstitious just because we
don't understand their relevance. This exactly had been deliberately
maneuvered.

The closing sentence from Lord Mccauley's proposal on their colonial
efforts revealed that the damage or loss of ownership to our traditions
and thereby the self-esteem had been clearly proposed as the necessity
to achieve what they wanted: a dominion colony. It's bewildering.

The reason of being

An oft brewing question in my mind, the existential justification, takes
the better of me today yet again. Why do I exist? What is the purpose of my
life? Why do I do what I do? Why do I work? Why do I hope? Why do I eat?
Why do I survive? Why do I live?

I do not buy that survival is the ultimate essence of life. There has to
be a purpose, a reason, which would quantify the purpose of our
existence. It need not be anything complicated. It could be decently
simple. But what is it? Surprising, isn't it, that we (humans) carry on
with our daily chores, quite ignorant of your ultimate purpose? We don't
know where we are headed. All that we know is that we are moving --
directionless. Or are we still?

Humans are able to foresee immediate purposes and plans with easy
deftness, however, the successor to all these errands is bluntly
unknown. How could God manage to keep us in such illustrous illusion --
make us move without telling the direction? Isn't it something like we
set a rabbit to motion in a maze-like confinement. The rabbit doesn't
know where it has to go, in what direction to proceed. But it still
keeps going, appearing to be looking for a way out. It doesn't have any
direction or motivation. Perhaps, to think of a direction in the
maze-like confinement doesn't even make much sense. Is it the same with
us humans as well? Doesn't it make sense of asking of our directions?

Also interesting is the fact that we cannot satisfactorily explain what
life is. Every moment of time, however small, we experience life, but we
don't know what exactly it comprises of, what it wants -- directions.

Einstein said: I do not belive that the good Lord plays dice. I just want
to know his thoughts. The rest are details. -- How true!

What You'll Wish You'd Known

I came across this very exciting and interesting article by Paul Graham.
It talks about thoughts while growing up. Of course, it interests more
because I could relate my life a lot to it. No wonder because he talks
about my fascinating idols -- Shakespeare and Einstein.

Just read it: http://paulgraham.com/hs.html

Communication problem

Just how impossible communication can get with certain people, I just
realized again today. As a mess committee member for my institute, I had
gone to talk to Mr BLN, the so-called caretaker for the hostels and
messes. I wised to discuss with him issues about the Jan 2005 mess
functioning. But we ended up in a deadlock. He wasn't at all able to
understand what I purposed and everything I suggested he understood that
to be a demeaning to his authority. No wonder he's dug himself to become
one amongst the most hated persons in the campus. Every few minutes he'd
end up mouthing "You should not talk like this.. You should do this..
blah blah". I, per se, still don't realize what horrible it was I told.

In the end, the inevitable happened. The communication process broke
down. I smashed out of his dungeon.

Communication problem

Just how impossible communication can get with certain people, I just
realized again today. As a mess committee member for my institute, I had
gone to talk to Mr BLN, the so-called caretaker for the hostels and
messes. I wised to discuss with him issues about the Jan 2005 mess
functioning. But we ended up in a deadlock. He wasn't at all able to
understand what I purposed and everything I suggested he understood that
to be a demeaning to his authority. No wonder he's dug himself to become
one amongst the most hated persons in the campus. Every few minutes he'd
end up mouthing "You should not talk like this.. You should do this..
blah blah". I, per se, still don't realize what horrible it was I told.

In the end, the inevitable happened. The communication process broke
down. I smashed out of his dungeon.