Blog About Nothing
For most of the four years in an Engineering college, I did one thing that we ought to do... watch a whole lot of TV series.
Those days, we had to start with FRIENDS and then maybe go to the next level. Different people had different next levels. Some moved on to soaps overflowing with all kinds of emotions. Emotions that
any creature has
ever felt were all there. OC, Bold and Beautiful (?), How I Met Your Mother, etc. are in this category. Others moved to emotionless pure satirical, ironical comedies. The likes of Seinfeld, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, etc.
I moved to both. This might be because I was efficient enough to handle all my academic work with the assortment of series mentioned above (excluding Bold and ...).
I had formed separate teams specializing in both these fronts, I was the
generalist in both.
There are also different reasons why people start investing so much time to both these categories of series. The initial attraction for the former is more often than not the portrayal of beauty of God's creations. The latter is mostly based on recommendations.
I was strongly recommended by one of my friends to first watch the "Live on Broadway" by Jerry Seinfeld (who was doing it for the last time). The title of the blog must be a hint that I would get to this sooner or later. Wasn't
very impressed the first time. My friend said that I needed to watch it a few times to get into the mood. He had seen that video 40 times by then. Don't know about his current score. Well, a couple of times more and I had started liking it, so then I did what I normally do. Get hold of some of my friends and made them watch this. (I had done this to a friend by giving him sessions on FRIENDS earlier. It was fun.)
I started watching the TV series 'Seinfeld' shortly, but it was too late to finish in the whole of that in my four years of graduation. It took a while to arrange for all seasons later, but now I have access to all episodes.
This time its one of my flat mates with whom I have formally started on Seinfeld. Now, I am in the 9th season and slightly depressed that this would all finish soon. Not that I wouldn't watch many of the episodes again, but first time is different.
Just wondering how a conversation between Jerry and George would go about blogging:
Jerry: What is the deal with people filling up blogs with something about themselves? Isn't the stuff totally useless for everyone else?
George: Jerry, you don't understand. Blogging makes you feel that you had a good conversation with someone who is listening. You can talk about stuff and views that you would be reluctant to share with people face to face. You can know more about other people's views on any topic. Plus, there are a lot of chicks out there. Also, ...
Jerry [Interrupting George]: All right, all right. Why don't you put all this on your blog instead?
George: Pass me the sauce.
Some Dog Millionare
Last weekend I saw the much hyped
Slumdog Millionare. When I first heard about this movie making waves around the world, I thought this is the case where you show the world what they
want to see about India and hence they like it. Later, I was told the movie unveils the story of a slum boy and exactly why he knew answers of all those questions in the game show. I thought it might be an interesting watch (and I always liked Anil Kapoor).
It was not as good as I had ended up expecting it to be.
Best Part: When they show how the muslim guy Jamal knew what Ram holds in his right hand.
Worst Part: When a driver beats up Jamal and he tells the American couple that this is
real India, and they give him a $100 note and show
real America. If that is real America, that explains the economic crisis.
Stupid Part: The three musketeers from the slum conversing in fluent English with an
American accent. And the mobsters were not far behind (with an occasional desi mention of the mother of the second person). The policemen too sounded quite educated.
I don't know whether I should be happy that a movie that talks about India and has contributions by artists from here is so highly acclaimed, or dissappointed that there are numerous far better movies made here that do not get noticed just because they don't show the
real India.I am sure even Rahman would agree that he has had better songs under his belt than the ones that got him nominations at Oscars.
Five Months Later!!!
I have been itching to post for a long time now, and finally full with scratches I would do it.
Although its been five months since my last post here, I have been part of our
group blog thing. Till now its been dominated by Mr. AA's views, much like the Indian batting line up was did by Tendulkar not long ago.
By the way, Happy Birthday to him! Hoping he would recover soon enough to play the tests in the Windies.
This saturday we had the Open House demos of projects in our college. There were many interesting projects on display. The visitors were from different backgrounds - professors, college students, school kids, families (on a technological picnic if you will).
As I had also put up my B.Tech Project on show (which I would skip explaining), I could not take out time to visit all the departments. The only place I did manage to go was Mechanical. They had chosen the lawns to display all their projects and were appreciably crowded. Many of their projects were implementaion of small smart ideas. For example one group had removed the electrical motor from the washing machine and installed a bicycle instead. So set a timer of 5 min. on your clock, and pedal yourself to a healthier and cleaner future. One thing to be taken care of is to not wear clothes while cycling, because you'll sweat and always end up with a set of smelly clothes, which you would need to wash in your washing machine, but again mess up another set.
Two very interesting toilet projects caught everyone's attention. One was a urinal with springs, so that when the 'pissed user' leaves, the decrease in weight on the springs triggers the flush. That would be a lot cheaper than shadow sensors (or whatever else installed in current 'fancy' urinals)
Yet another interesting project had improved the toilet seat by adding an extra flush button. So now you have High and Low knobs on your toilet seat!!! Use these knobs depending on what and how much you ate last night... =))
This is not making fun of the idea which would actually save a lot of water. Hoping this one does not go down the flush!
OK, much of this toilet humour... The most useful project I saw was in my own department. This was being developed for last two semesters by four 3rd year students. In association with the National Association for Blind (NAB), they have developed a cane for the blind which had two very useful features:
- It would warn (by vibrating) of any obstruction within 3 mts. range of the person using the cane.
- It would help them to easily identify the bus they want to board. With a small device mounted on DTC buses, the cane would just identify the bus no. and the speaker on the cane would call out the bus no. If more than one bus is approaching, the user just needs to press the select button as soon as the bus he needs to board is called out on his cane, then the speaker on the bus would buzz and help the person to track the door. The implementation was carried out with constant feedback with the future users, so that it turns out to be useful. Now they would be used by the people from NAB to suggest any customizations.
There were a lot more projects and interested people can visit the
official site.
Overall the Open House was quite successful, and if you are a technocrat you may have had a nice time here. There were projects for all kinds of people (since EVERYONE uses a toilet). Although some were meant for a very select intellectual group of visitors (like my project :D), and hardly had any visitors.
Being somewhat of an engineer I enjoyed the day, ofcourse the free lunch helped.
Surprise Trip to home
So there was this Inter IIT puzzle contest (really...) , and somehow I was selected from my institute , and had to go all the way to KGP for the final phase... It was a one hour contest sandwiched between the actual time to reach there and then come back... There was no way I was going to go for it had they not
sent me the air tickets :D
Obviously I had to go home (well that became the main aim of the trip as soon as i knew the venue was KGP). And I had already asked the organizers to delay my return ticket by one day so that i can get some time to go home...
Well so now I had to catch my first ever flight at 6:15 am <---- thats so late in the night !!!
I asked the auto driver to take me to IGI airport... although the distance to the airport and railway station are almost same, but the fact that you are going to an airport leaves you no right to bargain...
Anyways I reached the airport well before time, roamed around for a bit and then happened to just casually ask a security guard for the terminal 1A, coz all around I could only see terminal 2...
He suggested I should take a taxi for that !! It was 12 km far from there (actually the auto driver had higher hopes from me than anyone else and he had dropped me in the International terminal =)) ) Now I had to hurry up and reach the domestic terminal... Well I managed that...
The Jet airways Boeing 737 was cool (atctually at 6 am, in delhi everything
is cool)...
Anyways the flight was about to take off when they started giving instructions about what to do when the plane is about to crash...
If you have seen
Jerry Seinfield's "
Live on Broadway", you can exactly picture the air hostess showing you the emergency exit doors... (Isn't it hard to justify the utility of an emergency door on a plane?? when could you
safely jump off a plane??)
And then there was the pilot announcing the details of the flight like: the current height of the plane, current speed, etc. Why do they do that??
Well as the plane started to descend, my ears started to ache, I had heard that could happen because of the sudden pressure difference ... and now I was seriuosly afraid if I could ever
hear how to counter that???
After landing in kolkata, they took all the participants to KGP via road... We had our lunch, took part in the competition (me coming 2nd !?!), then I met one of my numerous friends in KGP. Then rushed to the station, to get a train to JSR. All in all I had only 12 hrs at home!!!
To catch (ok... board) the flight backto Delhi, which was at 2045, I had to take the morning train to Kolkata... now I had 4 hours to waste there... So I went to the Science City... One big Children's Park!!!
These are some pics...
Bottom View
Top Views
Well somehow managed to kill time there, and got on the flight back to Delhi... It looked great in the night from up there, and especially my Institute and hostel building... I could even see my wing in the hostel... How nice it looked from there, not so great when I actually got here...
What a Mess !!!
All the ppl who thought mess food is not for internal use, look at this...
This is our mess and my dear friend Mr. Birla is cleaning it up!!!
To highlight the seriousness of the situation the next picture was very necessary...
Normal humans like us visited the mess, and were more than satisfied by the chocolate pasty
(visible in the cleaner plate, difficult to notice its presence in the subject's plate)
but Birla is not normal... never was...
Those who know him, would agree that after this he can still devour a whole pizza !!!
Anyways they say "
a picture is worth a thousand words", so happy reading...
These are the various transition states that we went through during our Minor-2 preparation...
Needless to menion that these states are not energetically stable and are existant only during minors.
Necesssity is the mother of invention... the need to be equidistant from the notes, so that knowledge is equally distributed due to symmetry, made us invent all those poses...
Anyways the minors are over now and its time to take a break... I am heading straightaway home for the first time in 6 months...
Hoping to have a good trip...
Fig. 0
This pic was taken on the eve of our CYL120 minor (about a month earlier)
The course is all about organic and inorganic chemistry... all the students
displayed above are 4th year comp/math students...
Three years back I thought I was good at chemistry, and to complete my credits in Basic Science I figured why not play to my strength (?!?)
What I did not take into account was the fact that I have been gaining so much "knowledge" for the last three years here, that chemistry has been substituted (SN1 substitution :D) out...
So there we were trying to figure out what was the syllabus of the exam... we arranged for the notes by getting hold of a 1st year student (that is what they are recruited for)...
Anyways while we were preparing, the guy who owns this room happened to come by and gave a
MASTERCARD priceless look and fled away ...
After the
communal prep, we gave the paper and scored like the Zimbabwean top order :D
Now another minor has come quite near, but this time if we come up with the same performance, I fear even ganguly would score a century against us (our inorganic prof is Dr. A. Ganguly --- suddenly this analogy sounds more meaningful, right?? )
God Bless us!!!
P.S. - If I have offended any of the Gangulys, I am deeply sorry...
