Conflicts of the Conscience

Great to be blogging again!

If at all I were to be asked 'Has there been any change in you/your life?', I would say yes.

I was in a life where going to classes/assignments/attending lab sessions/writing records/preparing for internals were the only things that mattered apart from the regular tackling I had to do in my home. Having come to a place where guessing the language of the state in which it is in is very difficult, I feel I have been pushed to handle responsibilities(though I am loving it), learn things the hard way(as always it has been) and most importantly, learn to walk alone(for the benefits of your own self). Yes, it is Bangalore! I have been asking 'do I miss Coimbatore in ways I can't compensate for in Bangalore?' to myself. The true answer is NO. It might sound strange hearing this from someone who has spent 12 years in Coimbatore. It was strange to myself! I had to figure out why i was so comfortable in Bangalore (or rather) why wasn't I uncomfortable in Bangalore. The reason is that I am living a life of less apprehension when compared to what I was in Coimbatore. Fear of failing my parents/fear of not living up to expectations/ lack of confidence over which people called me over-confident/ lack of clarity in what I want to do are a few of the fears I had been managing for those 12 years. It became difficult at a point where I locked myself inside the door and kept thinking of all these fears, sometimes with watery eyes. I have been able to overcome all these fears.

Though I would not say that I have got clarity in thoughts, I would definitely say that I am being more of myself in this busy city. I am living all those I-am-also-a-normal-guy-with-normal-wishes moments laughing out loud whenever possible (even in my workplace). I am opening up my mind. I am trying to help people around me. I cater to my selfish needs with a lot of caution. I try to save money. But, I am still doing the mistake of thinking beyond what I should be. I take things to my heart very easily. Bangalore is easily teaching me to live the corporate life. Is this the voice of a frustrated kid? I don't know. What do I want to do in my life? I don't know. Am I doing the right thing? I don't know. Overall, the conflicts still remain the same but the fear because of others is gone, though the fear arising from my uncertainty still remains. In short, conflicts of my conscience still persist.

Not many wishes for the coming year. I only hope I get a little more clarity. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! :)

Athirapally

I was having the impression that the WCTC vacation would go without visiting any place.Having shown my angry face on my friend on friday(18th June) evening for reasons I never knew(probably frustration for not going out anywhere much),I was convinced that this hols would go as boring as any other holidays.But,I was wrong.Moonar being the initial place for our visit,we ended up finalising on Athirapally falls(or Chalakudy falls as we knew initially!..It was later that we realised that both meant the same location) for our visit on Monday(21st June).

Referred to as the Niagara of India,the Athirapally Falls is situated 150kms from Coimbatore.

Coimbatore-Ukkadam check post-Valparai-Malakkiparai -Sholayar-Peringalkuthu Dam -Vazhachal-Athirapalli.

The roads were perfect till the start of the hilly region;called as the entry point to the falls.Reaching the entry point of Athirapally Falls,which was 34kms from the falls' view,the road was not so good for some 5 kms.After that we had a smooth ride.

The entire river was fenced.We stopped at a place where we found we could have access to river water beyond the fence through an opening in it.We played in the river for nearly 2 hrs.Water in the river was cold and we found it drinkable.

We continued our ride up the hill for some 20 min.Getting an entry ticket for the falls we reached to view the highest point of the falls.We could never go really nearer to the falls due to protective fencing.Frustration crept into us as we felt Rs.105( 5 per person for 6 of us and 25 per bike for 3 bikes)had gone waste.Thanks to my friend who saw the board "This way for a full view of the falls".We went down the hill and found ourselves awestruck!

A video of the Athirapally Falls taken by us :)

Then I knew why this place was preferred by many directors for shooting movies.Nature at its beauty!The river fell down the rocks as two sources of Waterfalls.Standing near the foot of the falls one could get drenched easily within seconds.The force with which it fell threw water drops all over us that even made taking snaps difficult.Down,the Chalakudy river branched into two(as you can see in the video) and in one of those river branches we had played.

P.S: *The song "Enna satham" from "Punnagai Mannan" was shot here.

*Director Maniratnam has a special fascination for this place.Raavanan was almost entirely shot here.Other movies as "DilSe","Guru","Iruvar" and "Kannathil Muthamittal" have songs shot here.

India is sinking!

Bhopal memorial for those killed and disabled by the 1984 toxic gas tragedy.

The hindi words on the wall read "Hang Anderson! ". I thought this was a perfect memorial.

"Keshub Mahindra, 6 others get 2-year jail for Bhopal tragedy"

All get bail by evening;verdict after 26 years; no mention of Warren Anderson.

Either things are beyond my head or apparently, India is sinking! I say this for a few reasons-

*"no mention of Warren Anderson"- Where did this Keshub Mahindra come from?? Even the memorial speaks of Warren Anderson! I feel like asking "How much money?"- yes! that is definitely what I feel. Just by making it to the front page, the apparent meaning was for people to understand how important this issue is! But beneath that, there lies another meaning..which I felt as.. "People! Please awaken yourselves!".

*"verdict after 26 years"- Of late, I have come to understand that Tamil cinema(no other industry i am aware of that much) has presented REALITY(Yeah, I definitely meant that Vijaykanth movie where he gives statistics of the number of cases pending!). This isn't delayed-thus-denied justice; this is just USELESS JUSTICE.

*"All get bail by evening" - this sounded like, 'Mr. Mahindra, just make your presence in the district court.It is just a formality.Your are free to go in the evening.' (sounds better na?) - There is just no Justice in India.

*"2-year jail" - This case could have been left untouched instead of such a verdict.Even a criminal would have asked wtf??

If the Mumbai attacks( 26/11/2008) could get justice on 6th May, 2010( Kasab's death sentence), why can't the Bhopal Gas tragedy (1984) call for justice sooner?

Can only a city like Mumbai demand timely justice? Can't Bhopal?

A cry of 3000+ souls has been left unheard?

Can Justice go any worse?

Can people get corrupted any better?

Where is the country which had seen men like The Mahatma, heading towards?

Where is Anderson??

Many more questions are there to be answered.

I am just another Indian;I can only say.Let us hope.

Rate(out of 10) this verdict..Judge the Judgement! Drop in your rating as a comment.

JUST PASS in Operating Systems !

Prologue:

For those who really think Operating Systems is just a paper in an engineering course, it has something to do with BaLa :-O . IT HAS TAKEN THE HELL OUT OF ME! What with the 5th semester holidays getting over, my entry into the 6th was just like 'Ah! just another semester.' Given the elective options in the 5th semester, O.S and RDMS were the electives that were opted by many. And I took Embedded Systems(Very easily identified as The Colour Sensor thing! :P ) and O.S.

The Crime Scene:

Into the 3rd internals and 6 subjects done, I was there in front of The Godfather Of O.S- Mr.John Tony. He taught me with real should-teach-them-with-dedication attitude and I was like feeling really light after the enlightenment. Back home, I remember studying! But, the other day in the internal exam I found myself sneaky enough to hide the Bit Paper/Mal Practise material/Evidence-that-was-supposed-to-prove-me-guilty-of-my-crime or whatever it is called. Having successfully committed The Crime Of Copying any person with a mind would have discarded it but Mr. Mindless(yours truly) had it beneath his answer sheet with his mind trying to THINK (How genuine na? ) of the next question! After minutes of thinking, I could only remember someone pulling out that material and asking 'what is this??'. With an Oh!-s***-I-just-got-caught face I gingerly gave those silly replies and found myself storming out of the exam hall handing the paper(actually, it was snatched from me!) to The Lady(she wanted to teach me a lesson saying 'what would happen to PSG standards if I leave you?' Look at who is speaking of it! ) and I was there inside the HoD cabin.

Aftermath and a lot:

I spoke,pleaded,begged,wept and tell you what? She(the HoD) never felt sympathetic! Expecting sympathy after having indulged oneself in malpractice in ECE Dept of PSG Tech is like C'est impossible. The issue went to CoE(Controller of Examinations). I had to bring my parents to college to speak with the HoD.

The enquiry day and I told all my hooked-up stuff of what had happened? Kept my fingers crossed until the results were out. All were praying 'I should pass' , 'I should get a 9 in Microwave',' Wish I get a 10 in STC(Statistical Theory of Communication).

My prayer was 'My results should get displayed!'

Result Day:

Result day, and I had to wait for nearly 1 hour and 20 minutes and the wait was worthy!

5E in Operating Systems(this will be the last time I use this word! ) and it meant my internal marks had totally been scrapped off! This gave me a SGPA(Semester GPA) of 8.59 and I could still maintain a CGPA(Cumulative) of 9.19. Thanks to my previous CGPA of 9.32.

That's the story of 'JUST PASS in Operating Systems' :)

Nan pogiren maelae maelae!!

"Naan pogiraen mele mele..

boologamae kaalin keezhae.."

This song is so often heard by me that makes it worth mentioning. The unmistakeable voice of SPB and the chilling voice of Chitra have made people revere the song just for the voices. :)

E.V.E.N.T.F.U.L- My Experiments with Colour Sensor

Sem 6 and one thing I' ve understood viz. the meaning of the word "Eventful"- .

I can quote 3 such eventful days (till now!)

Day1: Thursday-the last day of our IInd internals, it was Operating Systems paper and I bunked it! Though nothing special about it, all those who wrote(that is the entire class except me!) made me feel that my idea of bunking O.S flopped as the paper was easy! I did not feel much though. I went to college by 11 and others came back from the test. We had an assigment in DSP to be written and we started writing. Even while we were writing there was a plan that few might go to Vinnai Thaandi Varuvaaya bunking the noon classes. And don't know why I was also in those 'few' even though it would be my second time to go to the same movie! Assignment work done, we felt why not bunk and spend the half day in Embedded lab to do our project. And eventually, our(mine and Sridhar's) minds tilted towards the latter. But our project hero Santhosh would never fall for the second plan! Attendance matters to him even though he has a plan of bunking 150 hrs of the total 600(His calculation!) to maintain 75%. I trusted him and had asked Vimal to book 2 tickets for me and Sridhar. Thus done, we started from college by 2 and with Sridhar's biking talent we reached KG. The movie got over and we were there again in college! I swear none would have expected us to go to college again!We went again to greet our dear batch mate Santhosh who had been waiting in college for us to do the embedded project.Thus joined him, we started giving the impression even-we-do-project! It was another such day in our 1-crore MPLS lab. And trust me, we never expected anything unusual.But our expectations went wrong, and the sensor worked! Our dear guide Sivaraj Sir(referred as SS here on) was called upon immediately(fearing that the output would just vanish before he could see :P). And I don't know what each one of us 3 felt like but i definitely know what SS was thinking.He was elated! He went and kept saying everyone that the colour sensor started working. He even asked us to go out for a celebration. I never knew getting a square wave output from an IC would call for a celebration?! And we stayed there till 8 30(last to leave the lab) waited for our most esteemed Venky Sir to return back to his cabin for handing the lab keys to him.Folks, that definitely felt eventful!

Day2: Tuesday-The day of Yukth! With Yukth(ECE department's annual project presentation event) date approaching, our-honourable-SS kept on insisting the importance of doing that PRODUCT with which each one of our Embedded students could(actually it was more of a 'should') get placed. He even insisted on presenting the same in Yukth. And our colour-sensor had shown the face of a square wave just 4 days back. We had the fear 'what if SS asked us to present this square wave for Yukth??' and fortune turned away from us as SS did say that! We were asked to take readings and do some coding for LCD to display the colour. I started feeling negative for having got the square wave! We took readings on saturday(3 days before Yukth) and asked SS if we definitely should keep it for Yukth. He then offered a compliment saying he himself would do the coding for LCD exclusively-for-us! Should I tell 'what a great compliment?'.Period. We never felt like our project meant for such an arena as Yukth. But nothing-against-SS goes the saying. Sunday, and Sridhar managed to mail the abstract and it was selected immediately the mail was sent; because no abstract was denied! Monday evening and still we felt like we had plenty of shame in store for us on Tuesday! We reached college on Tuesday morning by 8 and were expecting SS to turn up and make miracles happen for us. And SS turned up only by 8 45.Wow! What an opening for everyone to strip us naked for presenting such a worthless project! 8 50 and I and Sridhar were discussing on dropping the idea of presenting this project(in the hardware domain) and concentrating on our most hyped software project VoIP which was also to be presented. But then again nothing-against-SS. We took some readings and burned the MuC with the ineffective LCD code and took some genuine videos(:P) to prove that the whole system works in MPLS lab conditions and modifications in the code are to be done for it to work elsewhere and set out to the lab where all projects were to be displayed. We said to each other- 'Come! Let's enjoy getting embarrassed together'. The ribbon was cut and the first person to see our(and everyone's) project was our HoD. She same to our table and saw ours. We showed her the videos, told her that the IC was imported from the U.S and her comments were 'It is indeed a new idea. Imported from U.S uhn? Smart boys!'. Did we manage to avoid embarrassment? I thought we managed well. Staff members,juniors,ME students came pouring in and we explained as if we had done so much hardwork for this to work. Whatever it be, everyone was fancied by those videos! We were fighting for comments and teasing other projects but all that was in pure envy. Results were to be announced and I,Sridhar,Siva and Susan were expecting a prize for our software project. We never had this embedded project in our mind when they were about to announce.There were preliminary words before announcing the results followed by hardware results. When she was about to announce I heard Amalan anna whisper into my ears congrats! I was happy that my software project was going to win a prize. I even asked him 'software dhanae anna?' and he said 'NO! hardware..'. I thought he was kidding. But he is not of that type. III place to our class batch,II place to robot batch of g1 and..here we go.. 'Ist place to Balakrishnan and team for their colour sensor without the use of camera!' (even the project title din't sound good!) But that was like it cannot happen not only to all but even to ourselves! Nevertheless i preferred being numb till I left that place. I managed to get a glimpse of what all people felt like and Omg.. people were glaring at me! I managed to say everyone I had teased "definitely we never were worth this prize. You deserved the prize!". Even I can be modest :P. But actually speaking, none accepts that I did mean it!

Day3: Some evening(don't remember the day),scene shot in MPLS lab!(sounds like a movie uhn?? :P)

Having won the prize in Yukth we now very much belonged to those elite members who do embedded projects staying for hours after their classes.We were again there trying out our best to bring out the PRODUCT. And this day was special. I call it special because the only people present were g2 students! Usually it is the other way around. g1 students do a lot of work(it even seemed like the lab was all theirs!). But today there were only 5 students,all from g2, and those 5 included we 3idiots. We were there sorting out the problem of that ineffective LCD code(after the project won the first prize!) and we never were near solving the problem. The added specialty was that SS was also there(probably waiting for we 3 to come up with some miracle again :P). Our hardware hero Santhosh left early as he had headache(after all he missed to be a part of this yet-to-become-eventful day).It was 8 30 and I went to SS to report him this issue of ineffective LCD code and wishing him to come and sort out the problem. He did come and instead of finding the bug in the existing code he started doing all from the first. Typical SS way. He then asked us if we knew how the LCD code works and we had a big 'no' for it. He went to board,took the marker and started teaching LCD from scratch. 8 30 pm and we were sitting in a class of 4 learning LCD. I thought we overcame sandwich students that day. He finished teaching and again sat for coding it and seeing the output. He did the code and the output came as expected. 9 10 ! I got a call from my mom.I couldn't pick it up as I was sitting just beside SS. He began modifying the code and showing wonders on LCD. We were seeing the code and my mind was in my watch. 9 25, he finished showing all wonders he could think of and seemed like the end of the scene.Mind you, it just seemed! 9 30, and our web designer Joseph came up with a doubt 'Sir, why do we use a diode in a driver motor circuit?'. Except SS, who seemed seriously enthralled by this question, I could see everyone else( including me) had a bloody rage against him. He started taking a class which brought me memories of my 11th std physics tuition. 9 30 and I got a call. This time however it was Siva's mom. His mobile was switched off due to low charge. And I was able to imagine how it would be for a mom whose son din't return home till 9 30 pm with his mobile switched off. 9 45, and SS was saying something about electrons and positive charges get attracted towards each other the way boys get attracted towards girls. Was this humorous? Never seemed so. 10 00 and SS at last realised it was getting late! Yeah, late night. The moment he asked us to leave I ran for my bag(so did others) and we removed our project setup in MPLS lab and locked the lab. While handing the keys to SS I heard him sayin 'this kind of learning should have been started the 2nd year itself..'. I can't stay in college till 10 00pm everyday! We ran towards parking lot fearing they would have shut it. Fears allayed! it was still open and the only 2 wheeler in the whole lot was a Gray Apache which was supposed to be mine. Run to your home was the call from my mind..

That ended Eventful Day 3

Voice of a Tree

Blue thing with sun
Add the green thing
I need none.

I lodge no nest;
Fellow homo sapiens
To me you detest.

Want me for shade?
Wheels offer sludge
Why do u abate?

Tiger's timer begun,
Do me the same
I will be done!

Brought heavenly tears;
I might swear,
Will do for years.

Wanting nothing new,
I give one clue,
Save me,Save you!