My feet will carry me...

...home.
I wanna go home.
Its been months since I have seen my parents & siblings. Long since I have eaten nicely cooked 'ghar ka khana' (home food) , especially 'paranthas' made by mamma.

I am longing for it. :-(
I keep reading a lot these days to have good time. Last night read Jeffrey Archer's short stories. I have just started it. Read story titled 'Old Love' yesterday. It is about how two strangers fall into a very pious relationship. Nice story, worth reading.

I was thinking 'If love never dies' then how can we say 'Old Love' bcoz for lovers, the feelings are always fresh, it has no age. Else it will die ;-)

I have pledged not to be too senti-mental on my blog.
Okies, I will try. :-p

I was hand in hand with...

...someone precious to me.

It was around 9:45pm yesterday. I was holding in hand someone I was waiting for long. I was juggling with the thot whether to go ahead or not. Bcoz, once tempted its difficult to take the step back.

Its was time to take decision: Tick, tick, tick....

You guys there, while reading will think, what big deal, you should take your time in taking such decisions?C'mon, I had to bcoz shuttle for my office leaves at 7:30am in morning which means I have to get up latest by 7am(usual time being 6:30am :-( ).

Tick, tick,tick....

Ya, I give it to you. You guessed it right. My long waited desire finally won .

I Cud not believe that I took 5 mins to decide whether to open 'five point someone' or not Sometimes its fun to do grammatical mistakes knowingly like using 'holding someone' in place of 'holding something' ) ;-) ;-)

It was a nice book & I finished it in neat 4hrs 40 min or so, little later than my usual speed but as I was reading leisurely(or shud I say lazily) in my bed after tiredness of whole day. Not bad timing Sonal.

I liked many instances in the book, like the Coperate to Dominate(CoD) theory, the idea of giving the original gift to his girlfriend. With some of the things I disagreed also but then its not necessary for us to agree with everything if we appreciate it.
I had a great time reading the book, and every time I broke into laughter, I realised that I was little loud & after that I feared that my neighbours, who all had to go to the office in morning, may drop in & bang my door if I continued laughing like this at midnight. Mine is a corner room in the hostel, so, I think, thankfully no one heard it & I was saved. :-)
Read the book till 2:20am in the morning, then slept & got up at 6:45am, but it was worth it. In my last days a iiit-b, I feel even i will say after sometime like he said in the end...

I may have passed, but my soul is somewhere in the corridors of the insti....

Work Hard and…

...party hard.

Today it was outdoor quarterly update meeting or Department Update Meeting (in short called DUM). It offered me change from the routine busy schedule and was my first team outing. There was lunch, followed by meeting with discussion abt target & milestones achieved in this quarter and plans & updates for the next quarter & the roadmap ahead. Then there were department wide recognitions, out of seven who got the awards, four were from my group. ‘Cheers for them’

But the best part of the day were the team events. The theme of the events was based on one of my favorite movie ‘Sholay’. The attendees were divided at random in four groups. So, each group had around 19-20 members. Each team had to decide upon a name based on the characters in the movie and a nice punchline based on that name. My team’s name was “Dhanno”. For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, a small info, “Dhanno” is the name of the horse which pulls actress Hema Malini’s Tonga (Horse cart). And the punchline was “Bhaag Dhanno bhaag, sabse tej bhaag” i.e., “Run Dhanno Run, fastest and ahead of all” ;-).

Lots and lots of rounds were there. The round which I liked :-) was called ‘PERCEPTION’. In this eleven different sounds were played on audio, some of them were like a lady shrilling ‘nahiiiiiiiiiii………’ means “Oh, NO”. So, now it’s your perception how you interpret it. You can think of a lady who just saw her boyfriend with another girl. Or, think of a female, who has just now seen a cockroach. I don’t know how the heck some of the ladies get afraid by cockroaches? Probably the same way as some males get afraid seeing the dogs ;-)

As a team we had to recognize the sounds, keep track of all of them and then weave a story around those, such that all sounds are covered. Each opponent team has to look for flaw in the way story is linked & then ask one question to point out the loophole which the acting team had to defend by the answer. As soon as the organizer played the last sound, I told my team, I have an idea & have framed the story. I framed a story based on department’s success & competitors saying ‘Nahiiiiiiii’ as compared to monotonous hero-heroine based stories of other teams.
Now, time for a little self-praise. ;-)
All were surprised by my spontaneity & creativity. We all enacted the same story & our story was the best. No team was able to point a flaw, they had to think for extra time but then also they couldn’t. Our team was simply the best. If you are not ready to believe, scores will tell you. When all the teams had points in negative (Ya u guessed it right, there was negative marking also), our team scored 425 points.
So, by now you know that our team won. Each of us got beautiful milk mug as the gift.

Enjoyed the wonderful team event.

We sat near the stairs…

….and the memories flashed back.

After the pool side dinner in the evening, we were just sitting & chatting. Suddenly some thread of the chat took all of us back to the school days.

The excitement of the first day in a new class when we got the new books, to cover them with brown cover and polythene sheet properly….and then the search for the proper label of our choice: cartoons, cricketers, cars, flowers….for name slip. After sticking the label, the small little fight with the siblings at home that who will write the name on that sticker. The great collection of different kinds of pencils & erasers. The excitement and the wait in the primary classes that when we will get promoted to the senior classes & start writing with a pen…..Hmm…..

Filling up the fountain pen with ink at night….and sometimes we will forget…..then we decide of buying the pen with a big ink tank so as to last for at least two days to save us from the ordeal of filling up the pen again…..

Someone used to go in a ‘Tonga’ (horse cart), someone in bus, and trying to finish up the homework in that moving ‘Tonga’ or bus.

Some of the coolest things used to happen in the physics lab, when sometimes you won’t get the proper measurements and sometimes our friends won’t get it. With this there used to begin, the quest for tweaking with the lab instruments, to get the right value of the temperature or the correct value on the potentiometer. When nothing worked out, the final resort was to copy our friend’s readings in our practical notebook. ;-)

The chemistry lab was in no way less interesting. The experiments with pipette, wen sometimes the soln., will go inside…Ah...that taste of the base…. I can still feel it in my mouth, if I think.
I remember in one of the lab exercises we were performing Titration. Our lab assistant was a lady. One of my classmates, after every five minutes was taking his test tube to her & asking ‘Mam, is this color OK? ’ and she will say, ‘It is supposed to be still lighter Anurag, you should get the light tinge of pink.’ Poor chap, he will go…add some more base to the test tube and go again to Mam. After three times, the fellow came near me. I was standing near the sink. He opened the tap, added little water to the test tube and went back to Mam to show. Mam was impressed to see that perfect tinge of pink, she took the test tube in her hand and said “Attention class, see Anurag has got the perfect tinge. You all should perform the experiment SINCERELY like him & this is what you all should get.”
…..SINCERELY LIKE HIM? :- )
Do you still remember that last minute submission of the assignment after copying from some friend…?????? *winks* ;-)

Gone are those days, but the memories will remain.

It all started…

…with the Pooja.

It was Hall Day celebration at iiit-b today. It all started with a nice pooja in all the three hostels- GH, BH-1, BH-2.
One of my friends who came little late i.e., after the pooja was over, asked-“Oh, Did they allowed boys in girls hostel today?” ;-) & there came the PJ from one of us- “They have to, even the Pandit was a male, yaar”.

After the pooja, we all moved to the musical fountain and then the pool side dinner. The pool was happening today. If you’re thinking what was so happening around the pool, so here’s the description. It was well lit with flood lights, open air food arrangement by some different caterer, & all of us sitting around the pool & having dinner.

In short, it was cool.

A week full of decisions…..

….that need to be made.

Today’s day, 22nd April 2005, Friday is etched in my mind forever. A day I will never forget. The day which I am difficult to decide was amongst the happiest or the gloomiest. I have taken two important decisions of my life, one happy & one sad.

I hate mixed feelings. They are so annoying and confusing.

And the dedication…

…goes to a friend.

I dedicate the first post of this blog to the person who inspired me towards blogging. When we were studying, in the last three semesters at iiit-b, we hardly had time to recall that it’s a weekend. But now when we are working, the scene is entirely different. After the routine work at office, the rest of the time is all ours and is free of tensions like exams, project submissions. I was thinking from long time what to do on some of those boring sunny, summer afternoons on the weekend or in the evenings after returning from office. Some of the weekends, we go out, most of the time to Forum, but what to do when Kamyaa goes off to Chennai & there are hardly any people to be seen in the hostel. I either used to read a book or just sleep off ;-)

Thanks to Vikki that he introduced me in past few days to some of the excellent blogs. I was surprised after reading views of some of the elite bloggers around. So I decided lets give rebirth to writing skills of school time and start blogging.

Hold your breath, here I enter to the world of blogs.

It was Thursday Morning....

....and the telephone rang.

I was sitting at my desk in office, doing some work. It was Padma at the other end. I was surprised by her call at that time as she usually doesn't calls me in the early hours of the day. As soon as I picked the cell phone, she said we are going to Yercaud, are u coming? I said which place...believe me I was not able to get the name of the place....she spelled....Y.E.R.C.A.U.D....it is a hill station near Salem. When she said Salem, I thought, Oh Salem! Ya, this place I have heard of earlier. I told her: Padma, I will call you in an hour and let you know.
Then began the search on the net, I typed Yercaud on Google, exactly how Padma had spelled ;-) I read it is a nice and quite place & worth spending two days. Within ten minutes I called up & told her, I am coming. Nice that I decided in time, bcoz those who people who took time, missed the chance :-)

On friday, nobody called me to tell about the trip, I thot the trip is scrapped off.......thankfully Sonali came in evening & confirmed that we are going next morning. We were all set when Altaf called up Donny at 6:30am & that fellow never believed that we all at the hostel are ready & waiting for them (Altaf, Paddy & Mahesh) to arrive.

So there we were at the IIITB gate, looking at all the four-wheelers passing by, and waiting for the one which will come & stop right there. Finally...Finally...Finally... one white sumo slowed down in front of us. So, we dumped the luggage and started our trip from Bangalore to Yercaud somewhere between 6:30 & 7am.

We had hardly crossed the E-City gate and Gaurav expressed his desire for tea. We stopped at Naryana Hrudyalaya, very near to our previous college hostel...the unforgettable Balaji International…I have so many nice memories attached to it….then went to Ganesha temple there, was a nice start to the trip. They had breakfast & we started again. We were moving pretty nice....stopped in between once...were almost near Salem.....and guess wat? The tyre went flat. We got down, the driver changed the tyre and we were moving again.

At Salem, Mahesh had a traditional house. We met his parents, really caring fellows. Aunty & Uncle got amazed wen they heard that I am fasting for nine days (Navratri's) & will only eat a fruit in the night. The house was architected by Mahesh's grandpa....Aunty also showed us some wonderful South Silk sarees which they sell. Altaf and Gaurav liked some one black saree a lot...Aunty told them, “Start keeping some money aside to buy them for your fiancees later” ;-).

We started driving again uphill to Yercaud & reached there in around an hour. The beauty of the hill was scenic & there were 20 HPB's (Hair Pin Bends) in those 30kms from Salem to Yercaud. The house where we went was simply too good. A beautiful lawn, wooden work, big rooms...for a sec I felt I was at home in Agra. We played Frisbee, cricket, and clicked lots of snaps. In the evening we went for boating in the lake. Altaf & Gopi decided to race & I was in Altaf's boat. Altaf & donny started peddling, after sometime donny got tired & I took up. It was great sport. Then we went around for a long walk, dinner and then came back with all the plans for campfire, to the home where we stayed.
It was a great evening. Some of the best songs I ever heard....Sonali's bengali song about 'bhalo bashi' ;-) , Paddy's telgu one, Gaurav's great numbers, Donny's song for which he had once got a prize.....It was simply an inexplicable experience sitting in that cool night in front of the campfire and listening to those musical compositions.....

Morning everyone got up little later than what we had planned.....I MADE & THEY ATE breakfast....a big fun while cooking also....after getting ready went for trekking on the Lady's seat, Gent's seat, telescope point.

Then we started to drive for Salem. Went back to Mahesh's house where Aunty made each of us to sing a song separately.....which we have captured in videos along with many other videos....
The return journey from Salem to Bangalore was full of jokes & laughter and became emotional when Sonali & Gaurav started singing 'Purani Jeans aur guitar'.....
It was one of the memorable weekends after joining IIIT-Bangalore.....the other unforgettable one was at the time of SPANDAN.....

The description of the trip was written before the birth of this blog.