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Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Nightmare !

The human mind works in such mysterious, unfathomable ways.... Today I was supposed to be studying some stuff for the project but had managed to doze off, and what an effective way my mind chose to wake me up! I had such a realistic nightmare, that I woke up because of that. Wow!

I was supposed to be going somewhere to write some exam, and inexplicably I chose to take an auto instead of a bus. Well, the journey went on and on and on. Never had I expected that the destination is so far away. Somewhere along the way, the auto went on a flyover and passed by an air-hostess training institute which was next to the flyover. The building had a glass front and a real life-size plane sitting there. I wonder if the practical exams for the students takes place there!

At the end of that flyover, I saw Tonni walking along, and decided to offer a lift, but since the auto driver was speeding, I could only manage a wave. A couple of mins later, I reached my destination. It looked more like a shopping mall, but strangely enough, there was a railway station inside. The driver stopped the auto a foot from the track.

When I saw the fare on the meter, I got the shock of my life. Expecting something like 100 or so, I was stunned to see a 605 !! Btw, autos here cannot show a fare of 100, since after 99, it wraps around to zero. Anyway, I tried to reason with the drivers (yeah, no idea when or how it became three drivers - one Indian, one Chinese and one God knows who) but to no avail. I started pleading with the Indian guy to convince the others that 605 was too high and to give me a discount, but the other two were adamant that I pay up the entire amount.

Finally after an eternity of coaxing and pleading, the final offer I got was this - pay up 125. The meter says 605, they ask for 125.... what's going on ??? Before I could figure out whether it was a prank, or whatever else, I was wide awake. Now when I try to figure out the significance of the 605, I can come up with three possible fundas -
  1. I started writing this entry at 6:05 am
  2. A couple of days back, I had a deadline of getting somewhere by 6:05 pm
  3. The craziest funda of all -- "KA-01-F-605" is the number of the bus 102, and 102 is the reverse of 201, and part of my route resembled the route taken by 201, and my "love" for all things 201 is well known.
Sheesh! What a nightmare! Anyway, mission accomplished, I am up and running now. Back to studying! Adios!

An unusual Valentine's Day.....

Feb 14th - Valentine's Day. The day dedicated to luuv. A day when you expect to find lovers gazing lovingly into each other's eyes, muttering sweet nothings, and celebrating their love for each other. Well, my day was a little different from this stereotypical description of a typical V Day.

PC, CD and I met up in college to figure out how we plan to work on the project. We put fundae until lunch time, and then dispersed home. For quite some time now, PC and I have had this crazy plan of walking from college to Corporation atleast once. We decided that this was the best day, since we had the time, and project work had not yet started in full swing.

Having decided to go for it, we left college around 1:30 pm. As if to make the arduous walk just that much more strenous, it was extremely sunny and we got absolutely no respite. The walk started off with me describing the storyline of "Dus" in extreme detail to a pretty interested PC. As we walked along eating some chocolate as the "source of our energy" to provide us the "boost" to walk the entire trip, suddenly a dog got a whiff of the melting chololate in my hand and decided to investigate. Given my (unfortunately rather over-documented) fear of dogs which approach me, I freaked out and tossed the chocolate, wrapper and all, far away from myself to get rid of the dog.

It being an out-of-the-blue decision to walk, both of us were a little tired after less than a third of our journey was complete. Since we were near the Gudda Anjaneya temple, we decided to visit it. As was to be expected, it was locked since it was afternoon. Luckily, the Lord was visible through the locked door. After darshan, we decided to sit there in the cool shade and put more fundae on our second project. We generally chatted about all manner of things, project and otherwise. After resting for nearly 45 mins, we reluctantly decided to continue.

Looking for the "minimum shortest path", we took quite a few wrong turns and ended taking a rather circuitous route eventually. Our next stop - ButterSponge, since PC was feeling a bit hungry after all this walking. After that pit-stop for refuelling, we resumed our journey. We visited another temple, the presiding dieties being Karthikeya, Ganesh and Krishna. This time though, it was not much of a stop there since was already past 4:30 pm, and hence we decided to get to corporation as quickly as possible with no more detours or stops or adventures.

As fate would have it, at the very next intersection, we chose the wrong road, and ended up walking the extra distance to get back on track. Of course, both of us were getting rather tired since its a good 12 km walk from college to Corporation, specially considering our less-than-optimal route. Anywayz, we finally reached our destination at 5:09 pm, over four and a half hours after we started. Luckily, PC immediately got a bus there, but I chose to complete the walk to my place. Just the thought of walking another 6 km was tiring, but I stubbornly pushed on. The pace was gone, energy was gone, but managed to drag myself home and reached home sweet home around 6:15 pm.

Whew! What a great day. Definitely not what I had in mind when I left from home that morning, but was a lot of fun and had a great time. Yet another of those unforgettable moments in (or rather, due to) college.

Thursday, February 02, 2006

IITM Memoirs

24th to 28th Jan 2006 -- some of the most unforgettable days of my short life so far on this planet. My second visit to IIT Chennai, this time the pretext being the Cul fest "Saarang". The onward journey was total fun, the highlight being the creation of the crazy Kaaya kavya. Once at Chennai, the gang of nine took a couple of taxis and reached the hallowed precincts a little after lunch-time.

Unlike last time though, we got mosquito-free (but cement dust carpeted) individual rooms rather than a common room. Since a black-buck reserve is actually enclosed within the campus, it was an awesome experience watching the deer and blackbucks roam freely all around us. A couple of us even got to touch a couple of really friendly ones. THRILLING ! And the best part - the deer easily outnumbered the dogs and cats and monkeys on the campus.

As regards the competitions, we were not really successful in breaking the drought of success in IIT, but the fun was the rest of it all. It being a HUUUUUGE campus, and walking being our only mode of transport, we must have walked easily 35-40 km in the space of those 4 days! We discovered a crashed plane also, and the controls in it still work after all those decades! On one of those expeditions, we visited a lake within the campus, and came within 10 feet of a couple of snakes (not surprising, considering that the Chennai Snake Park is a neighbor to IITM)

Two visits to the beach and had a blast both times. On the first trip, we saw a couple a navy choppers and 4 airforce jets fly by at a very low altitude! Lotza fun! We even spotted a couple of crabs on the beach. If wildlife is one of your interests, a mind-blowing trip. We caught the sun-rise there on both days, and thankfully no clouds to spoil the view. Unfortunately, some sea-water splashed my camera rendering it inoperable.... Too bad.... Once back, I managed to recover a few shots from the camera though by downloading some appropriate software.

We attended a lecture and a workshop by Mr. Nuggesh Kukkunoor and it was a "hazaar level" talk. He has such a such of humor and is such an inspiring person. We were supposed to attend a photography workshop, but found it toooooo boring.... That guy was actually giving a PPT which reminded us of our regular classes (yuck!) and hence we fled. Kinda felt that we could hone our photography skills better taking snaps of nature at its delicate best in the campus and the beach rather than sitting through that class (!!!).

Back at IIT, every evening there was a special event in the Open Air Theatre (OAT) with a seating capacity of around 9000 janta. The degree of security involved, even for registration for the competitions, was mind-boggling! Even as we were sent back on the first day to our hostel to retrieve our ID cards, we kept mumbling about how easy it would be for would-be terrorists to fake the IDs and get away with it.

Back to the shows. First evening - Classical Nite -- there was this absolutely AMAAAAZING performance by Ganesh-Kumaresh duo playing the violin. No vocalists, just instruments. Man, their control and speed were almost super-human! Second evening, rock band finals which we ditched and instead went on a nice long walk touring the campus.


Third evening, Shankar Mahadevan (SM), Ehsaan and Loy had their show. And with them were Mahalakshmi Iyer and a bunch of other upcoming stars. SM was simply superb. All janta were dancing to his tunes (quite literally!) all through the show. That guy is one brilliant entertainer, and a clown to boot.... hehe. The most beautiful part was when the entire audience took out their mobiles and waved them around reminiscent of lighters being lit during rock shows elsewhere. After the show ended at 10:15 pm, we went to the Dhaba (yeah, IIT even has its own dhaba!) and settled down for dinner. The crowd there was so huge after the show, we had to wait for almost 2 whole hours for the food to arrive!

Fourth evening, there was a jazz concert by a French troupe --- Duo Ferdinand Et Cie --- oh man, never knew a human being could play instruments that brilliantly and at such a blistering pace. Ok, me running outta adjectives to describe it. Almost missed it due to ridiculous security (even biscuits and combs were banned!!) but thankfully, I managed to be inside before they started. WOW! Those were really magical evenings!

Trip back was mostly spent dozing coz all janta were soo tired after over 100 hours of non-stop fun and exertions. Took me a couple of days to catch up on lost sleep, and now I'm back!