Sorry for the delay

Due to some uninteresting and ungrateful people who have assigned me some bull-crap work, I will not be able to continue the journey till Monday, 12th June. Waitup for the next blog on Monday.

The Unholy alliance

‘Desperately in need...of some...strangers hand, in a...desperate land’ is line from one of my favorite songs. Never completely understood the meaning though. So I will go by the literal meaning of it. I will continue our journey from the place where we had Quake 3 Demo downloaded and ready to be played. I installed the demo waiting anxiously for the setup to complete. Then I double clicked the icon on the desktop holding my breath, finally I will be back to my natural habitat of slaying artificial life forms to sharpen my skills. The feeling could only be compared to a coke addict receiving a pinch of the magical powder after a century of abstinence. To my agony I saw this

...unloading OpenGL DLL...assuming '3dfxvgl' is a standalone driver...initializing QGL...WARNING: missing Glide installation, assuming no 3Dfx available...shutting down QGL----- CL_Shutdown -----RE_Shutdown( 1 )-----------------------GLW_StartOpenGL() - could not load OpenGL subsystem

I was mortified as this message flashed in front of me. And almost as an instinctive reaction I downloaded the latest drivers for the card. The Installation told me that you need ‘Administrative Rights’ to the computer. The ‘power user’ privileges were insufficient to do the job. I was wondering how I could, in my first week at college would be able to get these rights. Then I saw this really big guy doing something in DOS. The kind of things he appeared to be doing was of computer ‘pro’ and I thought may be his needs could be similar to mine. We started talking. At that moment of time I didn’t realize that this could be the start of an ‘Unholy Alliance’ that would allow us to leech on the University’s vast computer resources. We carefully devised a plan to lure someone to type their password unaware of our fiendish intentions. Someone who would be a ‘Network Administrator’. We carefully chose our candidates. The Chief Network Administrator was a lady. At that point of time she had 3 side-kicks. One a short plump one, who looked as if God while creating her accidentally zipped her before emailing her to earth. The other one was a tall fair girl(who tried teaching us Matlab on couple of occasions and failed miserably) and last but not the least the good looking of the lot, a girl with a hint of what we know as ‘Chinkiness’. Now here I would take some time to explain why we chose her as our scapegoat. Now the general theory of energy says that “Energy only changes form. It cannot be created or destroyed.” Now since beautiful girls always attract boys everywhere, we can say ‘beauty’ is a form of energy. Now this energy must have come from some where. Empirical analysis over several thousand years shows that this energy comes at cost of the ‘brain’. So we concluded that beautiful girls are generally dumb.

The Execution of Evil™ Plan.

One nice morning we are sitting in the lab waiting for our subject to arrive. The idea was to convince the dame that we were a bunch of dumb heads who knew jack about computers. The plan went something like this.

I (alpha) would lure the subject into the trap gates
The big Guy(Omega) would be ready with the trap switch
Once the subject was completely unaware of what was going on
We would trigger the trap and catch our subject totally unaware.

Now don’t think we were going to kidnap her. I put on a great show that I was very new to computers and I did not know how to transfer files across the network. She instead of showing me how do transfer files, gave me instructions. I told myself ‘Oh Shit!!! Plan A failed time to switch to contingency plan B. I always have a plan B. I typed my password incorrectly, and I told her that ‘see, still no authentication’. She was started mumbling that we were a bunch of “Computer Illiterates, who had no intentions of learning anything ourselves and always wanted to be spoon-fed.” Saying that she took control of the keyboard and I signaled Omega to spring the trap. She typed her user id “shal**i” and then the password. The theory of Conversion of energy proved successful. The subject was trapped. Mission Accomplished.

By the time she was finished teaching us how to access shared files, we had learned what we needed. A ‘key-capturing’ software running on the computer and notified Omega of the password. The password “hopeislife” was what we needed. After all hope is life J. I installed the needed driver with the domain admin login and password, played Quake 3 till my craving for Quake 3 was satisfied. Tomorrow more on the “Adventures of Alpha-Omega.”

220V, 50Hz, 16Amp, No Power. Enjoy the lab ‘Praanis’

Well what could be better than attending your maiden electronics lab next day after attending your maiden classes a day before? Attending your electronics lab when there is a ‘load-shedding’ and the generators power the entire building but the electronics lab. Now here allow me to introduce a term which is very frequently used in the northern parts of the country. It’s called ‘load-shedding’. Especially during the 12 months of the year (not just the summer as the government claims. They are just a bunch of lying blood-sucking parasites.), parts of the country are deprived of one of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind, Electricity. Electricity Board claims that they do this to provide electricity to the rural agricultural areas. But everyone knows the truth. Now I think I got carried away.


So our electronics lab was an unscheduled lab (nothing to do with castes). We all gathered there and when all of a sudden 60 people hit the lab it was a ‘Reign of Chaos’ the lab assistant, ahhh!!! The lab assistant of electronics lab brings back these memories that I had suppressed for such a long time. The man looked harmless and down-to-earth kind of guy on first glance. And to some extent he was down-to-earth, but harmless, no way. I mean the guy was paranoid about his stupid principles. That was something that we didn’t get on the first day. I would call him an unpleasant ‘flat-tire’ on long long journey.

But the first day was good. There was no electricity in the lab sockets but luckily the window air conditioners had their power-supply from the generators. They were working. We all gathered in the lab getting hold anything that we got to sit on. An informal introduction session had started, which was good in a way since most of us had not been introduced to each other. One guy then stood up, and if I remember correctly he was wearing a blue jean and a blue shirt in the summer. His hair looked as if it had already borne the brunt of a personality development program. He claimed that he was ‘karate Black-belt’; saying that he had rechristened himself with a name that he would be known as for the rest of his life. Another guy stood up to introduce himself. Dressed in pure ethnic clothes, he talked in a tone similar to a ‘Politician’ and had hobbies like ‘listening to Mohd. Rafi’, ‘Mirza Galib’. In my mind only one word came, “BULLSHIT”. And when my turn came, I was ‘blank’. What the f*** did I do as a hobby? Ahh! Computer Games. I remember only these two guys because they would be an integral part of the journey, especially the ‘karate-kid’. Others, I am sure would be remembering the rest of the guys in their own memories. Stay tuned for the exciting episode of this journey, anytime after 12, tomorrow, same URL. Tomorrow’s special, “The Unholy Alliance”.

My first day at the Deemed University

I remember when I was studying in school in my lower classes; I have written numerous essays on ‘My first day at …’ all that I can recall now is the last time I wrote that essay was long time back. Well school was so much fun back then. Simple homework, recesses where we used to play ‘pakda pakdi’, ‘bumpastic’ (a slightly benign version where u were to hit a guy with a softball). Later on in higher classes we used heavier and harder balls, for both as projectiles and targets ;) ). But all that is over now. We are adults in a professional institution getting trained to be professionals of the future. But it never hurts to write that essay again.

My first day in my college class was really good to start with. The time-table was not set and consequently the first 2 periods we sat in our labs, surfing the good old internet. Me, being the computer geek I am, was checking out the configuration of the computer. It was a Compaq Deskpro workstation with a Pentium-III(550Mhz, 512Kb cache),128 Mb RAM, 40GB HDD with a dedicated Matrox Millennium G200 AGP card!!!! I was speechless for a while. It was high-end system for the age in which I got admitted into my college (My college director will kill me if he reads this. He quoted once ‘You are not in a college, you are in a Deemed University’). So when you have such a beast at your command what do you do? Play games of course. I downloaded the Quake 3 arena demo while my gamer friend (A very very very lean guy from the state capital) started downloading Unreal Tournament Demo. Before the download was complete, a class was called for. A ‘Class’ without a ‘time-table’, how unfair? So we attended our maiden class I don’t even remember which one it was. I was too occupied with the thoughts of visiting the ‘Longest Yard’ arena after a long time. Once the class got over, I rushed over to the lab only to find that someone was already occupying my computer and chatting away to glory. I was just about to blow the person out of his seat, everyone went quiet. The only thing that could be heard was the humming of the AC and the computers. For a second I thought, was it me? Did the Quake 3 energy that was flowing through my body could have caused this tranquility? I was standing at the door of the lab, lost in my thoughts with everyone’s gaze upon me. Was it really true? I felt a hand on my collar and as my instincts would tell me I said “Kaun hai be?” To my horror, it was my senior. It was the guy would later take on the name of ‘Veto Corleone’, ‘Bhaktavaar’ and ‘Mard’.

Time after that near fatal encounter with the senior did not go very well. Our (each one of my batch mates present in the lab at that point of time) personalities were developed for two continuous hours, after which I ate a lunch which did not taste good. I needed some rest. We again had post-lunch unscheduled classes. What could be better? I took the last seat near the air conditioner and slept for two continuous periods. After that again a short round of personality development and we were off to our ‘Boot Camp’ to continue our hardships there.

Mess, messy and messier

Sometimes I wonder if the word "mess" was coined by someone who has endured the food in a boarding institution. No autobiography of any engineer is complete without the mention of the hostel mess. After the excruciating journey of 22Km, with an unscheduled pit stop at the local bridge, we were so exhausted to eat that for the initial few days it was very difficult for us to complain. With the pocket money really tight, it was difficult to eat outside everyday. The food was basically divided into various nutrient groups.

1. Carbohydrates(rice)
2. Proteins (the daal, oh! great daal. It was difficult to make out what was floating on top, a cricket, a fly or something else)
3. Vitamins (a gooey mixture of vegetables which were in a really disgusting state before being cooked)
4. The minerals

One particular note here is the 4th bullet. We were living in an industrial sector on the outskirts on the town. There would be no deficiency of minerals like chromates, dichromates, oxides ... and all the pollutants there could be in the water that was used to cook. But again, since that was "The Boot Camp", it is the place were you are given the basic training to sustain, the training to survive. I could bet on the fact that it hardened a couple of mummy's babies into men.

If the food was not bad enough, one would look at the worker's conditions to make sure that the hunger would pass away. But we were the survivors of a holocaust, called the 'IIT-JEE' & 'EDCIL'. It was not like in the days of 'Nazi Germany'. We were never starved to death or gassed. We ourselves chose to starve. An average loss of 10 kg was a common thing in those early days. Often the smoke from a near by industrial installation would engulf the hostel. We would then salvage for anything to cover our faces and try not to breathe. The worst hit were, the 'park view' and 'pool view' rooms. We in the penitentiary-like rooms were protected by the closed nature of the rooms. But let’s not wander off from our subject which was 'food'.

As I said we were survivors, we found ways to survive as all survivors would do. We found the magic of '2 minutes'. A preparation simple to make and provided enough nutrition, supplemented by a few eggs to pull us through 6 days of the week. On the 7th day we had a feast. On a local street side restaurant, me and couple of friends would enjoy for just Rs. 70, half a chicken cooked in a mouth watering gravy cooked generously in butter, with the great "Indian Roomali roti". That was our energy cell that took us through the week. One might feel this to be an exaggeration but, it is not. The mess in a way made us appreciate, what quality food really meant.

A hostel, good from far and far from good.

At times it so happens that there is a huge difference between what you expect and what you get. Our hostel was somewhat like that. The room allocations were done. There were deluxe rooms on the ground floor. Vast, spacious, and really cool during the summers. They were already occupied by the students inducted in first counseling. As far as my memory can remember they were really monopolized by our friends from the Hills. There were the park facing rooms and pool facing rooms. Although the pool was used exclusively by cattle and the park had enough long grass to practice guerilla warfare. The rooms that were in the middle were very similar to an American penitentiary. Deprived of direct sunlight it was really dank.
Being a single child, I was never very comfortable with the idea of sharing a room(once we reach the middle part of the journey we would know why). My first roommate was really not a person whom I would get along with. He was the safe player, ‘think before you do and just before you do it, think again’ kind of guy. He kind of kicked me out (a lot of credit for that goes to me) and I was to become roommates with a country cousin. A guy as you would come to know was different, rebellious and really skinny for that kind of attitude. We got along well for quite some time. Part reason for this was his cavalier, never say die attitude. But we did our best to do things the right way. We once in a while cleaned the rooms. And no matter how bad things would get, and no matter how stinky it would get we would stay in that shabby little place. Later our hostel-wing was call ‘C’ and our room was ‘C-3’ just 1 short of a ‘KAAA BOOOM’. Everybody got their rooms eventually and things were finally settling down. 22Km away from the civilization, around 110 boys resting thinking about what tomorrow holds for them.

A long time ago, in a hostel far far away

It was August 8th, I don't want to mention the year as it was long time ago (:D). A collection of different, faces from different parts of the country had gathered at the institute's building. We were loading our luggage onto the institute's bus. In order to help out I got on the top of the bus and started arranging the luggage. There was this fair guy, from the land of the desert, he handed me his suitcase. I couldn't find space anywhere in the middle, so I put it on one side. At that time I didn't realize that this was going to cost the guy, who incidentally becomes a key character of the last half of our journey, a good old suitcase ( :) ). Another character in our story is from the land of the desert, which deserves a mention here had just got out of an university in another holy land nearby. His father had come to drop him off. His story will be a very interesting one in our journey. We all were packed up and ready, like soldiers geared up and ready to go into battle. The bus drove on, into the unknown (for us). We waited anxiously for our trenches to arrive. We awaited more. We realized we had crossed borders, a river and now we were behind enemy lines. When we finally reached there we realized we were on our own. It was like a war-zone. The construction had just taken place. There were already students there. They were the ones who had come with the higher ranks. They were supposed to be the section 'A'. We were the section 'B'. There was very little interaction, for reasons I can't explain without creating a controversy about our journey. Later as you would see that this section-'B' or section-'Brutes' incidentally would bring out some very talented people, the best ‘anchor’, the best 'drama directors', 'the best dancer', 'the best gamers' and probably called later as the section of 'the best'. But later when the time came to change the course of our journeys, it didn't matter what was the best. What really mattered was that the time that was spend there was the best, even with the extreme conditions of survival, the more than occasional anti-student notices. But anyways, let by-gones be by-gones. Wait up till tomorrow for the most interesting chapter of our journey. 'Da Boot Camp'.

Behind enemy lines

When you have just got admission in an institution which is said to be the key institution of IT in the future, you should not get your hopes really high. It still is the present, future has not come yet. I had come a day earlier, and instead of allocating me a room in my hostel, I was sent for a day at the 'Super Senior' hostel. Was it my fate, or my stupidity is a topic I still debate with myself. But I saw that I was not the only one, with this 'fate'. I met with two classmate from the capital of the state. At that moment I didn't realise like all the other occasions that their story is going to be most entertaining in our journey. Well the seniors inducted us on the very first day in their 'Personality Development Programme'(Ragging is a banned word). The two 'to be roomies' were made to dance in a 'sensual manner'. It was kind of disgusting to see and I wondered why the super seniors enjoyed it. I was made to sing and then later be a part of that disgusting dance. After that we were allowed to have food. I felt like a prisoner of war. Once we had food we thought that we could survive as a team. Our hopes were foiled when they again called us for the next round of dances. After a while (2-3 hours) we were allowed to sleep with seniors, 3 on two beds. I was a little sceptical, I had heard stories about frustrated engineering students opting the 'alternate lifestyle' but I was physically and mentally too tired to argue with myself.
Next day when I woke up, I was relieved to find that I was not 'physically violated' by any senior. I had heard the most disgusting stories about these 'Personality Development Programme'. But now it was August 8th the 'Day'. We had reached the first station in our journey, finally.

"Kaun Selling - Engineering seat le lo "

Every journey begins figuratively with day you buy your ticket. Without ticket travelling is dangerous. The ticket in our case was a day of counseling at the university campus. A 'strange collection' of people from the university were handling our counseling. On the face value they appeared to be harmless. A presenting for which we paid heavily in the later stages of our journey. Also the country's brightest were also in the room. Out of the approximately 72,000 who appeared in the All India entrance only the top 350 had been called till then for 120 prized seats. When u do the maths, initially 600 students were competing for a seat. When we were called around 60% of the seats were already full. So chances were still very slim. I met these couple of really nice guys from a near by town which incedently was the capital of the state. That day I never realized that the first quarter of this story would be so influenced by them. I saw another character, a very stoic guy. I never saw a smile on his face even when his seat was confirmed, as if he had a kind of distaste for this stream of engineering. It was later I came to know that he really disliked the Computer stream and wanted to become a mechanical engineer. I did not know then what future held for me. But I was relieved, after a year's hunt my journey had begun. A journey that would make what I today.

Let us C

As I remember and many of the Software Engineers in India do .... we all started seeing C first. A book by Nagpurian viz. 'Yashwant Kanetkar' has given a lot many of us to step into the Indian IT industry. As far as my personal opinion goes the book is greatly inadequate( I realized this after I went to a job interview after revising that book). Nevertheless it still has an important place in our memories as our journey as a software engineer began from this book. It is not the Bhagwad Geeta or the Bible for us programmers but it tried its best and failed to give us a glimpse of what the programming world would look like. "Seeing is believing", but "Let us Cing is fooling ur self". I am not critisizing the book.. but after reading it and apprised about its inadeqaucies while in an interview, I only wish that it were a book that would be complete. May be I am a wishful thinker but I would love to see something better coming out of that book franchise.
Anyways I was talking about the journey, a journey that began 5 years back, a journey that transformed my life and life of many other like me. A journey that should have been green with Trees, long with lists and tall with stacks. But instead it took a turn and went into deep realms of a 'Synthetic World'. A World torn apart by raging battles between 'Knights' and 'Trebs', 'Rockets' and 'Rails', 'Snipers' and 'Shotguns' and last but not the least 'Terrorists' and 'Counter-Terrorists'. I didn't ask for this alter ego. The temptation did not take me by surprise like the others. I was introduced to this synthetic world even before I embarked upon this journey. But soon I realised that I had crossed the point of no return.
I was always a talker in school a.k.a. 'chatter-box'. Probably this quality(a trait rather, in which i take pride) saved my skin on several occasions. Especially when it came to securing grades in practicals and examination. My pr (personal relations) with many of the professors and the Lab-Assistants were the sole reason that I would be given the benefit of doubt(there were occasion when this ploy backfired on me), which would mean that i would secure an easy B+. No pain all gain. But then I always like many other software engineers like me say, "I don't study for marks, I study for knowledge." . A really pure thought when taken in literal sense. But again knowledge can wait. There were better things to do in life.
Now since I am in a job now, I have to give time to my "work". So I will continue the log of this journey tomorrow. Sayonara for now.

(Hey nobody is gonna read this sH! t, if you do plz post a comment).