Pertinent Observations

one more exam to go this term… and then a couple of assignments to submit on saturday. and fourth term will be over. with 5th and 6th not counting for grades, it gives one an opportunity to chill big time…

one one hand i’m feeling elated that this term is almost over and i’m looking forward to 2 terms of masti. on the other hand i know i haven’t done particularly well this term. expect about a 10 basis point fall in CGPA. considering that the system itself is “flawed” and that CG is hardly an indicator of learning, i don’t think i’ll mind.

but on the other hand, it is this very flawed number that you get after going through a flawed system that a lot of people use to judge you. and my parents will go again on the “you’ve underperformed so we won’t attend your convocation” trip. some people never understand. and if you tell them that they’ll be angry.

whatever, only 1 exam left (thatz tomorrow). and a lousy assignment.. which shouldn’t take too much time either.

feeling doped now… never know when the balancing low will hit me…

just had a half an hour chat with an old friend of mine… she was my benchmate for eight years in school and it was her birthday 2 days back.

we have this simple way of staying in touch – i call her up on her birthday and she calls me up on mine. Every year. without fail. and it helps that our birthdays are more than 3 months apart, so every time we have stuff to talk about…

this has been going on for the last 8 years now… and we hope to keep it going…

i’ve been a member of this online community Orkut for about a year now… and have a friend’s list of about 250 now… interesting to see how different people use orkut differently…

i use orkut just to keep in touch. MOST people on my orkut list are friends (either from schools or from IIT or IIM). Scrap them once in a while and check about their health. yeah there are these arbit people in my list too. reason they’re there is that they generally added me and me being the nice guy added them under the “never met” category.

but i’m amazed to see the amount of “blade-putting” that goes on on orkut. just visit some female’s scrapbook (ideally she should’ve put an attractive photo on orkut). you’ll find thousands of messages such as “hi i’m XYZ done #$$@ unemployed in @#@ED i wanna be your friend please scrap me”. something that seems like a standardized message they keep putting on many peoples’ scrapbooks… wonder if anyone actually replies to them…

then there are these people who build “second-level relationships” where they get acquainted with their friends’ friends and make them friends. Warshall’s algorithm comes to mind when i think of this.

then there are these communities where you go and post arbit messages. it’s good fun reading these messages… for example on the “brahmins” community which i’m a member of, there was a thread “Intercaste marriages should be banned because they dilute our divine blood” or some such bullcrap. and there were a thousand people posting “agreers” to it with each reason more ridiculous than the other. LOL.

actually i live in a **whatever, i can’t get the word for it now**, where i interact mostly with well-educated middle and upper middle class urban people. and it’s more than a year since i travelled by second class unreserved. these communities help me get a feel of what “the world” is thinking.

then i know of this “paavam” senior in IIT who is reported to have found a girlfriend through orkut. he seemed to be the kind of guy who would never get married, let alone have an arranged marriage and now orkut seems to have “worked for him”…

can you think of any more “uses” of such online communities??

i’ve always wanted to do this… attend classes religiously for the first 75% of the term and then bunk the last 25% and chill… no attendance issues, last 1/4 of term holidays… wanting to do this for the last 5.5 years… never happened… either bunked too much in the beginning or hadn’t had the heard to bunk in the end…

finally happened… religiously attended almost every class for the first 9 weeks of the 11 week term… and then have been on a bunking spree… and it’s immensely helpful if you have so many assignment deadlines….

today happened to be #3’s birthday. i had “put blade” on her between early 99 and mid 2000 (“live”) and for a year after that by email. Even after it was “all over” (now i think it never began), it rankled for another 2.5 years.

now, when I look back at “incidents” such as these, i feel like laughing. “How naive i must have been then to do this and do that” and stuff… on another train of thought, i feel it was a wholly unnecessary ordeal which simply troubled me too much… on yet another train of thought, i feel it was a good learning experience.

LEARNING!!! what have i learnt? some things, but not all. I still continue to do the same mistakes. At that point of time (towards the end of “blading career no. 3”), a grave mistake i made was to assume that any message i wrote would be read by the intended recipient only. decided i’d always double check before sending any message/mail.

however i don’t seem to have learnt from this mistake. still keep writing arbitly “fearlessly” assuming only the intended recipient reads the stuff… “how naive i am even now to do this and do that”!!!

Have gotten addicted to the game of late. Playing it whenver i get 20 mins free. And i still suck at it. And it’s bloody spoiling my assignments and stuff.

Today was another supply chain submission which meant yesterday was another memento-us night. a report i would normally finish in half an hour took 2 hours as my typing speed dipped. characters on screen started looking like marching soldiers. I could think only of AoE. was givvup.

And i actually had reached a “pinnacle” when i beat a moderate comp yesterday.

anyways, i’m uninstalling AoE from my comp now. at least for the next ten days…

the new york office of Lehman Brothers came out with its PPOs (final job offers) today. we had expected both the people who went there from IIMB – call them ‘mother’ and ‘father’ to get the job. mother got, as expected. however, in what has been a rude shock to most of us, father didn’t. i mean, fatherjane is one of the biggest fighters on campus. he was known as “night-out god” in IITM. and he hasn’t been made an offer.

and no cribs about motherjane getting the offer. everyone expected her to. no doubt about that.

these i-banks are really arbit, i must reiterate.

i’m really happy i didn’t accept my offer!

Aadisht wrote a post yesterday responding to an Op-Ed in the hindu by a JNU prof.

amazing analysis by swaadisht khaana. way to go!

And every other blogger worth his salt has linked to this article, so i thought being his classmate i too should do the same.

came for a lecture at IIMB today. amazing lecture. unmindful (or unknowing) of the presence of “sonia’s new whizkid” Rajeev Gowda in the first row, he went on in the same tone as his books (I’ve read about half of “Eminent Historians” – amazing) as he proceeded to explain the evolution of the Indian Economy through the ages. Brilliant speech, laced with anecdotes and forever playing to the gallery.

i was the first question to put CP (class participation for the uninitiated) and it proved a good move as Dr. Shourie answered every question in great detail and due to time constraints couldn’t take too many more. gave a decent answer to my question, so i was happy…

however, the best part of the evening came after the vote of thanks as Dr. Shourie quoted an urdu rubaiyat (a four-line poem) or somethign which roughly translated to “I don’t know whether you’re actually complimenting me or if you always speak that way!”

amazing. hope there are a few more lectures such as these. remind me of those good old extramural lectures (EMLs) at IITM, especially Subramaniam Swamy and Jairam Ramesh.

“What stand you take on a political issue depends on where you sit” – Jairam Ramesh, responding to my question as to why the congress was opposing Mr. Vajpayee’s government’s reforms while it was the congress itself which started them.