prateekshac

International Institute of Information Technology, from now referred to as iiitb became my educational institute cum home in August 2005. In the past two years, I have spent every sleeping/waking moment here along with 250 other such students. Well, not exactly. I went home on weekends and if I don’t mention that, my fellow iiitbians(some of whom were not fortunate enough to have their parents living in the same city) will make it a point to remind me.

iiitb had a variety of students hailing from different states,belonging to different religions,following different culture patterns..A true cosmo-university, if I may call that.

It is situated bang in the middle of one of Bangalore’s IT hubs, Electronic City, away from the noise and pollution of Bangalore in the midst of a beautiful nature friendly campus.It did not take me very long to fall in love with iiitb.

I developed some of the best of friendships during my term there..
That shouldn’t be too surprising considering that I practically lived with these guys. I can think of tons of things that happened but an explanation of all of those would hardly qualify as a blog post. :-)

One of the most exciting moments were definitely when on the night of my birthday, myself and a handful of friends decided to scare people in the hostel. We started by using sticks to knock softly on some girls’ bedroom windows from the outside pretending to be mysterious unwanted intruders. To achieve the effect we chose certain bedrooms on the second floor which could not be reached from the ground outside. Some fell for it and started screaming. Others brushed it off as an antic after considering the fact that the only rooms that were being targeted were the ones in the corners (as those were the only ones we could reach with our sticks).
So we thought of a way to get these people too. We staged an act by placing Swathi(one of the most convincing dramatists amongst us) in one of the middle rooms that could not be reached by absolutely anyone from outside in any manner, except if they were flying around on a broom.. Swathi caught the attention of every single person in the building by letting out an ear piercing shriek and running out of her room with stories of how she had just heard knocks on her windows, very scary ones at that.
This ploy was an absolute success as. :-P With all their IQs put together, the girls could not come up with any reasonable way in which this phenomenon could have happened. One by one, every one of the others whose windows we had knocked on earlier, were convinced that something evil was going on. God himself could not have come down and convinced the girls that day that everything was ok. We(the culprits) were almost on the floor, rolling with laughter, while the others decided on how to handle the situation. Swathi was still playing her part,shedding crocodile tears and building up newer,more excellent versions of the scary incident. She seemed to be getting better at the act.. :-) Everybody were totally convinced that there was a ghost about the place.. We enjoyed the reactions for some more time and it was only when the others decided to report the mysterious incidents to the management, did we decide to reveal the truth. Needless to say, nobody slept that day.:-)

Will write about more “Excitements in iiitb” later.

On Jan 8th, 2007, my first day at MSR, I arrived early at the institute. Atleast earlier than the time given to me. I got my photograph clicked for my ID card and was shown to my workstation by the group admin Prathibha who was one of the few souls in the lab at that early hour. Later I learnt that folks in MSR are mostly nocturnal in nature and a large number of them are, what we refer to fondly as ‘night owls’ :-) .

Prathiba quickly showed me what I needed to know, where I would sit, the pantry (which was fortunately quite close to where I would sit :-) ), the conference room, the recreation room, the rest room and so on and so forth. She asked me to help myself and left to attend to her other duties.

I had a lot of time on my hands and left to myself, I started exploring my surroundings. In less than ten minutes I felt very much at home in my new workplace and was quite proud of myself for getting there early enough to get comfortable before the important folks arrived. The next item on my personal agenda was to visit the restroom. And so I did.

The Ladies’ Restroom in Scientia(thats the name of our lab by the way), was quite impressive. After using it, I took my time admiring the interiors ;-) . I looked at the shower and dreamt of using it one day soon, though I couldn’t think of any immediate reason why I would want to take a shower in office. I admired the elegant wash area, the spic and span floors and mirrors.Soon I was ready to go, not wanting to spend my first day entirely in the restroom.

Oops. It was only when I tried opening the door to get out of there did I realize that I was locked inside. I looked at the thick polished wooden door and the shiny handle on it. Somewhere under that beautiful exterior, something had snapped.I shook it, rattled it, jiggled it( and any other verb you can think of).Finally, I realized with great despair that , that beautiful shiny handle does not work. The first thing that crossed my mind was the empty lab outside. How, Just how did I get myself into such a mess on the very first day of my corporate career?? :-(

Then a thought struck me. What if this was a test. A test that every newcomer had to take.A carefully designed task to test my resourcefulness. Could the new girl cope with day to day problems and match the ingenuity and creativity of the smart people in the company? I knew this was a stupid thought. But not altogether impossible.

I thought of the possibility of a videocamera that I could wave at, to attract attention. But unfortunately, the company was much too decent to have planted cameras in the rest room. Sigh :-( . Or they were much too cunning to have planted it in the open where I could see it ;-) . So I waved around anyway.. Needless to say, it did not work. The thought makes me smile even now.

The door seemed too thick to carry my voice out. So I decided that shouting was not such a good idea. Besides, I still had not completely dismissed the idea that this could be a test and did not want to fare too badly :-) . So I looked around for things to use to open the foreboding door. Unfortunately it wasn’t even one of those locks that one manages to open with a hairpin, specially in movies and novels. Though it was another thing that this was neither a movie, nor a novel and I did not have a hairpin. I was wearing one of those clasps that hold up your hair and I couldn’t think of a single way in which you could open a door with that.

I cursed myself for not having brought my cell inside. But then who would I call?? I didn’t know a soul. I would probably have called my dad who in turn would have called up the institute with a request to rescue his daughter from their second floor restroom. That thought was quite hilarious :-)

Well, looked like I had to try shouting. I spotted a few vents at the bottom of the thick door and bent down to listen for noises outside. My ingenious idea was that I would start shouting and banging the hateful door, the moment I heard footsteps. And so I did. I figured that if I could hear their footsteps, they must be able to hear my shouts too. But I was mistaken. Probably because they weren’t listening for sounds from restrooms as intently as i was for footsteps. Not one of those footsteps turned my way :-(

I also wondered what would happen if the handle failed to open from outside too. But I had run out of ideas so kept at the shouting. At length after about twenty minutes of incessant ’shouting at footsteps’, I heard one of the footsteps stop. I heard a voice. I increased the fervor of my shouts and tried making as much noise as I could. The footstep was definitely coming my way. My savior was here :-) . I couldn’t wait to see the face of the owner of those now familiar footsteps. Then there was a final thought. Would the face be curious and concerned when it sees me or would it be grim and judgmental because I had failed the test? Fortunately the face of Aishwarya, my savior :-) , was the former.

Within moments I was out. We had notified the housekeeping and within about half an hour the problem was solved, the handle was fixed. The efficiency was quite impressive. I returned to my workstation and vowed to stay out of trouble for the rest of the day. :-)

For some months now, I have been taking the company cab to commute to and from home. My rides,normally cover 25 to 30 kilometers going one way, and take up well over an hour and a half. To be precise, I live in in one of the southern most points in Bangalore and my workplace is situated in the northern part of the city. So it is not too much exaggeration to say that my cab rides are normally quite an experience.

I share the cab with three other individuals scattered in various different geographical positions around the city and due to the lack of cooperation from fate, my position turns out to be the farthest from our destination.Result being, I get picked up first and dropped last. :-(

There are a few distinct characteristics of our cab rides that I want to talk about..

THE SUN

This is a phenomenon noticable fortunately only in the morning as our drops in the evening are well after sun down. This phenomenon mainly consists of a set of entities(namely ourselves, the ones travelling) trying very hard to grab hold of the best seats to reduce the effect of THE SUN (bisilu) falling on us, and at the same time trying very hard to make the effort inconspicuous.. As I am the first one to get on the cab, I get to choose first :-) And I can see the very same set of careful calculations going on in the others’ heads as went on in mine, as to which direction the sun is at this time,is it a cloudy day, which direction will we be travelling on an average, how many shady roads are we going to take etc. Its quite a hilarious situation :-), specially because no one talks about it.

THE MUSIC

This is quite a common phenomenon amongst any set of people trying to travel together. Interests in music vary and unfortunately we have only one radio :-( The situation is worsened by the fact that, that only radio has close to a dozen channels making the choices harder. So not only does everyone try their best to get their favourite channel on air, but they also make quite an effort to try and impress the others with their channel hoping that they might just succeed in influencing a few others into adopting their music. Thus hoping to reduce the competition they will have to face, the next day. This set of mind games being played is another interesting thing to watch out for.

THE ROUTE

This phenomenon occurs when we have two strong parties each favouring a different route to take to the destination. In our cab, one person feels that the sensible thing to do is to take a route with minimum number of traffic signals and thus try to keep away from the mainroads as much as possible.This unfortunately means that we take a route that comprises of the smallest ‘gullies’ possible.
The opposing party does not agree, and puts forth the argument that lugging an almost heavy vehicle like ours(which is an SUV), into those small congested ‘gullies’ is akin to inviting traffic jams.
Both parties make it a point to respond to jam situations while on the oppositions’ route, by shaking their head and making appropriate sounds like ‘che’ and ‘plch’…This heated argument is something else to look for.Highly amusing :-)

But apart from all these, our cab rides also come with exciting conversations and debates, gossips ;-), sleep sessions and general sight seeing, thus accounting for a wholesome experience…
If you ever get a chance to experience long cab rides…make your decision wisely ;-)

Its a phenomenon we notice everywhere. The day you create a blog, you go on writing posts like you have been awaiting this day for eons. And soon, the frequency reduces drastically.Atleast for most. Though,there are a few brave ones that continue to maintain the vigorous pace.

It is a similar situation, that we have here. :-)
One of my colleagues, Vinay just came and asked me if I would join him for a game of carom as he was finding it hard to pass time. I said I would join him in a bit, but he is not at his desk now.Nor is he near the carom board. So I imagine, he is off trying to interest more people into it.

So I thought I would pen down my little history with carom,while I wait for him to get back. When I joined here about four months ago(here being Microsoft Research, where I’m interning), I was delighted to find that every floor had a little recreation room which had a carom board. Its not like I am extremely fond of carom or anything, but it had been a while since I played my last game, and I have had quite a few fond memories from my childhood, playing carom with everybody possible, my parents, friends, neighbours, parents’ friend, cousins and anybody else you can imagine that would have allowed themselves to be dragged into a game by a 12 year old. Infact, I even remember these carpenters that were working in our house who would be kept from their work because of ‘my persistent invitations to play’, though I’m quite positive they did not have any serious qualms about it, especially considering that they were being paid by the hour.:-) But finances weren’t the first thing on my mind then, and some might argue that it isn’t even now. :-)

Well, So I developed this habit of playing carom every evening for the first few weeks of my internship, and not surprisingly, soon everyone in the lab, atleast on my floor knew about my enthusiasm. It was not too long before I had played with most of the usual ‘carom playing’ folks in the lab, and very soon I realized that though I had played a lot of carom during my childhood, I hadn’t really developed the right techniques.

So,then started some intensive coaching sessions,where some of the people sensible enough to have picked up the techniques earlier on, started lending me tips and tricks on things like how to hold the striker to achieve the maximum performance, which finger to hit it using, etc. And it was during this period of extracurricular education, that my manager chose to give me something interesting to work on.

Soon, technical interests and the zeal to excel in my first internship overcame my enthusiasm to perfect carom playing techniques, and I found myself playing carom less and less often. Sadly, I not only failed to completely learn the new techniques, but also successfully unlearnt whatever little bit of techniques I had innocently developed during my younger days.

Realization struck late,about three months later to be precise, when I picked up the striker once again, only to find that I had lost total control on the striker. My fingers weren’t sure if they should do what they used to do instinctively earlier or apply my new half baked knowledge. And eventually I realized that all my strikes were turning into disasters.. My fingers seem to have developed a mind of their own.

I hope that,soon, I will atleast get back my ability to play carom naively. So that I can get back to playing it with reckless abandon. Maybe if i can find Vinay now, I cant start now itself..

Today I came across this really inspiring slide show on India. I have seen lots like that before. But this one somehow made quite an indelible impression. It wasn’t entirely accurate, as one of my colleagues put it. But it did the job. It got me thinking.

The first thing it did was to make me silently promise myself that I should read the Bhagwat Gita. I don’t know a single Christian youth who has not read the bible.
I don’t know a single Hindu youth who has read the Gita. Ofcourse, many manage to get hold of abridged versions … But apart from all that, its quite shameful that most young Indians have let go of their roots, quite comfortably. Infact that very same slide show had a mention of how many applicants for American H1-B visas, Indians accounted for.

I have seen innumerable other blog posts, forwards,video clips and other such articles of information, aimed at essentially awakening any such patriotic feelings that might by lying dormant in people, being furiously circulated through the most technologically advanced mediums of communication. But it rarely ever does anything more than inspire someone into writing a post like the one I’m writing. So what am I doing besides rambling?
Well for one ,I in my small way, will try and help the cause by not following the herd to the Americas and Australias of the world to improve their economy, after having leeched enough from our India.

And there are others , who are doing much more like the guys from IIT, Bombay that formed Lokparitran , a political party aimed at using education and technology to do something more than just earn fat paycheques.
Bless their souls.

For quite sometime now, lots of people have been asking me why I don’t have a blog of my own. foremost amongst them being Ritesh. Blogging is like second nature to him and he does so extensively on anything technical you can think about.

People looked at me as if I was insane when I said that I don’t maintain a blog. You ask why? Well, it was simply because I did not feel the inherent need to and more importantly the time factor. So what has changed now?
Well, you could say I have in a way joined the IT working community now and am finding myself spending more than a dozen hours a day in front of the mini idiot box. So, I thought I might as well venture into this arena and see how it goes.. :-)
I will try my best to post as often as I can..