College To Do List

I have been in my college for nearly three years and believe me not, if you want it to be, college is fun. I never realized how fast the past three years have gone by. There are some things you have to, I repeat HAVE TO experience in college. Those few things are listed below:

1) Make best friends for life: I met my bff’s in college and I am sure we will go much beyond college. If I can call the last three years any good it is just because of them.

2) Go on a Goa trip: You can go to any part of the world, but a trip to Goa with your college pals will always be the most cherished one. Trust me, it is a crazy place, where you can be at your craziest best because what happens in Goa stays in Goa. Do not miss to plan it in your college.

3) Miss classes: Miss them to watch movies, to go for road-trips or just to sit in the college cafeteria because you don’t feel like studying.

4) Study a night before an exam: That’s the best time to study, the time when you can push yourself to stay awake and complete thirty chapters of the hardest subject while sipping coffee.

5) Live in a coffee-shop: My friends and I have literally spent our entire days in coffee shops talking, laughing and doing absolutely nothing. I remember a time when we even had memorized the entire playlist of a particular place and knew that each song played there six times in a day (yeah, we are that lame and idle).

6) Pull a prank on your friend: I guess, everyone has done it, pranks are always fun but make sure it is nothing serious.

7) Slap your friend for being serious for a guy/girl: When your friend is truly, madly, deeply in ‘lowe’ with someone and cries and whines all day because of this and that someone is not good enough then you have every right to knock some sense into your friend.

8) Get drunk: Get drunk a million times and every time that happens pledge not to drink again.

9) Think of life after college: Everyone does that, have fun but not at the expense of your future. Make sure nothing goes wrong there.

10) Party till the break of dawn: Be loud, dance the night away and just party hard.

11) Ace a subject and fail another: Nothing feels good like being perfect in a particular subject and you can’t be good with everything so can fail in one of the subjects.

12) Realize: Realize a lot of things, like how your grades could have been better, how much you have changed in college, what you have to do after college, all of it needs to be thought of.

13) Go broke: Spend all your allowances on something exotic in the beginning of the month and end up having no money for the rest of it. I believe that’s how we learn how to manage our money, making sure next time we are not out of it.

14) Own a car that breaks down fifteen times a month: You will hate it, curse it but a jalopy like that is a guarantee of you having a great time for it takes you everywhere, no matter how many times it breaks down.

15) Spur-of-the-moment-trip: College is the first time in your life you have the freedom to do almost whatever you want. When it’s a cold, depressing Friday in February and you don’t feel like going to the same places you’ve been to every weekend for the past five months, take an unplanned trip somewhere.

The Strike Strikes

So my awesome college *pun intended* had the most amazing beginning to a week. After the worst weekend spent studying Data analysis and Algorithms (DAA,  I am still not sure of the  full-form) courtesy the new college rule of having an exam every Monday everyone decided to skip the exams and strike against the new set of rules. Here is a little insight in what those rules were:

1) Exam every Monday ( The worst beginning to any week)

2) College working on Saturdays (Weekends ruined completely)

3) Uniforms (Do I need to add more?)

4) Facebook and Youtube Banned  (We got smartphones )

Its a pleasant rainy day somewhere around 10:00 AM, people are in the exam hall, most of them appearing unwillingly, they hear a mob, the mob enters the class rooms and tears all the answer sheets, this is what happens in one of the departments. Definitely a respite for the ones appearing in the exam unwillingly. The mob has already vandalized their own department, the notice boards, the window panes were smashed into pieces. After tearing the answer sheets they proceed to the third department, by 11:00 AM the entire college is enjoying the great ‘tamasha‘. Slogans are being raised against the administration, the mob is moving from one end of the campus to the other.

The on-lookers fully equipped up with their mobile phone cameras and umbrellas are enjoying every bit of it, after all they got to skip first two exams of the  year. I wonder how horrified the freshers might have been. The faculty and the professors are running around looking clueless and the admin is still not to be seen anywhere. Imagine entering a college with police deployed outside and bus windows being smashed.

I am definitely glad the exams got cancelled, and I detested every bit of these rules and vowed not to follow them and if forced to follow I decided to skip college everyday for the next two years, but tell me was the breaking and vandalizing the college property a good way to protest? I am in support of the strike, there is no way the college would have scraped the erratic rules and uniforms( the rumor was the color of our uniform was red), but the breaking things bit was too much.

The people who today broke the college window panes, will tomorrow go harm the national property, burn public buses, stone trains. In short the country’s future will be the same as present, every problem will multiply into million others. We will never find solutions to anything, this is not pessimism, it is the harsh truth, the stark reality of what we face today. Is this what our education has come to? Today’s incident in college reminded me of the Maruti Manesar plant incident. It was a harsh realization that we were pretty close to see what happened there in our own college.

Although these mobs are nothing new, other universities witness it more often especially during university elections, they are worse. But how long can we continue ruining our education,they vandalize places where we are supposed to gain something from. It is sad we have forgotten our moral values. I wish my fellow class-mates had chosen a better to protest against the new rules.

Beer and Buddies; Books and Brew

These are the four b’s that a human being needs to live with, if I were stranded on an island either of these two combinations I wouldn’t miss anything. They help you survive anywhere and everywhere. Friends, your partners in crime, rescuers in crisis, misguides, philosophers when not in senses are the people whose company you will cherish all your lives.

You can act silly with them, pull their legs, offend them, pretend you hate them and get away with all this, although not without getting it back. They are the ones who laugh at your lamest jokes. I didn’t have good friends until I got to college, it was in college I met the people I now call friends for life. College is the perfect place to bump into like-minded crazy insane people. It is only in science opposite poles attract, when it comes to people it is the other way round.

There is nothing like having a good conversation over beer with your best buddies. That is how you stay high on life. Together they will help you survive any calamity. The two come to your rescue in the worst of situations. Last weekend we celebrated two great creations together, it was the friendship day and the world beer day. There you go, they even compliment each other this way, isn’t that just perfect? Beer is better with friends and  friends better with some beer not a lot though. I hope you did enjoy your weekend with the tow and didn’t let it go a waste.

The second combination books and brew is perfect for the times when you want to spend time on your own. A captivating book and a strong cup of coffee are enough to keep you entertained for a long time. The best sleepless nights are spent in the company of books and coffee.  It is the best way to have some peaceful, lonely and quiet time. The coffee keeps the sleep at bay when you are reading an exceptionally good book and you don’t want to fall asleep while at it.

With either the buddy and beer or books and brew combination one can forget the world around, things around seem to be simpler and more fun. So folks cheers, celebrate the companionship of these for eternity. Brew your life in a high way.

Monster vs Me

How would a kid who doesn’t like math react if you told him he no longer has to do it? I bet he will be ecstatic and dance the night away. That’s what I feel like doing right now after my fourth semester result.

In engineering you have math upto the fourth semester and its the hardest and most irrelevant subject. Basic math is fine and required in the core subjects, but some of it is just not essential and we are taught that for no reason. So after nineteen years of being in the battle ground with the monster, I finally won, emerging gloriously after the war. The last two years were the toughest, that’s when the monster had learnt to breathe fire. Night after night in exam months I tried to devise ways to tame the monster. And finally to my disbelief the feeble efforts paid off. I scored a pretty decent score in math for the last time and I’m glad I no longer have to do it.

I’m not a very keen engineer, I enjoy nothing in it except web-designing and the only subjects I liked in two years were data communications and operating systems. Also system programming to some extend but that was for some funny reasons I’m not disclosing here. All these subjects were in 4th semester. That would mean the former three were a complete waste. But I never detested any subject more than math. It came back every semester to haunt me and screw me up. Its a good feeling to know I no longer have to pick up a math book for, let’s say eternity. Yep, that sounds awesome.

I finally nailed it, still hard to digest the fact. All I can say is, math-game over. Let’s not face each other again, because now you know who the fire-breathing monster is. *evil grin*

Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

I Miss College

After cursing and hating my college for nearly two years. I miss going there now. Yes, you heard me ‘I MISS COLLEGE.’ If you want I will climb on top of my college building and scream that. Its been one and half month since my holidays started and there is another one and a half month to go.

I don’t miss the teachers or the lectures or the dingy classrooms I have my PHP class to compensate all that. The teachers here too get under my skin. What I miss is the fact that I have no company during these holidays, no friends to hang out with, I mean I still have friends but they all seem so busy. Okay not seem, they are busy. My partner in squandering the city roads is the busiest of them all. All of us have bad time clashes with our classes. And I hope they all better be feeling this way.

So anyways I’m left all alone with a book to read or with my laptop and hey, now I have even started watching tv( Its more than a year after that I have started watching tv regularly), I don’t even go online much, so its generally the book and me or the tv and me. I do love reading but not all day long, it feels so lazy to just read or watch tv all the time.

Its irritating not to have a single joke to crack and not to be people you love spending time with even if its in a boring classroom. I miss passing the lunch from one person to another during the class and made fun of for something I do or make fun of someone else and devise ways to bunk a lecture.

I am lazy, irritated and bored all day long. I wish these vacations get over soon. I need to put my rusting brains to some work, been a while since I played a prank on someone. I don’t even feel like writing anything these days.

Oh and by the way apart from reading and watching tv I also have my PHP project to add to my excitement. Sigh! Atleast that gets over soon. I will never miss these vacations. I am not sure if I will write much now, but assure you a good dose of posts during or after my Mumbai and Goa trip. Thankfully its just six days away now.

Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

Snappy- Our new Innovation

No, Snappy is no second nephew of Scooby Doo. Its the new innovation of the Motley Crew our team for the Yahoo-Accenture Innovation jockey. Its was AV’s and Uncle V’s super cool idea to have this flying camera that clicks all your special moments and never lets you forget anything.

Check out the entire innovation presentation of Snappy here. Like it, share the link and make us popluar.

If you are too lazy to see the entire presentation I will brief it up for you. Its basically a camera that captures your beautiful everlasting moments, when you are busy living your life, all you have to do is click and forget about it while it does the work for you.

 We can bring this idea alive by constructing a small sized hemispherical case which has four pre-programmed and synchronized built in cameras. For the purpose of flying, we require a lightweight airframe, preferably plastic. Five light weight synchronized foldable wings are attached to the hemispherical case on which we need to mount the rotor system. One of which is a co-axial rotor system, perpendicular to the base, the other four are attached to the base and fold into the same. The outer end of the wing is where rotors and subsequently a pair of rotor blades are attached (for the main wing one rotor is used for co-axial rotor blades) which comes down to a total of 5 rotor systems. Communication with the whole system occurs with the help of wireless communication.

Resources we require to build this up:
1) 4 Compact Cameras using liquid lens of 10 megapixels
2) Image sensors
3) Bluetooth Chip
4) 5 rotors
4.1)motor controller
4.2)processor
4.3)accelerometers , sensors
4.4) radio with frequency 2.4 GHz
5) Memory chips of the capacity of 8 gigabyte
6) Lithium Battery
7)Capital and technical support for integration of the resources.

Here are the reasons for coming up with this innovation:

1) One of our friends was eve-teased, and we had to complain but we had no evidence against the guy and he was let off despite this being a crime. If we had a device like this camera, we could have had some evidence and then that guy would have been punished.

2) Once we decided to go for a Columbus ride and one of our friends who pretends to be a brave heart got real freaked out and panicked during the ride and was screaming on top of her voice. We so regret not having any proof of it because later, she denied it
happening.

To sum it up social networking has not only given a way to people to communicate but has also become a major photo sharing platform. Every second we spend anywhere, we want to upload it on facebook and share. This compact, easy to carry camera captures everything without much efforts from your end.

Secondly, it also is very useful in situations such as accidents, eve teasing, robbery or even murder. Its like a personal CCTV camera,
which here in this case, clicks pictures in a sequence.

This is the visual representation of Snappy.

Cheers to Motley Crew. Let us know if you like it.

And I rise from the ashes again.

I have been away for a while now. Yeah I know you did not really miss my ranting  much but I will still divulge into it and tell you why I haven’t been blogging. I was in Ambala at my grandparents place for  five days in mid-December. The time spent there was great specially because it was after a long time and I wanted to go there since long but kept postponing it.

1) I learnt how to survive with no internet and almost no electricity for three consecutive days. There was no connection here for 72 freaking hours and I  could never imagine a life with no internet and I needed a break from it. It was nice to be disconnected for three days.And we have power cuts almost every hour of the day. Its difficult to exist with so many power cuts but we managed. I am glad Chandiland is not deprived of electricity.

2) I have had a typical grandma’s place holiday, doing nothing, wasting time, long walks and lazing around. I am spending time here after ages and feels good. Skipped taking a bath one day , guess first time in nearly two decades of lifetime. That’s gross but its getting cold now and I don’t usually get away without it.

3) I hung around with my aunt and uncles , all much older than me but it was great fun. Nothing like hanging around with adults who are really cool. Endlessly talking about music from their times and the other stuff I don’t remember now or some I won’t write here.

And then we had our family get together around Christmas, I love the winters just for this reason and look forward to the end of the year for the entire clan to come together and have the craziest times together.So for another five days blogging got ignored for good reasons. Then came up the year that brings the end of the world, 2012 and I was too busy celebrating the end of the year. New year eve was great, we had a bonfire and I got caught by cop for skipping a red light and pleaded him to let me go and he agreed

Just when I was getting over with 2011, a disaster happened, college started and it has been the most undesirable start, with  one week gone and I am tired of it already. We apparently have good subjects except maybe Math but not very good teachers.Oh lord where are the good teachers? And just imagine waking up at 7am on a foggy like the picture below and waiting for your bus to come when you can be in your bed sleeping.

To break the monotony of the extremely blandly boring and exasperating week, we went on one of our trips to nowhere, and this time I had my Jalopy, and we drove to Nangal a 108 kilometers from Chandigarh. We drove to and fro in 3 hours, yes my jalopy isn’t that bad is it? It was a great drive, I and uncle V drove for the first time on the highway. Although the start of the day was horrible, terribly horrible, I don’t want to recall it, we witnessed a bone-chilling accident. But then it turned out to be a great day, a day that is going down in  phoenix’s history book. Like AV said ” its not necessary to have a good start to have a good day, even bad starts can have happy endings.”

Somewhere on the waySomewhere on the way again

The Year End , Already ?

This year has already entered its last fortnight. It has gone by at the speed of lightning  , the time just flew by. I was trying to figure what I did this year. And surprisingly I did a lot , learnt a lot , gave up on a lot of things and tried on a lot more of new things and I don’t even remember half of the things . Here is a quick flashback of what I have been upto in 2011:

January : The first half of this month was vacation , perfect way to start a year . In the second half the second semester began. Pretty insignificant apart from the fact that I got into my first and only so-called relationship , which was  even more insignificant  than this month.

February: The EP!C idea came up in this lovely month . This is when Uncle V and I started working on the magazine. The month when I nearly stopped sleeping  . The best one because apart from EP!C , AIESEC too happened in February itself. Two things that changed my perspective on various things. This is when I learnt a lot if not the most.

March : The EP!C Magazine came up on 17 March , Uncle V’s birthday. It was a great beginning , can’t ever forget that day. The nervousness in the beginning of how the response would be for the magazine , the excitement , the overwhelming response. The celebration on the day was just amazing. Beautiful month. Somewhere in March also came my lowest point when I got my first semester results , something I want to forget forever.

April and May : Don’t remember much of it , usual college and exams I guess and the end of first year in college. Oh and I got my driving  license in April.

June : The summer of 2011 is the one I am never forgetting , the college training which was never taken seriously , the number of times we bunked college and had some crazy times. I watched every single movie with the gang  in June on the pretext of writing reviews for the magazine and then actually wrote the reviews. The drives to the neverland in the Jalopy began in June .

July : Vacations , did exactly what we did in June. Woke up late , slept late  , read a lot , wrote even more , typical holiday time.

August : The third semester began and I did not go to college much. Team Magik happened , my Organizing committee team for recruiting new people for the organisation (AIESEC) , I was Organizing Committee Vice president – Finance. It seemed difficult then but  now I miss being the part of the OC. Every day was new , eventful and exciting. There was a new beginning ,  new surprise , lesson every single day. There were times when we came back disappointed but then the team got back together the very next day to get into the battleground.

September : The OC ended somewhere in  the middle of September. The going at college got tough. It wasn’t the easiest semester , we had six subjects , all drove me crazy. A point when I started detesting college even more. EP!C suffered this month , for reasons I wont divulge into here.

October: Quite an eventful month , apart from handling the monstrous exams everything was amazing. Went for the Shimla trip at the end of this month and only the gang knows what happened before and after it . Although I think I did a lot of things I should not have but it was all worth risk. Sorry if I sound mysterious here.

November : Exams yet again , they just went by and I still fear what will be the outcome.

December: The first December that did not feel like December , its not cold at all apart from the slight chill in the evening and morning. Apart from that it has been quite explosive. The birthday in the first week , do you want to know more about it? The EP!C will be back this month after a long gap .Then rest of it has been happening too and here we are on 15th December ,2011 waiting for 2012 to come in and hoping the last fifteen days are just as awesome as the first 350 days have been.

HAHA …. I am too funny

I am surrounded by the most lame people and they crack even more lame jokes. These jokes can leave one speechless and sometimes might not even qualify as jokes . Thought I should share a few of them with you :

Date structure teacher (while teaching foreign keys) : What is foreign key ? Basically we define foreign as , when someone goes from India to another country he is in foreign land .
Me: Sir What about the guy who comes from the other country to India?
Blank Silence.

Swat and me going to have breakfast at Mc Donald’s , while crossing JW Marriot
Me: I was thinking we should have breakfast at Marriot instead of usual burgers at Mc or Hot millions
Swat : Forget it , we don’t have change today.
We had only fifty bucks at that time.

SS: Please tell me some position in  …
Uncle V : 69
Blank silence
SS(after sometime) I was saying a position in a software company.

Me (while lighting candles) : The candle wax fell on me , its hurting.
Dad: Good , you just got va(wax)iccanted
Me : HUH???

Me : Mom , are you kidding me?
Mom : No I am adulterating you.
Blank silence.

Me (at KFC while climbing down the stairs , the board said mind your head ) : Uncle V , I can’t mind my head .
Uncle V : Why so ?
Me : Because I am too high headed .

AB (on getting his green slippers back ): Guys I have my slippers back and then revolving around. Guys this is such a green revolution.
*PERIOD*

When Uncle V uses an umbrella in summers
Me : Using an umbrella is so lame in summers , how can it stop you from being tanned?
Uncle V : It won’t effect you , you anyways have hair falling all over your face (indicating my tresses that have a tendency to fall on a my forehead)
Me: Okay , so you mean to say , hair are like some anti-tanning devices ?
Uncle V: Yes
Me : Prove it
Uncle : Look at your scalp , is it tanned ?
Me : No , you have a point , so lets keep our hair on our faces.
THIS IS BY FAR THE LAMEST AND MOST RANDOM CONVERSATION.

At the traffic lights when the light turns green
AV: Drive , the light is green.
Me : Oh yes , sorry I forgot I was driving.

Me to Bro (who was studying) : Dude please tell me how you concentrate ?
Bro : I follow some rules .
Me : Interesting , shoot I am listening.
Bro : Rule Number 1 . Stay away from you (my name)
Me : Okay whatever .

And this one’s my personal favorite .
All of us were planning a trip on activas to Kasuali
Someone(i don’t remember who) : Listen this is a very far fetched plan , its not happening. Stop dreaming.
Uncle V : No we are just trying to make memories , wonderful college memories.And you should be a part of it.
Someone2 ( I don’t remember this someone either ) : Yeah just like people make babies , we make memories.
Everyone : Now that’s something new .
There’s quite a possibility that someone 2 was me. But let it be , I am too modest to take credit of such jokes.

Maybe these do not mean anything at all and a lot of them may not even be funny anymore but they did entice laughter at one point . I did not remember a lot of them and finished this post in a month of wrecking my brain. And is for all those who will understand these .

An over the top drive

I hope no one from my family ever reads this especially my mom and dad , they would probably disown me if they read this (disown here is an understatement ).

I have the most insane friends whose dictionary does not include the word “Normal” . They are just CRAZY! They  can go upto any level of madness . The post is a prove of this fact. Well me and my gang of girls have this pact that we go for a small road trip after every month’s exams and around diwali . This was mutually decided last year when we went to what we thought wasRDB fort. The pact was sometimes broken and this time it had been too long since we went somewhere and we just had to take a break.

It was decided after the last month’s exam that we would go to floating restaurant which is around 50 kilometers from Chandigarh. But the plan was cancelled due to some  unavoidable circumstances . But this week we got so bugged by college , the lectures were a harrassment the professors even more so and we had endless assignments , submissions and what nots. This was when Swat and Uncle V talked again about the previous month’s plan and told me .I was just looking for this break from college , I asked everyone else and they surprisingly agreed . So it was decided that the people who have activas ( I don’t get the car on weekdays ) would get them and we’d fly outta the cage. It was the six of us and three activas .

Next morning we assembled outside the college and Uncle V and I discovered that Swat had included few of her friends and AV ( who had her own little adventure while coming out of the college , she was caught by the guard but ran away) in the plan and from six we were now eleven people . Now we had eleven people and not enough two-wheelers to accommodate . We thought of getting buses , I hate buses even the one hour bus journey to college whacks me out. They are just too uncomfortable especially the Punjab transport buses and CTU and since college started I have been trying to get used to them.

So anyways we had no other option , unlike the previous times we knew the way to the restaurant . So that meant less of adventure. The first bus we approached did not go to Sirhind , neither did the second one , the third one went exactly where we had to go but it was fully occupied and there were no seats available . So I just moved on thinking maybe we will find a better bus , its always good to have options . After a few seconds I saw SS and AV asking the conductor if they could travel on  the bus top , yes they  freaking thought of it . And when the conductor seemed okay with the idea all of them started climbing . I was like FML , we just joke when we say how cool it would be to travel on a train top or a  bus top but our life is not some bollywood movie where we can do that and sing and dance our way . I had a battle inside me , whether to go up or not by the time I could think of anything everyone was up there except me and Uncle V so I just stopped thinking and climbed .

Phew! I never imagined I would end up doing that . The top was dirty and I honestly was doubtful of sitting there even I had climbed up. But  I believe if you take a decision there should be no looking back , so I finally sat down making myself comfortable. The wind up there felt very nice and the view was amazing too . Have a look at the picture from the top :

We talked like crazy and then started singing as well and drew a lot of weird looks towards us  but who cared . It was glorious . We just don’t say things we do things . But the travelling on the top did not prove very good for our poor hair. The best way to worsen a bad hair day is to travel on a bus top , your hair will be at their best worst .

After an hour long singing and screaming and evading trees that had the potential to hit our heads we reached the floating restaurant. Getting down was major task for a few people who were scared out of wits, specially Swat who after climbing down to disguise her fear said ” Oh , it wasn’t that big  a deal , was it . ” The place was beautiful , we took half an hour to detangle our hair , yeah we are girls , another half hour to make our faces look good . Yes we are girls after all .

Finally when everyone was done , we headed for breakfast , which wasn’t that impressive . I felt the place was shaking because it was on top of the water , but everyone else denied that. Apparently they are not vibration sensitive . Uncle V – It was shaking , don’t you deny it just for the sake of contradicting me . After the breakfast we went and sat on the bank of the river and a nice time . It indeed was a peaceful place something like Jainti Dam ,talked discussed things and clicked a few pictures and came back . Here are few more pictures to make you envious .