Taking it in. (eww)

I will henceforth blog daily often!

Not like that's a very enticing resolution, but hey, I do need some positive reinforcement from time to time. (For those of you who know, I picked this up in psychology, which we are coincidentally taught at the Indian Institute of Technology.)

You know this is the toughest bit to write in post, yeah, right after when you fill in some memorised and rehearsed snippet to start with and then reach the bit when you have no idea where to go to, believe me, I mean, I’ve actually been staring blankly at the cursor blinking at my face for the last 15 minutes... umm yeah, that’s enough of a peek into my near-comatose mind state. I really don’t want to scare away the select few, who actually bother reading this far into a post.

So basically my life’s hit an all time low, and I know that I write that at least once every post, but that's my life I guess, it keeps hitting them. Consistently. Here’s why

1. I got my laptop, and all I’m doing on it is spending 90 minutes writing a blog post that's going around in circles.

2. I am suffering from a ‘How I Met Your Mother’-hangover, which somehow adversely affects my facebook status messages. (Yeah I do blindly copy one-liners, even when people know where they‘re from...)

3. I have NOT messed up my academics! Well, not yet at least. (Okay, this one isn’t all that bad, just HAD to state this on my blog :))

4.

5. I just saw the cursor blink 20 times and pressed enter in the last one! Damn!

So there’s nothing important happening in my life right now. But surprisingly, even when I spend precious time driving home this seemingly trivial fact to you all, it makes me smile (yeah I do that too :)). Maybe life isn’t about living through the important things, it’s about going through these blank ones in between. (complete WTF-ness to kick ass philosophy in two sentences, nice.)

THE END.

ME

P.S: Hope you like the little inferences I’ve drawn in this post, cause, I’ve just found the mantra for the rest of my life (definitely, the next 15 minutes of it.)

(I will also cut down on bracket use.)

P.P.S: On a related yet different topic I’ve always wondered why women have such expressive eyes. I mean, isn’t that what we buy pets for? :)

Darkness decends on the banks of the Bhramaputra

"There will always be more manual robotics' events than you can ever conceive, and every single one of them will be coordinated by a senior, who has asked you to pull your pants down in the recent past." - The IIT G equivalent of Murphy's Law.

Ola.

Its not like the days in IIT are not like what they seem in the books (40 girls, 400 guys and what seems to be, 4000 goats.) but its at night that my alma mater truly comes into its own.

Okay, Imagine trying to break into your College Director's abandoned residence, at 1:00 am and running into the guard... Bad eh? Back here in Guwahati, THAT is the best case scenario, I mean, really, I would take being caught in flagrante delicto by a guard, to loosing a leg to a leopard any day.

And the seniors, well they make the leopard look like a tame kitten you can feed milk to. I remember reading the freshers' guide and drawing the conclusion that the seniors here were hard working, honest people who would treat the freshers like their siblings...bah! Imagine a person who loves you based on the amount of robots you are willing to build, take twenty of them, and add the fascination for doing a 'muski' to anything that moves. Brotherly isn't it?

To the leopard and the seniors if you also add the minor points like a dwindling academic career, and a near certain Chetan Bhagat CPI, you get a real good idea of how being awake at 3:00 am (and blogging about it) at IIT Guwahati feels.

So here I am 3:00 am and all, wondering why on Earth would soomeone with a friendly name like Robert T Morisson write 4000 pages of organic chemistry, and then proceed to sell them to innocent 18 year olds thus ruining their goat plagued lives even further. Chemistry quiz tomorrow. And I would have gladly taken to my date with destiny if it wasn't for the 8 dc motors (here's where the robotics comes in) lying on my desk, which i might have to solder (Don't, worry i don't know what that means either...) with something else (I soo know what I'm doing!).

Every 30 minutes or so, theres a knock on the door from one of those loveable seniors. Followed by a conversation that tends to go like this:

HIM: Hows the robot coming up?
ME: Prety sweet. I just haveto solder.
HIM: Hmm, what will you do now?
ME: I will... umm... solder!
HIM: What about the ketcher plug mechanism?
ME: Right after I solder!

See there you have it. End every sentence with the word 'solder' and you get a precious 30 minutes. Which you can dedicate to a newer alibi for next time!

So there's your bit off a place, where you can escape a guard at 1:00 am, and then be forced to celebrate your close shave by building a robot, 2 hours later, never for a second pausing to wonder about the chemistry quiz, and its impact on your future earnings potential.

Me?... I have 800 acres of it.

ciao.

P.S: I know I've spelt 'Brahmaputra', incorrectly in the title, at least now I do, Thanks to the know-it-all who pointed it out in her comment.

Whales and relationships.

Call me Ishmael.

Actually........ don’t. I haven’t really mastered how to start posts, so that’s why I picked up the first sentence of the most boring book I have ever read (Read: Moby Dick). In fact boring doesn’t even begin to cover it, the fact that someone can actually accomplish such torture in 860 pages of the English language is actually very surprising! And yeah, mom (and the rest of the Earth) thinks it’s a classic. Duh.

Well this post really isn’t about big white whales that we grew up watching on Cartoon Network, and no, its not about college either, its actually about umm...... relationships (yes, everyone with a blog seems to spend half his life writing about them.).

This isn’t one of those “SPURNED LOVER KILLS EX-FLAME, FAMILY, SELF.” stories. It’s just that all around me, people are soo full of their relationships. I mean, I know people who have spent hours discussing their girlfriend’s haircuts, their boyfriend’s pets, his eyes, her eyes, his hair, her hair, his nails, her nails… you get what I mean right? Its not like I think mind talking to people about things like this (Really, an 18 year old on vacation doesn’t have a lot of things to occupy him) but what I mean is, yes, its amazing to in love but is it a part of your life or the part of it? How much of love, is actually too much of it?

Seriously, it makes life meaningless to define it around one individual (especially when there are 6 billion of them to choose from.)

Waiting for the 24th, will get to know where I’m heading by then.

Later.
Me...duh

P.S.: Well actually when I came online 10 minutes ago I really didn’t have anything to write about. I mean I was actually considering throwing an abstract photograph at you with a caption like ‘The ecstasy, the ardent times, all are gone..... all are none.’ And then pretending like I know what that meant. So considering what I had in mind, this ad hoc post seems nothing short of a masterpiece :).

Angels and Khakras

Okay, its down to Civil/Chemical Engineering at IIT Delhi/Bombay or Computer Science at IIT Guwahati. Yeah! These were the colleges I was talking about in my last post, its not like I was expecting to cause knee-jerk hysteria, but no one even noticed!

Everyone around me, has a lot to say, the least helpful of it seems to be my dad, who in attempt to make up for his absence (read: Malaysia.) seems to be saying anything that comes to his mind. Here’s a bit of what he had to say:

“don’t worry, you always develop a special bond with your alma mater (yes, he does talk like that!) despite its location, I love my college even though I had to live off khakra for 2 years in ( IIM ) Ahmedabad.”

Yes dad, love you for drawing a parallel between some remote terrorist infected corner of Assam and Gujarati food!

P.S: Saw ‘Angels and Demons’ yesterday. It not being aired at any multiplex compelled me to go to Sangam Cinema! I'm not really the type who would rip a movie apart and get into a detailed discussion about charector development and direction, but really someone who would brave through going to a hall that shows movies like "खुनी दरिंदा, प्यासा हैवान। ", will definitely be left disappointed.

Later.
Me.

*************

P.P.S: And THIS is for those of you who think that tamil is difficult. I bet a lot of you have seen it though.

The control that I have over my life.

De-chickenpoxed at last! Man it feels so good, to not be treated like some quarantined casestudy! So here it goes.

Well finally there’s some movement in the house. I mean I’m getting daily calls from some of my overachieving relatives trying to get me into a discussion (in the vaguest of terms) about my career and my future. All those discussions tend to go like this:

THEM: I think that you should take electronics in whichever college you get.
ME: How about nanoscience?
THEM: Naa, the scope for nanotech is very ....ummm...nano. (yeah, engineers are funny aren’t they?)
ME: How about aerospace engineering?
THEM: There is no market for that at all! Unless you want to do aircraft maintenance.
ME: What does that mean?
THEM: You know, like checking tyre pressure.
ME: FINE! And how about chemical engineering?
THEM: Great we finally have someone in the family, who wants to become a petrol pump attendant.
ME: PETROL PUMP ATTENDENT!! Why don’t I just do an MBA after my engineering?
THEM: Well, yeah, go ahead. Wal-Mart has a lot of toothpaste to sell. You can at least sell it for them after an MBA.
ME: What can I possibly do after electronics that’s so nirvana-ish?!
THEM: Oh, loads! After that do your masters then your PhD and then become a professor. (It took me some precious ISD minutes to realize that he was NOT joking!)
ME: (CENSORED) .

That! Is what my relatives call a ‘discussion’. I just can’t help but be amazed by how the next decade or so of my life seems so predictable to them.

When my dad initially asked me what I want to do in life, my answer was ‘I want to be slightly less miserable than people who hate me, that’s called winning!’ I wonder why? but I think that sealed my fate. That’s how parents think I guess, a witty response was interpreted as ‘an indication of how little my future matterd to me’, sooner than I could say ‘college’.

Gone are the days when I would brag about my dad being an all India topper.....Now I find myself hoping that that he was just an uneducated exporter.... Sigh!

Me.

P.S: And ‘Guwahati’ is not spelt as ‘Gauhati’ (as I have spelt it in all my comments). That just shows how dependent I am on Microsoft spellchek. :)

Wish I knew where I'm heading.

Two weeks!! That's how near I could get to my goal of Bi-weekly posting! But for once the lax attitude didn't stem from my tangible lack of determination, rather it was because of a mother who wouldn't let her chicken pox infected son touch a cup (let alone a laptop!). Ohh and sadly thats MY mother I'm talking about.

Well as I sit here and write this post, it feels different. I mean I have spent all 18 years of my life in this city (the last one of which was almost exclusively in my bedroom!) and now, suddenly I realise that this might, well be my last month here (read the update in my last post.). Never having thought of myself as capable of anything even half as emotional it feels weird. I guess that its just the initial moment before moving on that's dilemmatic. At least I hope so. Will miss Delhi if I leave, and will surely value it more if I don't. I hate it when life is so fluid.

Will get back to posting regularly soon, will have to wait a bit though.....at least till my mom realises that It won't kill anyone if I touch MY laptop!!

Moi.

11 months, 14 days and 19 hours later.....

Okay, long time… well things have changed since the last time I blogged, then I looked at blogs as if they were the outlet to your clogged thoughts that needed to be shared because they eat you up from within (man I must have felt so British, right?), but now it seems that anyone with a laptop can start a blog churn out posts get ads and get money ( I’m not criticizing anyone, on the contrary that’s what I’m hoping!!) . Okay the last year has been umm different, basically I dropped a year to give the damn engineering entrances again, but trust me you learn very little life skills while preparing for IIT. What you do learn life skills from is a long distance relationship, a dad whose topped every exam he ever gave (even the ones at St. Stephens and IIM –A), a nagging mother who cooks to kill and a bitch of a best friend who thinks that every moment not spent abusing you is a moment wasted.

Well I would love to give you a blow by blow account of last year, but as my entire life can be summed up in half a dozen bullet points (half of which I have already forgotten), its difficult to look back and try to summarize about a year that went by in needlessly pondering over fat books that I’ll never see again (it feels so nice to write that!) Okay well atleast the four things that I did learn are:

1. There’s more to life than what you hit your car into.
2. Beer tastes better at this side of eighteen (its still illeagal though).
3. There are three cube roots of 1.
4. Read above.
   

On the whole not quite a lot…. And that is a valid explanation for why I am just rambling along and not sticking to any topic., I’ll try to blog regularly from now on though (just a bit of advice though, try betting on something else, like a dead horse!), about my life and the little incidents that make it exciting, and incase I do run out of such incidents I can obviously write songs and poems, in English that I obviously won’t understand and make myself sound like a 12 year old pregnant girl whose suffering is contained within my soul…. ( I can soo picture myself stooping to that level, man the day you stop reading stuff like that, people will stop writing it!!).

Me.

**************

Update :

IIT JEE AIR - 1313.

AIEEE AIR - 684.

BITSAT - 373.

*AIR= All India Rank