Masters, they say!

One by one, the last bit of dirty linen went in. On most other days, my thoughts would have already been captured by mom made curd rice. If on the rare days the thoughts did not travel this far, they would have been eagerly waiting for the next 356. Today, they refused to leave the room. The thoughts took the form of a lump in my throat.
Slowly, I locked the doors of my room. But the eyes were threatening to open up any instant. My legs led me to Subbu's room. My mouth murmured, "Yennada naaye, weekend yenna plan". Ears heard something, did not listen. Did not want to listen. I walked away. The mind did not. How could it?

The address of my home has not change. But, the address of my room has. This is MY room, MINE. This is the place where I found my solace, my identity. Where I could lock myself all alone an err, no not cry, but compose mails to sometimes troll, sometimes lol people. Where I could sometimes study, yeah sometimes! Where I could simply sit! Imagine doing THAT at home. Where I could find myself waiting for me, every afternoon, every evening, every night!

Indian kids across generations are threatened,"eat your food right or else you would be sent to hostel". Little did my mom know curd was served in abundance in the hostel. Perhaps, I will force my kid to a hostel. Because, It is only here you know how to talk to a person who has flunked his fourth re test! It is only here you know how to share happiness. Here, you know the art of running away from birthday bumps, even if it is not your birthday.

The transition from a non-hosteller to a hosteller does not happen on the day of joining the hostel. Takes a month. You know you are a hosteller when the formality of knocking your friend's door is invisible. Your phone becomes our phone. Huddled in a room together with the high and glorious aim of studying one day before examination and ending up cursing the teacher, only to come back to curse yourself and your friends. Asking your friend to wake you up knowing fully well he would be fast asleep. Knocking each door after coming back from home. Never feeling shy of letting an expletive from the mouth.

Sigh, the journey from home to college was long. From a boy to man. The journey from college to back home is longer.

Where am I?

In the infinite horizon of time and space, where do I exist? Do I exist? Does space really end? Where does the earth exist? Questions or bizzare ideas like this seem to have captured many a coffee drinking mans attention when they could have blissfully been talking about the best girl nearby. Closer home, for another set of 40 insane folks have probably become more insane trying to make an idiot box(err, sorry, not the television. My laptop is not intelligent any more!) understand the ultimate question of mankind, “Where am I?”

There are some projects which help you learn, some which are fun, some others which are plainly impossible and some others outrightly boring. But helping a laptop blabber,”I am near Data center. You are facing a god dammed wall. Please get lost” was a challenge which breached even these sacrosanct limits. Frustration, angst, anger it sure produced, but also bucket loads of fun. In an otherwise lifeless college where you can find groups of students huddled together talking about some loop which has run a time extra, another few who share a hi-five every time they are able to ping to their neighbors computer and the rarest of rare who while away their time in the most useless of ways, just like what am doing! But in IIITB, projects make strange bedfellows, or rather floor fellow! And you find yourself rubbing shoulders with the scholars from CEEMS lab et al! Of course, they ended up building an “ intelligent” system as the course titled suggested, “Principles of Intelligent systems”. Err, well, I of course ended up barely completing it. Intelligence of course, I shall add a dimension to perception to console myself.!

But seriously, what can a project do? Its 2 am in the night and you find the owls sweeping the first floor for the slightest bit of clue that they can swoop about the first floor! And in such times, you cannot help but feel an asshole. The only comfort that one finds is in watching others code work, or rather not work! How does one feel when you teach a system a thousand times, BOSS, we are sitting near reception and like a spoilt brat, says “You are near the toilet!”. How many times, I felt like slapping the laptop? For many a seconds, I have even pondered over breaking my five year old relationship with her.

And if this was not enough, you have a professor who can troll you behind imagination. Just image yourself standing in a facultys room and the laptop says, “I am at the toilet!”. And the man laughs and says, “Yes, that is probably catching the wrong signals.!”. All this while, he is obviously silently noting it to find a grade which is the lowest amongst all. And while you are depressed that your solution is not working, he tells everyone.”Good! Good!”. You start wondering, if they changed the definition of good somewhere in the last year! And for all the crappiest code that we write, Mr. Prof asks a student to get into the lift and ask,”Where am I?”. If you thought this was it, here comes his next move? Peeps right into the camera, gets his image into it and asks, “where am I?”.Pretty sure, the “trollolololo” music is playing in some corner of his head. Move three, Turn your laptop upside down, take a picture and as you would know have guessed, “Where am I?” And if you think, your prof. Was the only one to troll you. There is not a bigger troll than the laptop which you carry everyday, the one whom you love everyday! Did it forget the day when I affectionately named her “Highbury”! Wonder if it really cared for all the love!

And the laptop sure did benifit from the whole experience. Imagine taking a one and half kilo ass with you everytime and ask it a simple question,”My dear boy, where are you? ” And it says, very proudly, in a heavy American accent, “UnKnown Region”. DAI! And if this was not enough, someone asked me, did you do a GUI? DAI, From when did blind people started seeing a GUI! And then another fellow remarking about the project,”This project had componenets of networking, image processing and speech processing!”. Calling the location was apparently speech processing. DAI!

Yet, all is well, that well, ENDS!

Every Class has a….

Contrary to most people, I find the classes at IIITB very interesting. Because, it’s a class of 150 students(not sure, if all the 150 students are human only. I do know some vampires who do not sleep!!), there are a large number of samples whom you can observe to keep yourself amused!(According to a certain GNS Prasanna, increasing the accuracy 10% requires 100 samples.) Err, Before you draw your conclusions, I am not talking about chick watching!! None that way have arrested my eyes still..;)

While, our UG classes were composed of a more homogenous group of ‘kids’, this class can roughly be classified into groups with certain defined characteristics.

1. THE GYAANIS!

This breed of students is the “who’s who” of the class according to the lecturers. Typically, these folks have a work experience of 2 years working in a huge company..(That’s a different story that they got extremely frustrated there to return to academics.!)

How to identify them?

Their eyes are fixed either on the black board…err..smart board or the lecturer and there is an unfailing head nod for every brilliant point that the lecturer makes. They laugh, but only when the lecturer cracks a joke! The only time, they will be seen talking to their neighbor is when the lecturer has ‘explicitly’ asked them to talk to their neighbours.

2. The Wannabe Gyaanis!(The HeadBangers!!)

This is the most interesting breed of characters you can find in the class. This clan’s motive and objectives are as diverse as the methods they employ to prove their Gyaani quotient!

If you just had a glance at them, I wouldn’t be surprised if you mistook the class for a rock concert. Infact, Newton could well be proved wrong about the ‘perpetual motion machine’! Their hands are perennially in simple harmonic motion throughout the class, and I mean it. If you are unfortunate enough to sit besides them, you are also sure that you wont be able to sleep inside the class. These folks constantly have this “Oh!!”…”sss…..”..”Ok!!OK!!” reaction and the decibel levels are adjusted precisely enough for the lecturer to be able to hear it.Some of the other common characteristics in this group is laughing like it’s the first time they have heard a joke when a teacher is rebuking a student, having that *How can you do this!!* look when they see someone snoring in class??

3. Type Writer

This group theoretically, does not have an independent existence of its own and could potentially belong to any group, with a very high probability of belonging to either of the first 2 groups. Btw, I will better stop commenting on these people because on the eve of exams, the best thing to read is inevitably their notes..:P

4. The Sleeping Buddha

Now, this is my favourite group of people for the simple fact that unless they start snoring are the least annoying of all. For one, they do not make me feel guilty of wasting time in their class. That’s a different story about why they sleep in class. A couple of them because, I hear they were debugging a 2000 lined C code, a few after reading the research papers all night, and most of them because they felt the teacher was trying this best to put them to sleep. Did I mention someone dreaming about his gal?:P

Overall, these are the ‘nice’ guys of the class.

5. LiveWire

This is one of the rare breeds of students in class who are extremely vulnerable to being punished by teachers and being hated by the nerds. These noble souls do the yeoman service of trying to convert The Sleeping Buddhas into any of the other class of students through their occasionally witty jokes. However, on their off days, it is extremely tough to tolerate the various Pjs that they generate with such tremendous regularity.

Oops, Last but not the least, there is also a certain guy who is so jobless to ‘observe’ whats happening in the class, and not whats happening with the lecturer!