Sunday, January 12, 2014

The Beginning of the End-II

We went for our 1st wing treat of the last semester at Tycoon restaurant or maybe Dhuaan- can't actually say where because 5 of 12 were sitting in one place and rest at the others. This really pissed my wingie Anant 'Panda'. Watch this to know about unhappy pandas.https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=never+say+no+to+a+panda&sm=3
 At Tycoon I drank so much fruit punch (only after paying some fruit punch tax to panda ) that my veins and arteries must have fruit punch flowing in them instead of blood. In fact when I was shaving some day after the treat and cut myself I was half expecting fruit punch to flow out. I ate the main course and then said I can't eat more. Then the desserts came and I said that I just want to taste the chocolate mudpie. After some time I had eaten as much desserts as much I had eaten in the main course. 

The wing interaction has dropped considerably after placements.


On a typical day before placement:


Enter h mid (my wing) in Hostel IX

Scene: first room: H 201- Gaurav Gupta room is open 
You can hear some people discussing a puzzle from techinterview. In the room opposite Kushagra is doing extra puzzles and extra coding and extra quant problems

Outside Bhole is saying - "abe ye mera strength sun le...sayad thoda ajeeb lage...I a- am a g-g-good speaker- er- an- and I have g-got good communication skills from -er nuk-er-dram club and -er performing nukkads"


Moving ahead jingling sounds of coins can be heard as Harshit attempts to make some extra bucks from poker website. Akshat is unbothered  and is solving astronomy problems.


Wait till midnight


Enter Bhole in my room

Bhole- Abe weakness nai mil rhi hai meri ek. Koi apni weakness de de ek.
Me- Abe yaar, kal bi ek weakness di thi maine. Tum log meri saari weakness le loge
Bhole- Are yaar bata na, kaun sa hm same company me baithne wale hain?
Me(reluctantly)- kk...ye kaisa hai... sometimes I take too many jobs wanting to do them out of enthusiasm...blah blah..
Bhole- hmmm...ye likh leta hu....acha wo news padha Raghuram Rajan ka...bata usme kya kya hua tha...
Me-hmmm padha tha kuch....blah blah... abe ye cv dekh ... kuch pooch...abe is wale POR se mat poochna...isme challenges sochna baaki hai...iske challenges and first intern chor kr kuch bi pooch...
Bhole- hmm so tell me Why do you want us? blah blah....

As the conversation goes Enters Pranav the motu
Pranav(looking in the mirror and adjusting his few hairs left)- ye failure thik hai ki I wanted to...blah blah...but could only blah blah....
Me- abe ye failure nai hai..ye to carelessness hai...isko aisa modify krte hai....you did this...blah blah...ab better failure hai
Pranav-hmm ab chap gya....ab mere 2 failures ho gye hain

Some1 shouts in the darkness-Abe koi GD karega kya??

During all this, several doors open several times, several people come out to discuss several puzzles and go back into several rooms..in superfast motion like in several movies


After everyone is placed


Enter H mid

Gaurav gupta's room closed-sound of FIFA coming, Kushagra laughing to punches of FRIENDS TV series. All other rooms closed. 

The only things unchanged: Jingling sounds of coins can still be heard as Harshit attempts to make some extra bucks from poker website. Akshat is still unbothered and is solving astronomy problems.


Wait till midnight

Pranav comes out (occasionally a stray dog also comes out after a nap)
Pranav(still looking in the mirror and adjusting his few hairs left)- canteen chalega?
Me-naah
Exit Pranav

You must realize the importance of placement when you know Kushagra  got time to watch the friends tv series finally after 9 semesters at IIT K. FRIENDS production team would have felt honoured to know this. 

Last week I watched a documentary on youtube about Venice. Venice is sinking. I liked Venice. Not so much now. I watched some other documentaries on jelly fish, octopus, Paris' sewage system, Iceland, Norway, etc. I found one jelly fish which is immortal. http://www.boredpanda.com/turritopsis-nutricula-immortal-jellyfish/ Also octopuses are very intelligent and quick learners. I watched one octopus open a lid of his prison glass jar on a ship, run on the deck and jump into the ocean. And it was not animation.


I was having casual conversation with one friend of mine and it evolved into a bragging contest out of nowhere. I told the friend that I had seen Zaheer, Gambhir, Harbhajan during India vs SL test match at Kanpur. The friend told me about having seen Katrina Kaif from nearby. I dealt the killer blow saying that I had seen Dhoni before 99% of Ranchi had heard his name. I had gone to watch Bihar vs Karnataka in Ranchi probably when I was in class 4 or maybe 5. 

Actually I had the habit of reading the scorecard of Bihar in newspaper those days and always found 1 player making some quick runs...and he did not score much but consistently scored 30s and 40s. And this way I knew Dhoni's name. Dhoni was keeping the stumps while I was watching. Karnataka won. A journalist for a magazine called taapman patna was sitting beside me trying to gather some info about the match. I asked him so many questions that he finally took a sit several rows away from me. 

 This semester I had take a course - International Business Management. I thought even if I screwed and learnt only 1 out of 3 terms-international or business or management it would be still useful for my career . My Business management professor extended a 80 min class to 100 minutes and all he achieved in this was forming 16 groups for future presentations and deciding the class seating arrangement. My patience was failing. I finally caved in when he says at the end he had not got time for attendance so please have patience. I went home and immediately dropped the course and took another - Spintronics and quantum transport application to Semiconductor Devices. Its more technical, there is no attendance and the proff is cool -he comes to the class wearing 2 woollen caps...he comes wearing a woollen cap opens it and there is another beneath it! 

Thursday, January 2, 2014

The Beginning of The End

So this new and hopefully the final semester of my 5 year program at IIT Kanpur has begun. I have been trying to get a perfect and delicate combination of courses to achieve the right mix of wisdom, ease in life and good grades. I attended this Finite Element Method class and immediately realized within 5 minutes that ee humse na ho payega. The proff wrote bizzare partial differential equations on the board and read preface of a book. After one hour the professor asks us if we understood anything? There is some silence and some people say- NO. The professor hears it perfectly and says - "k..then lets proceed further".


It reminds of  my behavior after a maths lecture in 1st sem. In 1st semester I was attending my first lecture of MTH 101 sitting beside my room mate Anurag Kumar Singh the guy who once was a die hard fan of the Twilight movie. Anyways as the class proceeded I became quite disheartened and after the lecture:
Me-"F**k we missed our 1st lecture at IIT Kanpur."
Roomie-"What are you saying? This was the first class."
Me (confused)-"Dude we were sitting in the wrong lecture room."
Roomie-"Hey most of these were freshers are sitting here. It was the right room".
Me(baffled)-"Were we supposed to study something before coming to campus ? F**k... I did not know about anything we had to study before coming here. Did they send some syllabus to study before coming for lectures?"
Roomie-"What is wrong with you?"
Me- "Wrong ? What was happening in that lecture? It was the Chernobyl of Mathematics. How is everyone so fu****g calm?"

Now even if the proff says in my lecture-"...and so using this simple Pythagoras theorem we can prove the Riemann Hypothesis...This has been left as an exercise..." I would hardly bat an eye. Same calm face like an experienced cards player. 

Let me tell you about my wingy Yogesh Kumar Soniwal's episode in Taiwan where he had gone for about 10 days in a Maths winter conference. I am only doing him this favour because he brought me a toothbrush, a comb and lots of chocolates looking like fish food we put in the aquarium at home. He met a lot of people who knew only two words of English-"No English". Once he entered an Indian restaurant in Taipei and tried to order something in English. The waiter interrupted him and said - "No English". Yogesh had to randomly select a dish in menu from all the menus written in Taiwan's Chinese or whatever language they spoke. Once while walking on the road Yogesh met a man on the bike. The man told him something the gist of which is-" My bike has broken down here in middle of the road. I don't know anyone here and I urgently need this much money to reach home. I was going from this blah place to this blah place. My family is expecting me  because blah blah."
After the man had spoken for about 7-8 minutes Yogesh appears calm, stares at the man and says- "No English". 

So It's festive season- last few days of December. One of my uncles call  me one random day. I was surprised and happy that finally some relative remembers was calling me to see how am I doing. I was less happy and less surprised when he told me to write an essay on "Importance of Sports and games in daily life" in about 250-300 words. My cousin sister is probably punishing me. I wanted to say- "hey i am in IIT now- final year- I do only cool things...i do not write essays !" but I did not. So i celebrated my new year eve writing-"Sports and games are very important for us in our daily life. They keep us fit and healthy. They offer us a change from the monotonous life.....blah blah..."
Besides this I also completed watching a documentary on South Pacific ocean on new year eve. I found this really cool spider which lives on Hawaii- the happy face spiderhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theridion_grallator

Also I watched about this ship Essex hit by a whale in the Pacific. This inspired the novel Moby Dick. The survivors ultimately resorted to cannibalism. It is a painful story.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_(whaleship)

I completed the TV series -Breaking Bad. The third season is too good. The characters Saul Goodman, Jesse Pinkman and Walter White are nicely evolved. Can you imagine the contrast in transformation of Walter White and transformation of Shah Rukh Khan in Rab ne bana di jodi ?
A movie I must recommend is The Terminal starring Tom Hanks. Comedy. 

Also I think I have finally decided my ultimate future goal. I want to be a halwaai...I think I would have a cool sweets shop. Finally after studying Topology, Real Analysis, Linear programming, Regression blah blah and doing intern in Algorithmic trading and getting a software job I really am excited about this sweets shop as a career. There are so many sweets I want to have with the right amount of crunchiness, smell, sweetness, texture, additives, dryness, inside fillings, etc  but can't seem to find them in market.