Posts

Showing posts with the label College Days

When Destiny Sends Its Helpers

Image
Keep running. The right people find you on the way. At different stages of life, you’re confronted with different challenges. And each time you cross a hurdle, you feel that familiar sense of accomplishment. It’s tempting to attribute that success to your own skill, tenacity, and willpower — to pat yourself on the back and feel proud of how you handled it. But when you zoom out and look at the moments where you somehow managed to trump the odds, a quieter realization sets in: It’s never just you. There is always an unseen army that shows up at the right time. It was 2005. I had decided to pursue my Master’s in the US. I picked a few schools in the Midwest where the expenses were manageable, and that’s how the University of Missouri–Rolla entered the picture. But funding was still a massive question mark. I hadn’t secured any assistantship, and we didn’t have the means to pay out of pocket. We went from bank to bank, hoping for an education loan. Each manager aske...
2 comments
Read more

Now, the trio :-(

Image
Introduction A couple of years back, four guys came together to live in a place called as Rolla. Everything was pre-decided in India as to who our roommates were going to be, and so it was no surprise that we stuck on together when we came here. We were perfect vegetarians, conservative and outgoing, having the right blend of modernity and orthodoxy. We knew from day one that we were perfectly made for each other (before jumping to conclusions, I meant "roommates" and nothing more!!). The four of us I remember the early days, when we used to sit back and start off a discussion that would seem as if it was going to end in the next few minutes. The discussion would meander endlessly, and as one of us swaggered lazily to look at the wall clock, he would let out a shriek "Oh!! Do you guys realize that we have been talking for the last three hours on a variety of topics?" We would then with great difficulty get up from our positions and worry about Buvva (food!!) for th...
5 comments
Read more

Rekindling the good old times!

Finally, we decided to meet up at Washington DC after quite a lot of convincing on Prasad and MAK's part to get me here from Rolla. As usual I was confused and indecisive in coming to a conclusion - whether to go or not! So, at 1:30 in the morning of Monday, I booked the tickets on Southwest Airlines and headed to the St. Louis airport on Monday exactly twelve hours later. People may think that it was a quick decision, but things are not exactly like what they seem. It is easy to travel anywhere within the world, but to get a ride from Rolla to STL is one of the most complicated things in the world. All travel plans are structured based on the availability of ride between these two places. As I got out of the DC airport, I waited for these two great guys to pick me up. One of them was the usual "giving out opinion" type talking about anything and everything with ease. The other was the chess master discussing hazardous moves and with a totally vanishing hairline (O...
2 comments
Read more

Bus Number 188

He stood waiting for the bus at the Malleswaram Circle bus stop with a sense of restlessness and uneasiness. He was already late for the morning bus, and he just hoped that the bus is late than usual. As such, he was getting used to coming to the bus stop more than ten minutes late, since the bus driver never kept his time. The bus was supposed to reach the bus stop daily at quarter past seven in the morning. The routine late arrival by about ten minutes meant that he never came before twenty five minutes past seven to the bus stop. Now, his normal time had shifted to the new time. He started timing his arrival at the bus stop to this new time, which meant that he was not able to meet the ten minute delay schedule too. Expecting a bus to be more than fifteen minutes late was something that was not extraordinary. Buses were never meant to keep up time. It was not the end of the world if he missed his bus, but that would mean an additional travel time to the main bus stand, and catchi...
2 comments
Read more

The Hindi Teacher

He was a short old man, with a bald patch, the patch almost engulfing the entire space on the head. He used to be dressed in a light coloured blue shirt and a pant that seemed to find its perfect place way below the belly which extended to many centimeters above the ankle. A comb to trim the patch was embedded in one of the packets. Now and then, with effortless ease, he used to shake his head in such a way that those one or two strands of hair settled across the patch to make it look that he did have some hair. Of course, he did it convincingly, but others disbelieved with equal conviction. His slippers were never noticed, as nobody really cared for any further details after all this joke. He entered the classroom amidst wild jeers and heavy boos with the book tucked in neatly under his arm. He would place the attendance register on the table, and get ready to call out the rooool numbers. As soon as he called out number 38 or whatever, he would say Roool number 38, aage aayiye...
1 comment
Read more

The G Gang and The Professors

In life, there are certain things that are unexplainable in a few words. The Gandu Gang fits in this picture. There are so many things that we did in four years of our Engineering that I just have to go back to time and pick events that have given us abundant happiness. The Part I had a vivid account of the Gandus (obviously, we belong to the Gandu Gang right!!), about how we met and how things changed in those four years. PESIT had a reputation of being a highly structured and disciplined college, and the fun was to break the system from within and to do it flawlessly. There is no doubt that it is one of India's premiere Engineering colleges, but what we did within the confines of the campus was fun and joyous. It is nice fun to talk about teachers and lecturers of school and college. So, let me list the entities who made our life fun-filled in those many years. Mr. X = He was the man who handled our C programming class in the second semester. When he entered the class for ...
4 comments
Read more

The G Gang

Image
Pic: Robin, Harry(though not a part of G gang), Prasad, Me, MAK, Gopal, Anand M and Kanna (Anand Raghavan - missing link) What is the G Gang? A post pending for really a long time to reflect upon the atrocious activities commited by us during our college days at PESIT. The characters of this gang are highly contagious creatures who can land themselves in trouble at the slightest pretext, and of course more importantly can get others in trouble all the more easily. The G Gang sounds rather filmy, but the title is transfixed due to certain high profile characters outside the gang. The G gang was thrown upon by a highly studious element in the class, and being highly shameless and uncaring, the gang took it as a compliment to prefix it with a G. Before you get into G-spot and other outrageous abbreviations, let me get this straight. Those guys are not fit f or anything . It is the gandu gang , screamed the good samaritan. We laughed around on hearing this from the good guy's fr...
10 comments
Read more