small amusing foolish stupid

We all have our own small incidents, which may not be big enough to write about or important enough to tell others, but yet may amuse you when it somehow crosses your mind. I too have my collection of these small incidents some of which are amusing, while some are foolish and stupid. I am writing about some of these here.

On one beautiful ( This I am guessing :D) saturday morning, I got up around noon. Having nothing better to do, I thought why not take a bath (What a timepass). The previous night I had the usual struggles of my life, finishing off a damn assignment and so had slept late. Having got up soo "early", I was still not fully awake. I took my bucket and soap and went to the bathroom. I hung my shorts on a hanger, outside the bathroom, and went inside to take a bath. Soon I was enjoying the cool waters from the shower.

After finishing my shower, I reached out to take my towel. Nothing came to my hand. I turned around. Oyee where is my towel. Then suddenly it stuck me. O great, I forgot my towel. I guess I would be the first person in this world who would have forgotten to take a towel while coming to take a bath. While the outside world was enjoying the beautiful day, I was foolishly standing inside the bathroom, with water dripping all over me, wearing nothing, not knowing what to do. Well, the only option left for me was to dry myself with my shorts.
Wow great, now that's on the hanger.
But hey, but that's just 10 metres away.
Maybe...just maybe, if I could run outside and get hold of it....
But what if anyone comes into the bathroom at that exact moment...
Well no risk no gain...
After weighing the pros and cons, I decided to finally take the plunge. I peeped outside. Hmm coast clear. And then,with all the strength I could muster I ran outside, got hold of my shorts, got back into the bathroom just in the nick of time as at that exact moment when I reached back inside, a guy came in to pee. Guess I won the race ;). I dried myself up with the shorts and then had to return to my room wearing the same shorts. People were just staring at me, but then I didn't care...I had prevented a greater catastrophe from happening :D.

This happened just yesterday. It was the last of our diwali holidays and some of us were playing football in hostel-6(H6) ground.The time was around 6:45 pm. The lights were very dim, but the game was still on. There is a small forest like area just outside the boundary wall. The wall was so high that it just about reached my waist. Suddenly I heard some grunting from somewhere near the boundary wall. I turned around to see something big standing just on the other side of the wall. The light was very dim and the fact that I had short sight made the matters worse. Somehow it seemed to me that a lion was standing on the wall. Suddenly all those stories of panthers entering the campus popped inside my head. My first reaction was to just shout out "lion lion" and started running towards the room. Everyone else just stared at me for a few seconds, unable to comprehend what was happening, then everyone turned their heads towards the wall and then they started laughing.
Oyee it is a hungry buffalo you idiot.
Imagine the stupid sheepish look on my face on hearing this. Man where did I ever get the idea of a lion in the campus.

There was once a "Save electricity" campaign in our campus. Some of us had volunteered for this campaign. As a part of this, we were to stick awareness posters in the hostels, wherever we thought people mostly frequented. The obvious places were the toilets and canteens. To kickstart the campaign, we gathered at H12 at around 12 in the night. We were divided into groups and each group was assigned one hostel each. My group was assigned H7. It was a very big group : 2 people. Myself and a senior. We started exploring H7 and started sticking the posters at places we thought caught everyone's attention. Whenever we saw a light was on which was unnecessary, we switched it off and kept a count of the number of lights we switched off. After almost an hour or so (man this is the first time I realized how big our hostels were), we were almost done. There was a last poster to stick. By now the count of switched off lights was about 24.

Senior : We will stick this last poster in that toilet

Me : Sure.

After sticking the poster
Senior : So we are done.

Me : Not yet. The light is still on. And that makes the count 25.

And then I switched off the light
Suddenly there was kicking of doors from behind us.

"Oyee bhenchod kaun lights off kiya be. Lights on kar"

Me : Oops looks like the toilet was not empty.
We just switched on the lights and ran from there as we didn't want the bathroom guy to know the source of darkness in his bathroom.
And yeah, count is still 24.

There are more such small incidents. Maybe I may put them in another post some other day.

The assignment tsunami

The first reaction of a person getting through IIT is "Yahooo (maybe google will be better) I have reached the top of the world...."..well herein lies the problem ....when u reach the top of the world from one side of the world, the momentum takes you down through the other side. This,in short,tells you the life of an IITian (atleast as far as Mtech goes). Well my story is no different. I can't forget the day when the results were declared and to my pleasant surprise I got through ( I had already started preparing for next year's exam). Well that is how I reached the top of the world.

Now comes the interesting part-the sliding down part. Once in IIT I made this grand plan of playing one sport each day, seeing 2 movies a day, go out sight seeing mumbai each weekend. 2 weeks later, I still didn't know the nearest bus stop to our IIT campus, already submitted one assignment, screwed up a quiz and knew each corner of the our department lab like the back of my hand. Now that will give you an idea of how much I executed my grand plans.

One of the things that I hated most when I was in Infosys was the night outs that I had to spent inorder to meet the deadlines. There have been times when I had to sit till 6 am in the morning to complete the work. When I resigned Infosys, one of the things I was happy about was that now there will be no more night outs!!!!. But what do I see when I reach IITB. There are practically ONLY night outs. The day before the assignment submission, the lab is filled with our class. Even people with laptops are forced to come to the lab since there is no internet connectivity in the room after 12 am ( How cool is that :( ).

Till around September beginning, life was ok-ok. Though work was there, it was manageable. I could watch around 1 movie per day. The real attack started soon after the month of September started. Beginning of 1st week of September my workload read 0 assignments to do, no quizzes, 3 movies pending to watch. By end of 2nd week of September my scorecard was 5 assignments to do,1 quiz to prepare for, 2 movies pending. By end of 3rd week of September 2 assignments done, 3 more to submit the next day, screwed up the quiz, ended up facing a surprise quiz in another course and deep and creative thinking (read sleeping) during class hours. O yeah 2 movies still pending.

The most irritating of all the courses is the software lab. We need to break our heads on mundane assignments like Latex, HTML,Ruby, Ruby on Rails (Now which egghead can think of such a stupid name for a such a stupid application). Sorry for all these technical junks, couldn't help it. It was just last week that we had submitted our assignment for Ruby on Rails (ROR). The damn thing was soo confusing that my hair count have reduced to half due to the constant plucking of my hair each time I go mad trying to make sense of what was happening in this goddamn application.

Since ROR had become such a headache, we guys had no choice but to cooperate among ourselves to finish it off. Some guys will do one set of problem whereas others will try out the remaining. If in the very highly unlikely case that the puzzle(ie, the task) was cracked, it was time to rejoice for all. Our motto was :- One for all and all for one. In between we had some interesting conversations

Me : Alpha charlie come in, alpha charlie come in

Adil : Alpha charlie over, alpha charlie over

Me : Alpha charlie, what's your position, what's your position

Adil : solider down, soldier down

Me : Alpha Charlie, hold on to your positions, we must not give up.

Adil : I have given up. Contact beta charlie. Mei tho jaa raha hu sone ke liye.

Thus goes each day in the life of a new Mtech student. Life is hectic, definitely, but I guess it's worth it. After all IIT is IIT. :).

The invincibles

The professors in our campus are really unbeatables. Most of them are soo good that they can give their counterparts in MIT a run for their money. Obviously they are the best in our country. Most of them are damn good in what they have specialized, their degrees speaks volumes of their abilities. Most of them are PHds from highly reputed institutions.But in this post, I want to express in a comical exaggerated way some interesting features of some of them. For obvious reasons, I won't name anyone :D. Most of the descriptions given below are based on what my friends have told me since I haven't taken up those courses taught by them.

There is one professor who loves the blackboard very much. So much so that if a bomb explodes, he will run out of the class carrying the blackboard. I am sure if the blackboard was given a chance to write the exams, it would have topped the class for that course.

Then there is another prof who speaks soo fluently in english, but hates seeing anyone smile/laugh in the class. My friend was once a victim of this and from that day onwards he laughs with his mouth closed (Now don't try to imagine it. No one, who hasn't sat in this professor's class will ever be able to do that).

Another prof has this super duper ability to make even the most insomniac person go to sleep. I have a gut feeling that he must be hired by the pharmaceutical companies for testing their new sleeping drugs to test whether the drugs can match his efficiency.

There is another prof who gives marks for class participation. Anyone raising his hands in class is eligible for these marks irrespective of whether the person really had some doubt or whether he lifted his hand to scratch his underarm.

One prof speaks soo fluently that there is a hot debate among students whether he speaks Russian or French.But everyone agrees it cannot be English.

One extremely talented prof is very fond of english alphabets. He makes sure that he somehow uses all the alphabets in all the mathematical formulas and derivations.
Here is an eg:
"Consider a function F containing 2 variables b,c. When you apply a function H on this function, you get function G. Keep applying H on F and you get functions M,N,O,P....". Once he finishes up the english alphabets, he starts attacking the Greeks. "Take alpha, beta, gamma...". Thank god there are only 26 letters in english. I shudder to think what would have happened to we poor souls in his class if there were over 100 alphabets.Whew.

Before I end this post, I really would like to thank all these professors who will shape my future. It is such a refreshing change , compared to my Btech days, to be taught by people who knows what they are teaching and that too the best in what they teach. Thank you dear profs :).

Chak De PG

There are lots of events that are held in our hostel. One of them was the volleyball competition. There were about 5-6 teams that were competing in this. All the team members were UG guys (UnderGraduates). So there was no team to represent the PG guys ( PostGraduates ). So the organiser approached one of my friends and he agreed to cobble up a team. After we discussed it among ourselves, 6 of us from Mtech 1st year computer science batch managed to form a team. Anand was made our captain. Now he was the only guy in the team who knew how to play this game. (We actually had to ask him all the rules minutes before our first game got underway ).

So thus we formed a PG team and our match schedule was put up. Our first match was against the team representing the fifthies (5th year UG). The match was to be held at the volleyball ground inside our hostel. Special arrangements like putting up floodlights were done for this competition. And soon the day when our first match was to be held,arrived. And then our match started.

There were 6 of us..All from our class.From Left to right : Anand our captain (the blue dress), Saurab(red dress next to Anand), vishal, Ajitav, me, Akash.Since most of us were playing this game for the first time, our first game was very funny. I will recreate some of the scenes that happened that day. As usual it will be a bit exaggerated :D.


Ajitav : Everyone take up their positions

Sourab : Mera position kaha hei be

Ajitav : Jaha court mei space hei ,waha tera position

Sourab : Sahi tactics hei be

Game started. The ball comes into our court.

Anand : mine mine mine mine....
Hits the ball back. Again the ball comes back.
Anand : mine mine mine mine....
After 15 minutes :
Anand : mine mine mine mine....

Ajitav : Abee kya mine mine, ab mera mine mine...and he hit the shot :D

Once the ball came to me. I hit the shot and it went outside.

Ajitav : c'mon guys, play well, we can win..by the way score was around 20-2, with them leading.

The ball came to our court, Sourab hit the ball and it went out. He comes to Ajitav.
Ajitav was getting very desperate by now.

Sourab : Yaar ajitav, ball ko aise marna hei ya aise.

Ajitav : abee tu mere ko hi maar.

And by this time the first set got over and score was around 25-5

Anand was playing fantastic with his big smashes. But he wasn't getting much support from the remaining guys. We often end up hitting each other's asses instead of the ball. Another time when the ball was coming everyone shouted mine mine mine...and then each of us hearing the other guys call mine mine mine, left the ball with the result that no one hit the ball. But somehow we managed to pull up our socks and won the 2nd set. That gave us some amount of confidence that we too can give those guys a run for their money. But that confidence was short lived when we were bombed to pieces by the opposition attack in the 3rd set. Thus we lost our first match. But hey, we won a set playing our first match guys!!!.

Our 2nd match was held 2 days later. By now the fame of the PG team had spread to every corner of the hostel. This match was against the sophies (2nd years) . But this time we got an additional member in our team. Praneet was his name. And he is Mtech 1st year Electrical engineering (I think). We were not very sure how well he plays and so initially he was a substitute. The match started. And as usual we lost the first set. But that day we were playing better than we had done in the first match. So though we lost the first set, it was by a narrow margin. In the 2nd set, it was a comeback of sorts as we came from behind to hold the set. The 3rd game saw a see saw battle. In between anand made a change and brought in Praneet. After sometime we realised that he actually plays the 2nd best in the team, after Anand. Thus his addition to the team improved our team performance. At one point they were leading and at other times we were leading. The score reached 21-20, we leading. They score 2 points in a row. Score 22-21 they leading. We score one more. Score 22-22. Then Vishal delivered 3 killer serves in a row and yahooooooooooo, we won our first match!!!!!!!!There were huge celebrations among ourselves. The underdogs defeated the abovedogs( or whatever you want to call the opposition team ).

After this match, there was rain for the next few days and so no matches were held. and since we didn't get to hear anything from the organisers we thought maybe we are out of the competition on account of our first match loss. But a few days later we were told that our semifinal (yeah we reached the semifinals!!!!) match was the next day. Unfortunately that day, due to a pending assignment submission I had to miss out of the match. After the assignment I got back to the hostel. By then the match was already over. I asked Vishal what the score was. He looked at me with a dejected face. I got worried and asked "Kya hua yaar"
Vishal : "Hum jeet gayeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee" and burst into a big smile
I was like wooooooooooow, we did it again!!!!!!!! And this time, believe it or not, it was in straight sets. The underdogs were in the finals!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The next day was our final match. Since we had a good winning combination now, I offered to be the substitute. We were going to be play against the best team we had seen so far in the tournament. We had seen their semifinal match and they were simply superb. But now we too were not bad. anand and Praneet as usual the champs. vishal had improved a lot. They formed our front "army". They ensured that most of the balls coming into our court were handled between the 3 of them with the others providing the back support whenever the ball coming into our courts gets out of their reach.

The game started. Both the teams were equally good which meant long rallies and thus a good eye feast for the audience. The cheering was rocking high on both sides, with PG cheer squad performing better (obviously :D ). The first set was closely fought, but in the end we won it. The 2nd set too was nothing less than a see saw battle, but we were always in the lead though by 1 or 2 points. Towards the middle we accelerated our performance and we reached a score 22-15. But after that they started scoring continously and was begining to close in the gap. The score read 22-21. Then we scored 2 quick points. They scored 1 more point.Score 24-22. Tension mounting. Our team serving. Anand served, they returned..after juggling in our court for sometime Anand went for a smash...the ball went flying to the other court zooooooommmm. We won the poiint, the set, the match and the tournment!!!!!!!!!!!!!We created history (don't ask me why). The underdogs have won the "prestigious" Hostel volleyball competition. Soon after we were given our trophies:- a Rs 20 food coupon!!! woow can anyone think of a better trophy :D.
But that day will always be a memorable one. We bunch of first timers got together to win a tournament no one expected us to win. The main credit for this goes to our star Anand though the contributions of others were by no means less. It really does feel good to win a tournament as underdogs ;).

The day I screwed up :D!!!

For those who don't know, Onam is a state festival of Kerala. It is what Christmas is for the people in the West and Diwali is to the North Indians. In IITB, we have a mallu ( people from Kerala are generally referred to as mallus ) association called MCA (Malayalee Cultural Association). Though Onam this year was around 2nd week of September, due to the ongoing
examinations and other logistical problems, it was shifted to 1st week of October in IITB.

As a part of this some of us, including me, were asked to do some programs. So to decide on something, we gathered at Anish's room. Anish, incidentally is my school teacher Vinay Bhai teacher's son :). Since we had not had much time to think upon any new idea , due to our hectic studies schedule, we decided to do a comedy dance which Anish and his friends had already done in college. The theme was a funny dance sequence involving all the leading malayalam film stars.
He showed us that video. Man it was such a hilarious video, not because of the script as such, but due to the exceptional talents of the guys who did that dance. But now the question that arose was whether we bunch of guys, who have never done such a thing in our whole life can match what was done in the video.

But then our main aim was to present something, irrespective of whether it comes right or not. So we decided to go about it. Initially it was just 3-4 of us. The plan was to meet every night from around 10-12 for practice. But after 2 days, I felt I was not a good fit and was in a way spoiling the entire show though I didn't tell anyone that I felt so. There was also a secondary
reason that I was feeling too lazy to go for the dance practice from 10-12 in the night :D. But I too wanted to contribute something. So I put forward a suggestion. I would write a script and then 3-4 people can perform a skit. I felt I could come up with a decent script though my acting skills were a big question mark. By this way, we could also add an extra program
for the onam day celebrations :).

So it was decided that we will have a skit and a comedy dance. But being the lazy guy that I am, I kept postponing writing the script till the last day :D. Two days before the D-day, I got a phone call on my mobile.

Me : Hello, who is this

From the other end of the call came the reply, Hi this is Praful. I am in the coordination committee of the MCA.

Me : (in my mind) Trouble!!!

Praful : So is the script done.

Me : Err...hmm...cough...cough....isn't it a wonderful morning today

Praful : What..hmm yeah but what about the script

Me : O yeah the script...hmm...err...hmm..aahhh...errr...O yeah O yeah the script right...it truly is a wonderful morning right

Praful : #@$#^&$%#@ scripttttttttttttttt

Me : "O yeah the script is done no worries everything is taken care of ".... and I kept looking helplessly at the blank sheet of papers on which I meant to write the skit.

Praful : O gr8. Then we will meet on that day.

Me : (in my mind) Should we?

And then the D-Day arrived. In the morning, we had some games like musical chair( a very
tough game to play ) and tug-of-war. In the afternoon, we had the special lunch which is called the onam sadhya. It was such a heavenly feeling to have eaten it after 2 months of torture in our hostel mess. Anyone who might have observed my eating would have thought that I may not have eaten for the last 1 month ( though a weighing machine would have given a conflicting answer). After the lunch, everyone returned to their rooms. The cultural programs were scheduled for 6:30 pm.

After returning to my room, with all the brain power I could muster, I somehow finished the script By 5:50 pm :D. Though there were around 5 characters in the play, I had no choice other than play all of them myself since there was no time to call anyone and tell them what to do.. And the 1st rehearsel would be the actual play ;). Soon the programs started and within half an hour the announcement came....please welcome Sree Shankar & party to the stage. I was like "Oyee what party, even I didn't know there was a party". As soon as I entered the stage I applied for an anticipatory bail..."Since this is the first time I am presenting such a show, please bear with me if it is boring"

With this I started my skit. I introduced the opening scene to the audience and delivered the 1st 2 lines. Then bang!!!!!!!!!! nothing was coming to my mind...blank.......I kept quiet for 2 minutes on the stage...then started mumbling something to myself...then unknowingly turned to the audience and said "So what were the lines"...and even before I realised my mistake, the audience were laughing. I decided to gobble up the lines I forgot and continued with the remaining plot.
Even after 2-3 minutes of play no response from the audience. I increased the momentum. No use. Tried to increase the momentum more. Maybe it was due to the law of physics, but the momentum got too much and I started getting confused as to which character should be delivering which dialogue. In the end I was as confused as to what the play was as much as the audience. And by the time it ended, everyone woke up from their sleep :D.

And thus I realised one thing. It's not a very easy thing to make mallus laugh, especially without any preparations. But then when I think of that situation now, I start laughing. This will be one onam which I won't forget in a hurry.But the best part of the day was that the dance by Anish and others were a huge hit. It was really a credible performance considering the short preparation time, and the relative inexperience of the team members. All in all a great day for me which I will remember for a long time.