The drudgeries of life

Phew! Two down! Three to go! Well yes, I'm babbling about my final examinations which began today! Luckily for me, 2 of the main papers were scheduled for today! Though I was dreading the timetable for quite some time, now all I feel is relief!

Today was nothing short of one of those miserable days! I had done something close to a nightout which was reason enough for me to be feeling groggy! The exam hall was too stuffy for comfort and sweat was pouring down my forehead like some kinda waterfall! On top of that, in a hurry I had jumped into my favorite pair of jeans! To make matters worse, the question paper was Greek to me as I had no idea whatsoever of what Mongolian Hoard meant or how technical reviews were supposed to be conducted! Not a single minute in those 3 long hours would've passed without me cursing the idiot who came up with the idea of keeping a written test for a subject like Software Engineering! Jeez! How I survived through those 3 long hours of the first paper only I know! The four hours between the two exams were probably the longest four hours I've lived through! One minute I closed my eyes with an intention of taking 40 winks and the next minute I'm up, engulfed with the fear that I dont know even an itsy-bitsy part of Distributed Computing! Somehow time passed, and I appeared for the exam, only half awake! This time round, I went in a loose and baggy pant, and an airy Tee! To ensure that the day was hell for the students, the prof had formulated a messy paper with cent percent negative marking on fill in the blanks type questions, true/false problems and even on MCQs! Why do the bloody profs relish screwing the poor students for no rhyme or reason is something I never shall figure out!

Though I got screwed twice in the same day, it feels good to be able to boast of having just 2 main papers left! And knowing that I have 3 days preperation leave to prepare for those is a comforting thought! But knowing myself as the procrastinator that I am, I could very well say that I'll be into the last-minute cramming business yet again, on the eve of the 2 papers! Till then, fooling and farting around would rule:D!

Anyway, I came across George Constanza's "Words of Wisdom" after quite some time! Hmmm... This one really got me thinking! Not a bad idea at all! Check it out and lets hear what you've got to say...

One... two... three... Yeah! I shouldn't have bunked Mathuria's lecture today!
Twelve... thirteen... fourteen... Should I call her up?!
Twenty three... twenty four.... Gosh! What has happened to my aim in Quake? Just yesterday I was playing swell!
Thirty five... thirty six... thirty seven... My shots in table tennis have improved for sure!
Fifty nine... sixty... Goddd! When should I begin mugging up for the exams?!?!
Seventy two... seventy three... Jeez! I'm nearly broke! So whom should I borrow dough from this time?!
Eighty five... eighty six... Man! I sure could do with some Dew!
Ninety five... *huff*....ninety six... *puff* Gonna make it to a hundred!!
Ninety nine... nearly dead! Comon Kid! One more! You can do it...
Aaaaaaaarghhh! Huuundrrreddd! Flat on the floor! Phew! That's over! But *wheezes* should I *wheezes* call her?!

Nope! This isn't about me learning to count till hundred!! I'm upto my daily routine of hundred tiring push-ups! That's not the thing worrying me though! It's the thoughts that I keep having simultaneously! I can never ever seem to keep my mind on what I'm doing with the damn thing always wanting to ponder on something quite different from the matter at hand! Be that while studying, while exercising, while having some chow, while bathing, during lectures, and even while dozing off!

Now with the exams right around the corner and me having to inaugurate my last-minute cramming sessions, I'm in real deep shit! To think of it, I just picked up "my notes" (Disclaimer: By my notes, I'm referring to my copy of the xeroxed lecture notes of some intellectual who has managed to miss not even a single lecture! I salute such people!) to browse through the content when I see my roommate presenting his best strafing till date in Quake III! Wow! Sexy! That was one helluva rail! Superb dodging! Man! Freak, that's my roomie's gaming name, sure is a pro! My hero! Just a casual glance at the timepiece and HOLY SHIT! I've been hopelessly watching the game for an hour! Get a life, dude, I tell myself! Ok! So where was I?! Ahhh! The second line of the first page! Not very hard to find:D! So a fresh start will do some good! But not here! How about studying with the neighbours?? Sounded good until about an hour-and-a-half and a pathetic couple of lines and a completely waste-of-time kinda discussion on "how you get itchy when you don't wash the soap off your body soon enough" later, I decided to visit the gym rather than wasting away precious time studying!

At the gym, the story is no different! Imagine benchpressing with a friggin 160 pounds while discussing with the guys how bitchy and female chavinistic can a prof. be!! LoL! 5 or 6 repeats later, when I'm too far away from the 10 benchmark that I've set for myself, I give up! Almost dropped the damn thing, rod, weights and all, on myself! Sigh! No use continuing this way! Gym ain't the place to be exercising and talking, both at once!

So back to the room again! Fresh after a shower, and a decent dinner, it's time to study! No distractions this time, I promise myself! But that was not to be! Again the wander-thirst mind of mine drifts away into a reverie! And before I realize it, I've managed somehow to just throw away half-an-hour of mine! No use doing anything! Time is best utilised by sleeping! I'll try my luck out at studying tomorrow; a new day, a new start! But try though I did, damn sleep evaded me like a nymph avoiding an ugly bloke (pun unintended:D)! Thousands of thoughts crossed my mind! I tossed, I turned! I tossed and I turned! But still no sleep! Damn sleep! Never do you get it when you really need it!

Fuck everything! Now I'm gonna write a blog about this mess, I say! About my handicap of not being able to concentrate on anything that I do! With a steaming hot cup of coffee(well not that steaming hot, but still...), I sit down to type out my woes! And like it was the most logical and sensible thing to happen, a discussion about one of my friend's idioticities delayed that too! Maamamia! This is too much!!

Phew! I somehow managed to complete this load of bullsh!t that it seems I've been typing for ages! Now you know, fellow bloggers! How about imparting some wisdom to this poor, miserable, unable-to-concentrate-on-anything chap! I could really do with a dialogue like the one Morpheus delievered in the Matrix : "Stop trying to concentrate and concentrate"! For the time being, I'm off to AHEM study! Wish me luck...

P.S. I did finally call her up! Thanks Amod! That LDR post sure is responsible for this! I'm like so happy! But I'm gonna forward my cell phone bill to you, bugger! Be ready to shell out each and every penny that I'm having to spend thanks to you and your post!

You help me getting started with Miss Callipygian and I'd be glad to be your loyal servant for the rest of my life!!

These were the words right out of the mouth of my roomie! Billions of blue blistering barnacles in ten thousand thundering thyphoons (Yeah! I'm a Captain Haddock fan)!! Could the bugger be serious?! Ok ok, I agree that the curvaceous lady in question is as sexy as they come and the strain on your eyes from staring at her voluptuous rear could very well lead to your getting bespectacled! But, hey! Is this what we mortals refer to as love? Or is it plain and simple infatuation, nothing but a mere school-boy crush kinda thing?

Right from my school days, I could boast of having a crush on some girl every other day! The story is somewhat different in college but that doesn't prevent me from "falling in love" regularly; not with the college gals mind you, but with the pretty NIFT chicks or some Ahmedabad gals! My love story is (or stories are rather) completely one-sided with the ladies I'm going gaga over probably unaware of my existence, except in those one or two cases when they would've caught me with my eyes fixed on them and they took me for some eve-teaser! Gosh! After reading great love stories like "Love Story" by Segal and "The Notebook" by Sparks, it feels real bad to find oneself in such a situation! How can Oliver and Noah have all the damn luck?!?!

My pathetic life does have one instance when I actually fell in love (no crush this one, mind you)! It was more of a love for a really dear friend! The girl is the bestest friend I ever had! We met years ago, and that too in a fashion that probably Segal would've penned down in a romantic novel! The credit for making my school life real lovely goes to her! Our relationship is something that has survived through realy bad times! As we grew older, I saw her as more of a friend than anything! She's meant a lot to me and I really love sharing all my secrets with her! That said, she's still my good friend! But I'm no good at maintaining LDRs (read Amod)! Thanks to that, it has been ages since I've spoken to her! That's the end of it:(!

So back to the normal way of life up here! I ain't a DoSa member for nothing, DoSa bole toh DA-IICT one-sider's association:D! Make way love... infatuation is on the roll! And lets see what we can do for my poor roommate!!

I probably would have ended with the formalities of bidding SEN a "fond" farewell, but what the heck! I'd as well mention my DP's completion. Sorry for the frequent use of acronyms! Actually DP stands for Design Project, a course we started in the second year under a faculty of our choice! The motto of the entire exercise was to help us come up with some rad design! Naive that we were, not to mention over-ambitious and a bit stupid, we somehow chose a project which is unheard of even as B. Tech. projects! And to top it all, we chose professor RNB as our mentor! So that was the beginning....

While many of our luckier, and probably wiser, batchmates caught hold of professors who let them off the DP hook just a semester or two after they began, we were stuck with the thought of probably continuing our desigining a CDMA-like system (Outrageous??) even after the final year! RNB is one guy who I respect with all my heart and there couldn't be a second RNB! He's a pro in whatever he's doing, is up-to-date on everything else, is a great professor, has unlimited knowledge, who strives for perfection in anything that he's introduced to, and is damn friendly on occassions when you visit him for a chat! But he can make you work for all you are worth! In the beginning, though nothing much was done except redefining the project statement and shrinking the project scope, work actually began in full swing last semester when in one meeting RNB pinpointed me and Amod as being fit for nothing and promising us that it was not necessary that he'd give a Pass credit to each and every group member! That was enough to get us working, atleast me, thank you Sir! Slogging it out in the electronics laboratory for quite sometime to get a wireless communication between two PCs finally paid off!

After almost 2 years of being tied to the DP, the great RNB last week freed us! He was really cheerful and helpful and protective! Kept reminding us of not making mistakes and stuff like that which he kept finding in the project document! He actually spent an hour teaching us how to correct our documents:D! God I look back on the times when we met him in the beginning, then the time we went to him after a long break and he refused to recognize us(!!), when he promised not to pass all of us, the time he offered us some sweetz before Diwali (yum!)!! But the last day was really special! The guy actually seemed to get sentimental! His parting dialogue that he never wished to see us again with a big grin said it all!

Sounds odd to me too, but somehow I feel sad that the DP is over! It goes unsaid that it was fun "working" with my best pals and teammates! Feels good to be able to be one of the rare DP groups which can boast of either passing their DP after doing work! And that too, a DP under RNB!!!

Now that SEN and DP are no more issues of concern, it's time to concentrate on much more important issues of life! Orkuting and Blogging.. here I come!!

Yippee! Today was D-day! Today was Judgement Day! Today it was all gonna be decided!! And happen it did! And in a cool way!

For the last month or so, sleep and rest were words that meant nothing to me! Had nightmares of getting screwed in the evealuation of the project with all kinds of errors popping up when we are being evaluated! Till the last minute before our evaluation, we were at it adding a line of code here and commenting the odd lines there! When the evaluator, the great Prof. Banerjee (thanks Shaan for refreshing my memory), and his troupe were a bare 10 feet away from us, we were actually getting an error! Thank God it worked somehow after we refreshed the browser a couple of times! The evaluation went well! He knew who to screw and who not to! And a peer review which he took in class today probably went in my favor with my teammates assuring me of the top slot neglecting our dear group leader! And I was at the prof.'s side throughout butting in with tits and bits of information! Phew! We had a close shave when he almost run a portion which we knew was error-infested but I managed to discourage him from proceeding!!

The guy was cool and probably was too sleepy today to screw us! And our project was running properly! Best part was that not a single error popped up!! Seemed more informal than formal! But am I happy that it's all over! For my SEN groupmates! Good going people! Today we did well! It was real fun working with all of you! And please try to forgive me for my outbursts and short-temper! I do get pissed off easily!

That said! Now I'm back to blogging big time! I'm a free man today!! Adieu SEN

SEN! Nope! I ain't talking about the typical Indian Bengali family's surname for Christ's sake! I'm referring to one of my courses this semester! SEN, or Software ENgineering for all the tube-lights out there, is probably the first course which has made me dread college life like never before! Nothing wrong about the course though! It is surely one of the courses which are of great importance! All the credit for turning it into a student-screwing course goes to the way this course is being implemented down here!

Can't recall the real name of the guy who actually takes this course of ours, but yeah! He's popularly known a Bakarjee! For more on him, refer sarat! Thanks to Bakar's wrong interpretation of our seniors' feedback, the course which actually is meant to be a 3 credit course was made into a 5 (omfg) credit course! Now me and my poor batchmates can boast of having a 4-hour long lab session *sob* and a 1 hour long miserable tutorial each and every week this semester *double sob*! The entire semester was wasted attending shitty meetings and preparing all kinds of documents for the SEN project (mind you this makes up for 50% of the course credits)! The lectures were ok but it all seemed so very obvious! And the exams suck! I mean, what's the point in conducting a theoretical exam is such a course?! And now that the project evaluation is on tuesday and the submission is due on the day-after-tomorrow, man! Watching everyone trying desparately to save their precious arses from being screwed is a sight!

I've been sitting in front of the comp from 11 AM in the morning till 8 PM in the evening! Forget chow, forget the gym, forget Dew, forget blogspot, forget Orkut, forget every-fuckin-thing! Just SEN is all that matters! God my eyes are watering from staring at the monitor trying to figure out that elusive error ot two that keep popping up! Could be my "team leader's" PC for all I know (don't know where the bugger got hold of the pile of crap which is infested with viruses and throws up errors which can't be imagined by a sane person!)! It's due time that I get bespectacled:(! On tuesday, we'll be the first ones to be ravaged by Bakarjee, and the testing team that we hear he'll be bringing along! As long as this misery is put to an end, I don't care a damn of what I have to go through to emerge from SEN's clutches!! Wouldn't mind humming Nirvana's funky song, "Rape me", when they begin working on us:D!

For now, back to the last minute hopscotch (origin confidential;)) and just praying that Tuesday comes soon and we get over with it fast! That would surely call for a booze party! Farewell SEN, in advance...

Now who the fuck could that be?! Why do these miserable bastards make a racket so early in the morning, that too at my front door?!?!

For the past like two years or so, these are the things on my mind when I wake up in the morning! Not a great way to begin the day, but can't be helped! The alarm clock reads 8:00 AM. The guy banging at the door is one of my trusted colleagues who have been entrusted with the task of waking me up before the 8:30 AM lecture each and everyday, and at any cost (Poor guys don't have any idea how much they've been cursed for quite some time... lucky dogs!) ! Seems like I just went to sleep, which is partly true if you go according to the newspapers and medical journals which recommend a minimum of 7 hours of sleep. So ok! A bare 2 hours of sleep doesn't look good! Can I help it if life demands so much out of me that it becomes impossible to sleep before 6 AM?? Can't even remember the last time I got a good night's rest...

So, that being the case, now I can proudly show-off the dark black circles under my eyes, which I'm sure many tacitly take for a couple of punches that I graciously received during a fight! But who cares?! Even my parents have gone tired trying to make me change my habits but all in vain! Even my favorite prof.'s outright accusation that I've probably become a drug-addict(omg!) have failed to have any effect on me! I somehow can't recall when was the last time I slept before 2 AM!! Be it projects, movies, gaming, reading novels, or last minute studies, the best time to persue them are the wee hours of the morning! Catching up on my sleep used to be done in lectures, but that has become quite difficult these days with atleast one guy being kicked out of the lecture theatre per day! No time to sleep in the friggin (picked it up from a ravishing nymph's blog :D) labs and tuts! So, it's been like just 2 measly hours of so-called sleep for me these days! Gosh! I even stopped dreaming those wonderful yet mysterios dreams that I used to have :(! I used to catch up on my sleep on weekends, but thanks to the coaching that I've joined, even that was put to a sad end! Life has been going on this way...

Well, yesterday I finally broke down! Couldn't concentrate on anything! Kept drowsing off every where I could! Now that one of the major projects of this sem is almost completed, I told my groupmates that I had had enough for the day and am going to turn in! Unbelievable yet true, I hit the sack at 11:30 PM and enjoyed a wonderful sleep! Got up at 6 AM, couldn't sleep any more, and boy! Did I feel fresh!! Today I helped in bringing the project one step closer to completion (my SEN group members, you guys rock!!); got hold of a friend's bike and had a roam around the city (The damn sun was scorching hot but still a bike ride is all a guy needs!); got some grapes and am relishing them in this heat while typing this out ;)!

Well, what I wanna say is this... I don't know how long I'm gonna continue being a "good" boy by sleeping early, but it sure feels good! Feels like you've got the entire day to yourself; quite contrary to sleeping at dawn and waking up at dusk and feeling gloomy even though you've got the entire night to yourself! Even attending lectures was fun today! So, my fellow nocturnal DA-IICTians, give thought to sleeping early! Give yourslef a break from the nightouts! I bet it would feel great! As for me, I plan to turn over a new leaf :D (Hey come on! No sniggers people! I'm serious!)! Watch out for the new and modified me! And I pray to God that the black patches under my eyes vanish for good.....

Disclaimer: Any reference to a particular female, or a certain number of females, in this post is not at all coincidental and was surely intentional! Also, any resemblance to the females mentioned might be coincidental or might not! No names have been mentioned explicity, so hear ye, all females at DA-IICT! If any of you come across this post, associating yourself with any female or category of females mentioned is entirely your fault and not the author's!! Finally, hurting anyone was not the motto of composing this thread; all I had in mind was presenting my frustrations! Read on bloggers....

About a semester after joining college, the first time I came across a T-shirt with the caption, "99% girls are beautiful... the rest 1% are in my college", it kinda appealed to me! Throughout my life, I've been lucky enough to come across several girls, types ranging from reserved to cool to cute to sexy to bitchy to ugly(ugh!), but I had always imagined that college would be the ultimate place for going after the chicks! So, innocently I reserved any feelings I had for my best-female-friends in those good-old school days for the damsels that I had dreamed of meeting in college.

But woe is me! For starters, take my batch in college for instance... out of 240 odd students, a mere 30-35 belong to the fairer sex (Holy cow! Please don't be misled when I say "fairer" because fair specimens of the so-called fairer sex are a myth over here)! Hardly 5-6 out of them qualify as cool! A measly 3-4 qualify as cute or sexy:(! I'm in no mood to elaborate about the remaining. The biggest problem is that I never have felt comfortable talking to the better ones because I've always got the feeling that they possess that snobbish attitude and aren't much interested in any sort of conversation! So much for discovering whether the girl possesses internal beauty or not! Moving on to the external aspects, naah! If I state that T-shirt caption, I'm cent percent sure it would qualify as the understatement of the century!

What adds to my frustration, and probably the frustrations of most of my male colleagues, is watching the sexy specimens of babes that other colleges boast of possessing! Dammit! Take the recent fashion show that we had at our college! NIFT was here and Gaaawd! Were the female models awesome or what!! They had everything right - the attitude, the figures, the sex-appeal, the dressing-sense and what not! Another instance was when I went to IIT Bombay to participate in their annual Techfest. We had our contraption all set up and I was the one explaining how it worked to anyone who lingered around near us! I had the pleasure of reiterating the same things to loads of females, but I in no way felt ennervated! And the best part was exchanging names and shaking hands with these 3 absolutely gorgeous Pune gals after the explanation thing got over! Even these gals could boast of being babes in the true sense!
*Sighs* Which brings meback to the pitiable state of affairs in my college!

Seems there's nothing that can be done to alter the situation! So I've been surviving thanks to all the "cool" gals on Orkut and my Yahoo friend list :(! Not to mention cool gals like Isha who I bumped into on Blogger! Also, bird-watching in Ahmedabad helps a lot:D! Gotta spend one more year in this hell this way and then probably I'll get to know some real chick in real life...

Many a times I've had the feeling that Jim Davis (Thanks Salil) had me in mind when he came up with the concept of Garfield! Just like Garfield is a wise-cracking, nap-taking, coffe-guzzling, lasagna-loving, spider-whacking, dog-punching, postman-mauling fat cat (courtesy http://www.fromtheheartpostcards.com/Garfield.html), I'm also a wise-cracking, always hibernating, coffee-guzzling, chow-loving, pal-as-well-as-foe-mauling somewhat muscular dude :D! But the most striking characteristic that myslef and Garfield share in common is our loathe for Mondays!!

Ever since I started attending school, I began to hate the second day of the week, better known as the first working day of the week, like anything! After spending a wonderful weekend when I would sleep till late in the morning followed by lazing around for the entire day, and spend a wonderful evening playing all sorts of games in my neighbourhood, it was on the eve of Monday that it began to sink in that the tomorrow is the day to get back to the same mundane routine! So what ensued was stuffing my bag with all the books for school, polish my shoes, and making sure that I had completed all my homework (most of the times, it turned out that I hadn't and like always, last-minute hotchpotch work to the rescue 8)!

Mondays usually turned out to be just as miserable as I had foreseen, if not more. Classes were so very somnolent that drowsing off was a must and this gave the lecturers a good chance to screw me! The experiments seemed to take like forever to get completed! Squabbling with friends was a Monday speciality! Bloody profs took out their frustrations by handing out loads of homework! Thanks to my parents' hangover from the weekend, even they used to be sourpusses throughout Monday! Gawd! How I had wanted to escape all these miseries and get into college where I had imagined life to be eternal bliss, thanks to all those crappy Hindi movies in which college students have been portrayed as being the dudes and dudettes who do everything with the exception of studying and attending college! Boy! Mondays in college sure would be fun was all that I had in my mind!

Now I'm in college! Life is just the same as the miserable school life I left behind, if not worse! All that I had seen in the movies is so very untrue! You actually end up doing all that they don't do in the film world version of college life. As for Mondays, they're far worse! Psychopaths masquerading as professors ensure that you attend their labs and lectures, and that too by taking pop-quizzes and attendances or by promising you an F grade and a chance to repeat the course!

Today was a Monday! It sucked, and there's nothing new about that! I was working on a software engineering project till about 5 AM with someone who I can't say I adore or admire or, for that matter, like more than I like a stinking pair of socks! Played an hour's worth of Quake and wrote my diary entry for the previous day before hitting the sack at 6:30 AM! Got up at 8:45 AM *yawns* to attend a lecture in which there's always a threat of a quiz! Two consecutive lectures and a much despised 3 hour (which eventually goes upto 4 hours) lab session later, I'm left with one helluva headache! Neither do I have the strength nor the will to visit my favorite hangout, namely the gym! The rest of today I know is gonna suck as well! Got to continue the work on my project with, yeah you got it, the same bugger! Probably I'll have to survive on a bottle of Dew for dinner *sighs*! And I could do with some sleep :(!

Don't know when this day is gonna end, but I sure hope Tuesday hurries up.....

For quite sometime now, Orkuting has been a severe addiction of mine. It would be stating an analogy when I mention that what smoking a cigarette means to chain smokers, logging onto the one and only Orkut means to me! But recently, I got myslef into another "mess", namely blogging, thanks to my buddies and their exceptional writing skills. Even though I managed to avoid posting, I quite enjoyed browsing through the blogs. But after my debut on Blogspot as a true blogger, a trade off between wasting time scrapping on Orkut and whiling away my time blogging was quite inevitable!

For the past couple of weeks, it seems as if blogging was the activity being deprived of my attention. While it is a fact that I love writing, it is also a fact that I'm a lazy slob! And thanks to the latter fact, I preferred to stick to writing my diary rather than slogging it out at the keyboard! Added to the above mentioned reason, there are plenty of excuses for my not carrying on publishing my thoughts. For starters, there are early morning lectures failing to attend some of which would ensure your enrollment in the same course for the next year! Not that I'm a regular at these soporific discourses (actually I turn up once in a blue moon in the lecture theatre to give proof of my existence to the prof.), but bunking them is in no way fun because you lie in bed cursing yourself for missing a possible pop-quiz or attendance! Rather than enjoying a good hour's worth of sleep, which actually bunking a lecture should amount to, you keep awake just to confirm that there was no quiz! If the lecture was eventless as you had prayed and hoped, the relief experienced couldn't be put in words. If the case was just the opposite, what ensues is a barrage of words for you never knew you knew, not to mention a really fucked-up day!! AHEM

Carrying on with the excuses, lectures apart, I can actually boast of having upto 4-hour long laboratory sessions which are a total waste of precious time! Excuse number 3 is all about the projects that I'm overburdened with! I somehow manage to squeeze in my working-out activities amidst all these detestable activities. Speaking of excuses, how could I forget good old Orkut Buyukkokten's creation?! Apart from all this, the most promising excuse that I'm going to present is my addiction to computer gaming. Even though I was hooked onto Counter-Strike, I somehow managed to jilt that craze for good! But the same couldn't be said for Quake-III which I still continue to play as a freak, be it early in the morning (read between 2 AM to 5 AM!) or any time in the day!!

That's it with all my excuses! If you were crazy enough to read through the entire load of crap that I've typed out and reach here, kudos to you for managing to come out alive! As for me, I've been giving serious thought to showing the other tasks my middle finger, and getting into blogging the proper way! Thank you people for your comments on my previous post, which I believe were solely responsible for my getting back here.........