The pendulum sways in space
Unaffected by what it sees.
Twelve numbers watch
The two hungry hands
Alas! "sleeping time"...

-!nversed Poignancy!

Its been raining marriages around me over the last 7 months. Lolz, to continue to the beating started by Pooja and Padmav --> My Bro and Manni --> Doggy and Sana --> Price and Sharon --> Sherry and Flaunty --> My cuz and his girl --> Choms and R... The journey has been fascinating and absolutely awesome.. I'd previously shared a piece with my emotions painted when my Bro sold his stake to my manni; and now, to follow it up- I just want to paint an another parchment of emotions of how it feels to have you "chaddi-dost" and "best-pal" get knotted..:P..

Ever since I’ve known Chomy(Yup!, thats 18 looooooooong years now! :P), she'd always wanted to find the man of her dreams and get mar­ried. I’ve rarely met some­one with that objec­tive so clear in their mind! I remem­ber She and me watch­ing the movie "Life in a Metro" together and me telling her how much Konkona’s char­ac­ter reminded me of her.

Over the years and our 'sin­gle­hood', Chomy and I have had many dis­cus­sions on find­ing "the right one". One ques­tion she often had was how she would know for sure when he came along! How does one know, really? Much air­time has been wasted (or not) in dis­cussing the lack of good 'ones' (really, where are these lads and lasses?!) and the fact that our good years were slowly fad­ing away.

I mostly enjoyed play­ing an elder brotherly role and (in my infi­nite wis­dom!) usu­ally tried to impart, what I hope, was good advice. You will know, when you meet him, I said. Things will fall into place. When the stars align every­thing will work out! And so on and so forth. Through our heart­breaks and set­backs, I often told her that things that are des­tined to hap­pen, will hap­pen and surely they would hap­pen to her too. Very soon. "You can’t rush things", I said, they will hap­pen when the time is right. I even remember Shylaja Aunty(Chomy's Mom) took us to the some tem­ple and had gotten our futures read to assure both of us that good things were in store.:P

Over the years, despite all my out­ward reas­sur­ances, I must admit that my own belief in love and romance, the insti­tu­tion of mar­riage, in hap­pily wed­ded has received quite a knock­ing. Much as I would like to believe I have also seen so many signs to the con­trary, result­ing in cyn­i­cism creep­ing in and the rose coloured spec­ta­cles I wore when I was younger get­ting clouded. From being let down, from expec­ta­tions not being met (and what is life with­out some expec­ta­tion?) and from a lot of dis­con­nect. Do I expect too much or are peo­ple just not inter­ested? :-p

I would, of course, like to believe in love and romance, in find­ing "the one", but it’s dif­fi­cult to muster that blind faith any­more. When I was eigh­teen and starry eyed, yes. But older and wiser, as they say, and things don’t quite seem the same.

So despite it all, it gives me small plea­sure that even­tu­ally "Chomy-Dumbo" did meet the man of her dreams and now is about to tie the knot. While I watched — some­times in admi­ra­tion and some­times in fas­ci­na­tion at how fast things can move in some­one else’s life (at least com­pared to mine!), I was thrilled to see Soumya's and R's rela­tion­ship develop, mature and go straight to the altar!

I for one, am so glad that she is finally hitched. At least that way we will now be spared of her exis­ten­tial ques­tions (and mul­ti­ple smses) like, "err..bw does it happen in fairy tales..?", "Where's my man?!" and "when will I ever meet him?" and "ho!-c'mon- tell me Bags!"... These kind of ques­tions, as you can imag­ine, are quite hard to answer ;-p

Through these years, Chomy never gave up hope though. She went about her mis­sion with admirable enthu­si­asm despite the many road­blocks! I think one thing I admire her for is her sin­gle minded focus about what she wanted. And maybe that worked in the end. She did find the man and she did make every­one includ­ing her­self happy.

Mean­while, I still won­der some­times about life and love and its related com­pli­ca­tions. Infact, one thing that Padma Aunty(Poo's mom) com­plains con­stantly about the "sin­gle sta­tus" of both her daugh­ters, I jok­ingly ask her "why change what is work­ing fine?" I try and con­vince her that at least we’re happy. But I real­ize that her goal is not our hap­pi­ness, but of chang­ing our status.

I still remain unsure about mar­riage and wed­ded bliss. (Or it might be for the sim­ple rea­son that no one’s actu­ally asked :-). Have I been on my own for too long now and got­ten too used to it? What I do miss though is some­one being an intrin­sic part of my life and shar­ing and doing things together. And that is a part­ner­ship that is so much harder to achieve.

But a friend’s wed­ding always makes me happy. It’s a time for cel­e­bra­tions, for love, laugh­ter and friends to get together. And to rein­force some of those faded beliefs.

For Choms & Mr R, wish­ing both of them loads and loads of hap­pi­ness and good times together.

Chomy babe — the sin­gles club will miss you! *Hugs!* :-)

Mr. R : I’ll be there when you need a shoul­der to cry on dude:-p

You know they say time flies. They couldn’t have been more correct! It’s been almost four years and we have just another month to go. Batches have come and gone, but each batch has given the college what it rightly deserves. We are too. Placements are just one of the things. But that is not what I am talking about.

After four years, I often ask myself; what am I taking home? I don’t know how many would agree with me. But this degree is just an excuse to teach us the bigger things in life. You learn technical skills when you want to, while on work. Half of us won’t remember what we had done in these four years after 10 years. What we learnt are not technical skills but survival skills. But unfortunately, that’s no longer the case. With an effective ban on any kind of an interaction with the juniors the skill sets no longer go down the pyramid, it unfortunately goes only with us.

College life seems hard, but the fact is that we have a tougher life ahead. A life governed by your rules. You set them, or you break them too. Its clichéd to say “rules are meant to be broken”, but the fact of the matter is that if you do, you just break your own rules. Would you be willing to risk it? No one will call your parents to set matters right, no one will ask for an apology letter to be written for missing a lab. You write your own apologies, you stand up for your mistakes. It’s a wild world out there; and like I said, a degree is just an excuse to teach us to live in it.

It’s funny how aspirations change in four years. Back in first year we wanted the world. We thought of us as the best. We freaked out and had the best time of our lives. By second year we started getting used to the system. It grew on us; or rather we grew on it. Third year, we saw what great placements our seniors got and were enthused to beat them. (We did, but that’s not the point!). Fourth year, more than half the brats has a job in their hands and they know what awaits them (a smaller chunk missed out on jobs, thanks to the R word!). No more dreaming, no more fantasizing. Plain simple truth, you know where you stand in the heap of 500 students. Eventually we learn to live with them. We have to, have no other choice do we?

Ten years down the line, things that we crib about would hardly make a conversation. These are just passé. We are a great batch, and we will forever remember the good times, the bad times and the fun times. I can picture it, some days down the line we would be chatting away in the same olle gallery about the good times wishing that they would never end. Talking hours about how we made the best of what we got. The classes bunked, the night outs, the beer parties at Brigades, the road trips down the nooks and corners of Bangalore rural, the ‘acoustics’ in class…we had our share of both good and bad.

Sitting around lazing in our rooms we dream about what might be in store for us in the future. But having been in college for four years, we know it’s just a futile attempt. We can’t change who are. College either makes you breaks you. We just walk into the vast empyrean hoping for the best.

There is so much here. And we do take a good share of it. We take our friends and all the good times we shared with us. We only hope that one day we all might get together over a beer and catch up and relive those memories and rekindle the spirit of the Wonder Years at UVCE!

Err..! Its finally happened. My brother at last has divested his 50% in himself ;). Its been a super mid-week bonanza for me with hectic schedules and hyperly-hallucinating minds (Yup!, I'm hallucinating about my exams which are a week away and the fact that i am yet to buy "text books"). But, even amidst all these mid-week bonanzas and hallucination quibbles there were this ever oscillating emotions in me of nostalgia,depressions, sentiments,happiness, excitement pride and some hues of nervousness too (lolz!, BTW the nervousness has no symbolic link to my exams :P).

Infact, at the uninitiated spur- I was "awestruck!". Man!, this little guy with whom I used to fight, play,eat, learn, break-window panes,glasses, souvenirs and what not, is getting married!?. Shit! I still thought that we played and broke the show-case glass just yesterday!, I still thought that just a week earlier he was sitting right besides and teaching me "6th Grade Chemistry" involving what hypothesis, theory and equations were; And dint he teach me my 10th grade 'C programming' earlier this week?! I couldn't help recalling the feeling of long summer days playing with him inside the house, right there in the living room or even those days when we used to play table-tennis on the dining table or those hours we spent trying to plot a ploy to take as many kites as we could, that flew by our terrace. Lolz! my thoughts are getting thumply whetted by the droplets of nostalgia and Gosh! guess what?- there's nothing quite like a sudden rush of nostalgia. Not that's its particularly unpleasant but the desire it raises inside to go back to a simple time, is often overwhelming and for the briefest second, you can almost believe it is possible to go back, just once.

Just as these weird thoughts pushed me into a sea of past memories, there came a dosage of depression amalgamated with sentiment( Well, i know that most of my intra-circle friends associate me to being a rather "idiotic saint"--Ahem ahem, yes guys and gals- This time i was slightly away from the normal pH). And if you ask me as to what pushed me into depression?! Well, yeah!- Its simply because I also need to end up divesting my stake on him, specially those that I purchased as an IPO. Yup!, I realised that next time I give him a punch, I would have to tackle two punches coming from the other side :( ; The next time I call him by names i would have to end up getting belted twice over! ; More trucingly the next time someone calls me "uncle" I will have to bear it all and accept it (*Darn!,Phew!,Errrr!*)

Sans punches and boot-kicks- Let me move into a rather exciting and happiness provoking aspect of this bulk divestment. Hmm...well,did I hear someone talk about the increase in my channel capacity and my contention index being doubled?!; Err, the answer to that would be a simple straight face! :-|. Actually, there's more to it than just that!- There's this tsunami of happiness that took away all those hues of melancholy that I spoke about a bit earlier ; And thats the induction of a new dimension into the family. During the past two decades, my bro has been one of my role models (Perhaps,its a common phenomena that you have your sibling as your role model) and I feel that I have inherited a lot of characteristics from him. Now, whats exciting is that from now on I would be inheriting a newer eclection of his; Every decision he takes and every move that he makes will now have two discrete components and two mutually dependent dimensions and its really exciting to take em all, learn and store em in my kitty.;)

And finally the element of pride and with it some tinge of nervousness..;). Pride essentially because he'd now be a family man, and breaking his head and "Tail" on what would seem like some really crappy issues to me and more so because for some unknown reasons he'd be fully serious and stuff (*lolz*)..Hehe..That would actually be some real fun..holy cow!, I just cant imagine him being completely mumphed in voice and keeping is funny sarcasms and puns at bay!; On the same lane there's that speck of nervousness, which does exist for obvious reasons..:)


PS: Perhaps, most of you would be familiar with my "blog-post pricing index" and someone might even ask me about the pricing of this one. Well, the answer for that is pretty unanimous and unambiguous- its "priceless" and the fact that I am typing all this sitting crouched on the third tier of a second class sleeper should say more to it than just words..:)

Foot Notes :
1. The reason I remember '6th Grade Chemistry' and '10th Grade C Programming' is because I was poor at them initially and because at a later point I excelled at them be it for bagging a centum in International Chemistry Olympiad or for winning the Junior Code Wizard '07 ;) (Perhaps, a way to convey a gratitude).

2 : QLC stands for Quarter Life Cycle!. I just put that in to make sure that all those preps that I underwent for my IIM interviews doesnt go waste(*Lolz*)

3. If by chance my bro is reading this; I am sure that he'd be pissed seeing this looooong post. But, if soever he reaches this point- Here's a "Thanks" that I need to offer ;)

Other things that I learnt and still remember:

* Cycling in 1992 (Phase 1) and 1994 (Phase 2)
* Flying a kite during the summer of 1995
* Spinning the top in 1996
* How to weave a 'maanja' thread for kite in 1996
* Playing with water on the water thats poured on the terrace to cure the concrete in 1996 (I think that this was the time when the 1st floor was constructed)
* The word "Gee" and "Schedule" (To be pronounced as skedule) in 1997
* Some small Sanskrit verses in 1998 ( He was in his 10th Grade at this point)
* Playing "singleton" cricket with the wall as the bowler in 1999
* Electrostatics, Current Electricity during 1999 ( I learnt this when I was writing his Physics Lab Record! )
* Learnt how to write the "integral" symbol and also learnt how to apply "differentiation" in 1999 (Differentiation, I think, is his favorite topic in math)
* Learnt about circles and stuff when he was preparing for his CET and IIT-JEE exams during 2000.
* Learnt about Side view and Front view Graphics in 2k1 ( This prompted me to realise at a later point that engineering graphics dint require drafter and a drawing board!!- Guess what?, his drawing board was a "tea-poy" and drafter was my uncle's "Try-Square" (!))
* During 2k2 I learnt logic design. Courtesy his Logic Design Assignment which I wrote (!)(!) [I think i learnt something about synchronous and asynchronous propagations]
* During 2k2/2k3 I learnt C programming and I used to try and write C programs for his lab programs and then again debug my logics by comparing with his.
* 2k3 to 2k5 I was under a sabbatical, more so, cos of my 12th Standard exams.. BTW, I still remember learning about "packet switching networks" which was what his final year project was based on. (I also remeber learning how to make a report. Guess what, the day before his project submission I was also awake along with his friends and he till about 2am!(that was perhaps my first night out!!))
* 2k5 onwards, I have learnt a few trick of the trade in Core banking Solutions (Which after 2 years helped me to write a complete algorithm for my friend's company which worked in provided BBS to a small-sized bank. More over, I had already learnt a bit what a Perl, SQL and stuff meant :P)