Nikhil ko thoda gussa kyon aata hai!!!

The test went o.k., for I had not studied at all.Then I come out of the test wondering why the hell were my classmates so tense about the test. And I'm not 'peeved' at all today, have calmed down.But since the following post was written yesterday with yours truly, squint in one eye due to the stye stressing his eyes to write it, and I didn't want it to go waste.


Nikhil ko thoda gussa kyon aata hai!!!

I'm really peeved today and Harsha has even a bigger reason to be peeved.There was an auto-fest in our college. so what? there was an auto-quiz in the autofest. so ? Me and Harsha won the quiz. ok,so? Dilip Chhabria was the chief guest.So? Winnners of all other events got to receive their prizes from the man himself or atleast had a photo receiving the prize with him in the background. So, my whine(call that if you may want it to) is that while others got to receive the prizes from him, why were we left out?


I don't know if that was deliberate on the part of the organisers to have conveniently run out of empty envelopes or was it because quizzing was considered too frivolous to be part of such an 'august' gathering. We didn't want the 'here-come-the-great-quizzers-of-all-time' kind of reception and the huge cheer and the hooting that usually follows when anyone among our group is on the stage. Have crossed that stage now! It's ok even if nobody reads this post! I hardly look for appreciation from all and sundry. But having come up with some seriously brilliant answers(no self adulation here, me and Harsha did come up some good ones-firewall,left hand drive to right hand drive, on bulldozer,Murphy,stuttgart and the horse connection- that won the quiz for us),I thought we deserved atleast some 1.2434 seconds on the stage for this quiz. That feeling of exalted elation on having worked out the Murphy question and the firewall one was something inexplicable, something which you won't understand unless you are a quizzer!Jumping out of the chair, the hi-five and the disbelief wondering what stroke of genius had struck us.I'm kinda hyper, so me doing it is ok, but when I see my brother in arms 'Power-e- illa!!' Harsha doing it, it's an unmistakable indication of us having done something really out of the ordinary.

In the end, I made a perfect jack-ass of myself when I asked one of the conveners if we are receiving the prizes, and then an announcement of the winners of the quiz is made after the vote of thanks! Couldn't have got more jack-assish than this, could I?! This post could have been laced with much more sarcasm if people whom we didn't know or we were not familiar with, had done this. But it does hurt when people who are close to you conveniently forget things.

Well, I've participated in all the quizzes conducted in the college and have qualified for the finals of almost all of them and won quite a few of them as well. But this wasn't just another quiz. You invite a profesional quiz-master, paying him a decent amount of cash. Initially, I was skeptic if he seriously deserved such a sum. But after the quiz, we have every reason to believe that he deserved all of it for the effort he put in to make the quiz interesting and at the same time putting in real good questions. I wouldn't be having any grouse if this was again one of those 'just another quiz' we have in the college.I haven't even bothered to get the certificates and prizes of those. The whole point here being, quizzing is seriously considered trivial and is given the go-by.


Quizzing is something which is more than a passion for me, and for Harsha as well. We've been partners in crime of having spent countless nights searching for silly trivia, talking for long hours about things which are of no concern to us at all, discussing things that would probably be of no use at all. Yet there's some inexplicable pleasure in knowing things which generally shouldn't be bothering us.There's a long long post waiting to be written about our quizzing exloits, the highs, the lows, the serious arguments almost leading to us not talking to each other for days!!, the 'sorry macha' for the wrong answer,University Challenge,CERN not getting us to the Mindbend quiz finals. Well,the list is endless. Our styles are complimentary,he's the quiet,reserved one while I'm the vociferous,noisy one.I've mellowed down though now,I guess. Our areas of interest are also complimentary. The best thing being , there's some sort of unstated understanding between us. All we do before a quiz is just inform each other of the timings and that 'connection' is somehow established during the course of the quiz.


I spend so much time on IMDB and Wikipedia, that if they would've been females, I'd be surely proposing to both of them.(Too difficult to choose, you see!). I think I know a thing or two about quizzing, for my quizzing credentials are decent enough and my knowledge of what I consider to be my strong areas- business,advertising, brands,politics, origins of names of brands and bands,bollywood and word etymologies, is also quite adequate. Rajiv Gandhi was offered the role played by the Big B in Bombay to Goa, imagine what'd have happened if he had accepted and played that role!!I'd have probably written this some 2145 times on my blog that I'd be better off studying Operating Systems,DBMS,Computer Networks than 'wasting' my time on 'silly' things like quizzing,blogging,debating. But that's ok now I guess.There's an O.S. test tomorrow. I was the only dumb-ass from my class(apart from Mrinabh!) running around quizzing,doing this and that.I have no idea of what I'm going to do in the test.I don't believe in doing things just because they are meant to be done. That might sound outlandish and arrogant,but that's what sets me apart from others.Hopefully,will continue blogging regularly from now on.

pre-P.s. In case you are still wondering why such a hue and cry over such an inconsequential thing as quizzing, sorry for you. That's something only a quizzer can understand.



What had i been doing all these days/what's been happening with me. not in chronological order.

1.Went to garba at the A.C dome, couldn't make it to the inDoor stadium.Garba rocks!Sad it's my last time.
2.Came third in an India Quiz, quite good considering mythology and stuff isn't our forte.
2.5 Was a witness to two farces called 'quizzes'. Schools have better stuff.One had a good-looking dumb female reading out questions correctly, the other had a ugly looking,boisterous male reading out questions incorrectly.
3.Won the debate with Hitesh at PT. It was great.We won according to the judges-'on account of better co-ordination'
4.Elections were held in the college. Internet and orkut became the latest weapon of mud-slinging.I was not involed. Mama became the GS and Hitesh, the CS. Some people had their faces deep in mud during the whole mud-slinging thing and it was sad.
5.Kashish- the official welcome for the first-yearites. Lacklustre and boring. Pandit's dance had many males and females drooling. No song dedicated to final yearites. So, we played senti-senti.Details of that to follow in coming posts.
6.Conducted a general quiz. My coming of age as a quizzer, I believe. It had no question from QFI,Quiznet or Kcircle.Fell in love with wikipedia and imdb during this.
7. My seminar on 'IT in rural development' went real well. That might just inspire to listen to 'the call of my heart' and do something for the community.
8.Sugar and Spice had 50% on the total bill.Treated people there.
9.Sugar and Spice had 'buy a burger and get the same free'. Got a treat there.Stomach upset followed
10.Listened to 'High Hopes' some 12084 times and 'Naam ada likhna' 32456 times.
11.The stye in my eye has been bothering me no ends and with that recurring headache with the viral infection doing the rounds in the college, I look like shukracharya, with one eye almost closed and also look like a prison escapee with the dishevelled hair and the strange look with one eye closed.
12. Harsha got placed in Godrej.ALL OF US ARE PLACED NOW.IBM,Cognizant, Wipro,Godrej,Sterlite beware!
12.25Haven't cut my hair for about three months now. Plans are to grow it even longer.Not finding a decent reason to cut my hair.
12.5 Watched around 20 movies.
13.Parents,sister,aunt and kid cousins had come to visit me.Took them around in the college.Surat is one hell of a place for textile-shopping.It can make you go insane.They were happy to know that I'm quite well-known in the college!
14.Yours truly along with Jayanth and Pragnya, as bloggers made it to the papers. TOI actually, its South Gujarat Edition.will take a photo of that and post.
15.Missed the treasure hunt as I was with my folks. Skunk said I din't really miss it!Me and Bharath have won it twice in the last three years.
16. Did the 'Bollywood Auto quiz!' for this Autofest.It's a real good one. Will post here if public demands.
17.Exhausted SMS worth Rs. 2000 in 20 days!Airtel Guj has this offer- sms worth 2000 for 100Rs.Have rechaged again if you want to be pestered with my PJs and live accounts of my labs,seminars and submissions, send me your number!
18.Followed thisregularly.What's your take on that?

Back with 'back again'!

I'm back after exorcising some demons inside my head. I'm feeling much better now having accomplished that, and what makes me more glad is that I did it all alone. I went to some people looking for answers and realised most of them lay within me. Realsied that running behind/with the crowd just doesn't help in my case. There are some inherent 'quirks?' and inexplicble contradictions which only I possess and there are some things which I do and have perfect explanations which appear totally convincing to me and I guess that is what matters most at the end of the day. Raghuram has more faith in me than I do and it is vice versa I guess!

Expect more of such philo'soupy' in coming posts!!

Hope the purgation is successful.I realised that there's no point geting stuck in a hole and then complain, crib about how things are not going on well. The best way to come out of the hole, I thought was to attend some classes and resume the old routine of writing poems sitting in the last bench, with the teacher wondering as to why am I the only one taking down notes. I finished the book that I was writing my 'class notes' since third year and had to borrow a page from Lakshman to write this poem.


Geometry of life

They say life comes a full circle, but why is it that,
I feel like it’s back to square one,
When what I’ve been through is just a semicircle.
Yet they say, angle in a semicircle is a right angle!

You and your goals become parallel lines,
You’re stuck in a maze as complicated as a dodecahedron.
Life goes into the third quadrant and people suddenly become obtuse
Your sorry state turns more acute and the cylindrical cup of woes overflows.

You pause and reflect, wondering why
The angle of incidence is not equal to the angle of reflection.
And realize that life isn’t governed by laws of Euclid or Euler.
That there are paths longer than the hypotenuse, and shorter than the diagonal.

You feel you are living on the edge,
Length breadth and height of desperation threatening to multiply,
You sit back, contemplate and analyze your graph
And then that diminishing flicker lost in some vertex of your heart,
Tells you to look at life as a trapezium.

Hope and faith the parallel sides, always running along.
All you need to do extend the non-parallel ones,
And don’t they meet, that extension needing tonnes of patience and hard work.
So clear your mind, start from the base and work your ass off!!
- Nikhil
23/09/05

a Kit-Kat break

I am completely lost for words. The earlier enthu for writing is longer there. Need to get serious on certain things, and even if i don't want to,am having to spend less time of some things quite close to my heart(enough of listening to my heart, my mind tells me), blogging for example. I seriously don't know why has this numb feeling overpowered me and I know I'll overcome it and be 'normal' again cracking pathetic PJs, rubbing people the wrong way with my stupid posts, coming up with those silly poems and stories written sitting in the last bench with some sensible posts interspersed here and there.

Thankfully Bharath has a digicam and Mrinabh, a mobile cam. That means my photoblog will be updated regularly. Keep visiting that. But I just can't conjure up enough energy and brains to write though there is no dearth of subjects that I can write on. The photoblog will be running though.

No time to search the world around
Cause you know where I'll be found
When I come around
When I come around

-When I Come Around(Green Day)

In the meanwhile discovered some more bloggers, want to add their blog links in the links section, make my blog look nicer..but just can't..the numb feeling you see..

Shayon- my-labyrinth.blogspot.com

Komal- meriawazuno.blogspot.com-do visit her blog for her story of the deluge in mumbai.

A fellow quizzer, UC participant-Almost useless!- lifesucz.blogspot.com

and page 3 of blogging...meet rahul bose, deepak chopra, mallika chopra, rahul khanna, nandita das,shekhar kapur, anupam kher, milind deora, vandana shiva,kanika chopra and many more on intentblog.com

till my next post
nikhil

The battle heats up-Microsoft CEO: 'I'm going to f---ing kill Google'

my shift key has a problem, so no 'capitalised'(exactly..that's what one of our teachers said..all keywords in java should begin with 'capitalised')letters and my mind's not working. i donno the reason. is it because of the excess of movies that i'm watching or is it because i'm attending more classes this time!



continuing on the google-ms war, here's a piece i stumbled across on slashdot. it is a great site for people who are intersted in tech-trivia. they call it a site for nerds and i don't quite consider myself to be one. reminds me of one funny incident though. microsoft came calling to our campus for recruitment and i thought my knowledge of msn spaces, the mappoint technolgy would be of some help. and as it turned out i failed to clear the 'written' test which was quite 'technical'. that's ok as i don't quite fancy my chances with things 'technical'. but what amazed me was that even in the interviews that followed, there was not even a single 'hr' question. it was pointers, arrays, data structures, algorithms, compilers all the way. and this idiot thought his hours of meandering around the world wide web would be of some help! how naive of me! sometimes i feel i should have drowned in object oriented programming than spend time deriding bush's objective of occupying iraq. but surprisingly, when pause for a moment,i don't repent what i did! thinking that that one hour test would have made a difference of around 3.5 lacs to my annual salary!!was just wondering what makes the differnce? that duration of one hour of the test or the 'wasted years' (that's also the song playing rt now!, how ironic!!!..f*&k..the song is by iron maiden!!now my mind's working!!). to me it was that one hour that made the difference. my thoughts on placements din't go down well with many people here(like most of my thoughts!). and i hate to talk/write about placements, but couldn't miss this one as it was about ms.congrats siddharth!

google is also planning to come out with an operating system to challenge windows.
(writing 'remember i told you this first' sounds like crap to me now!!)let's see.

will post a list of movies/books that i've drowned in of late. talking of movies, am planning to start a blog on the 'other bollywood' ,the sensible indian cinema, indian movies in english, not the american desi, chai types...my gyaan of such movies is decent enough...and want to 'specialise' in that.just like my photoblog on hoardings, posters and notices!

if anybody can get their hands on cds of the following please write them for me. all freight charges will be borne by me.

war and peace- anand ptwardhan
matrubhoomi- manish jha
is raat ki subah nahin- sudhir mishra
black friday-anurag kashyap

A trip to 'shanivari'

I guess every city of has its own 'bazaars', 'markets' or 'shanivaris' as we have in Surat, where you get everything you'd need from soaps,deodorants,screw drivers,all kinds of apparel, cds cassettes at throw away prices and the rest you see in the pictures to follow. A very good timepass on a lazy saturday afternoon. Have heard that you get real good bargains early in the morning, but who wants to wake up early on a saturday morning!