Conquistadores

It was mid-sem break and I went home for 5 days. Home food, meeting with friends and relatives etc and you don't know when the time gets over. It felt too short but then all home trips do. I came back with 2-3 days to spare in vacation. But that were to be spent in a own unique way.

I have just come back from this 1 day (Sat) trip to Mirzapur organised by Nature Club and Adventure Club. Our going there was not confirmed earlier. It turned out that there were some vacant seats for the trip due to some cancellations by other guys and we (me, Arjun and Sachin) somehow came to know of it at 11th hour (actually it was close to 10th :p). And there we were - had to leave campus in about an hour! We all assembled at SAC soon and there were about 20 of us going for the trip. The mode of transport were 2 Toyota Qualis. In our Qualis, we had Raghu (btech 3rd yr) and bubbly and tomboyish little Sugu (she is a 8th standard student but quite knowledgable for her age. She is the daughter of a prof in our dept) in front. In the middle were Anjali, Vinaya and Rachana (all three mtech 2nd year) and Muriel (Muriel is a French exchange graduate student here. She is also teaching French here. And her name means Shining Sea :). In the back seat were Me, Sachin, Arjun and Malasi (Malasi, btech 3rd yr, is the Nature club co-ordinator here). And so started our overnight journey to Mirzapur.

Now travels like these are very interseting if you have people who love to talk and we all sure did, especially the back-benchers! And most of it was quite on the humourous side. We talked to Muriel about French language and culture etc and she enquired about Hindi and some other Indian traditions etc. We nick-named Malasi as Nature Boy as he was the co-ordinator (Nature Boy is also the nickname of a WWE player, Ric Flair). The cruel and probably somewhat sadistic part was that we made him say Woooooo! several times over the entire duration of the trip (Woooooo! is the famous punchline of Ric Flair). And amazingly enough, he obliged every time much to our amusement. The time passed very nicely, singing songs, cracking jokes, discussing almost anything that came to mind. We talked a lot about Anime too (Arjun is also a big fan too and Sachin also knows a thing or two). And in the process we bored the girls to death with talk of Jutsus (Naruto anime lingo) and Bankai (Bleach anime jargon). We stopped at a dhaba at around 4 AM (I think it was New Ashok Dhaba or something like that) to have tea and refreshments. Me and Arjun invented a jutsu of our own there. We named it Vikram Betaal no Jutsu and it was a very advanced and powerful jutsu requiring the chakra of both of us. We gave a demonstartion of Vikram Betaal no Jutsu to the crowd and they all really enjoyed it :).

That we had so much to talk was evident from the fact tht we performed a night-out of talking. Among other things, we played a very enjoyable word game wherein one player says a word and the next one has to say one of length++ starting from last alphabet of previous word (eg cat -> tits -> slave and so on). Even though some of my words like negroplasty, neobuddhism and yeomanship were rejected by popular vote, I enjoyed the game a lot. We reached Mirzapur at around 9 in the morning. We took 2 rooms in a hotel and freshened up and had our breakfast there. One other interesting guy on our trip was Pramod (he is from US, currently doing his Bachelors from Univ of Pensylvania. He is visiting his uncle this semester who is a prof here). Over breakfast, among other things, he told us about the party scene there in his campus and we listened to him sadly :(

The group went on forward after breakfast and we reached this national park or something like that. It was home to this beautiful cascading waterfall. The unfortunate part was state of cleanliness there (the bank was littered with polythenes and other garbage :( ). We removed our shoes and carefully walked to the makeshift bridge in the center and then crossed it and climbed up the rocks and sat there for some time admiring the view. It was time now for the trek. Climbing up mountains barehands is a real adventurous thing. The idea was to reach the top and cover round and get down from another end. But we got lost among the vegetation at the top and just began trying out random paths. Some were dead ends, some too steep. One very creepy groundnut selling boy followed us all throughout the trek. I can now understand it at another level how the fellowship of the ring must have felt when Gollum was following them. After wandering around for an hour or so we finally found a way and got down but the problem was just half over, we had to cross the stream in front of us and that is where we got stuck. The water was gushing downstream at great speed and there was no clear path to cross. The rocks and trees in between were very sparse. Half of our group thought it was too dangerous and went on to find another way. Among girls only Vinaya was left (the treks in Panchmarhi trip and here have convinced me that there is a mountain goat trapped inside her body). We formed a human-chain and bravely statred to cross. There was an occasional slip or two but we all mangaed to cross safely. Soaked till waist high, we emerged victorious after conquering that stream. Our joy knew no bounds when we found out that we had to cross another stream soon after it! This one was smaller though equally fun to traverse. The path after that was not too cumbersome to travel and we soon joined other half of the group. We had some snacks and our 2 Qualis moved on.

Again the bakchodi in car started. Somebody had brought a flute and we tried it out. I re-enacted that awesome scene from Kill-Bill Vol2 where David Carradine (Bill) tells to Uma Thurman the story of how badass Pai Mei is while playing the flute intermittently. I think I was able to perform it beautifully and even those who hadn't seen the movie were appreciative of it. Anyhow, I found it the second funniest thing I did on the trip, first being the Vikram Betaal no Jutsu, ofcourse! We also indulged in some intellectual discussion - Arjun posed this deeply philosophical question, Why is a Cow? No convincing answer came about it.

The next stop was some famous local temple. There was this really long narrow road to temple which we had to travel by foot. The front-end of houses on both sides were converted to shops selling religious stuff - dildos, condoms, porno mags and tapes, transparent lingerie, scented massage oils and so on (Just kidding, ok! There was K-Y jelly too!). Anyway, after the end of this large religious market, came this temple. The scenes inside it really disappointed me - It was too damn noisy - People banging this really huge ghanta with full force, some bhajan type thing blaring in the background, guys stationed at four corners of temple beating the shit of drums for some reason and worst of all - preist personally asking everyone to give money in his hands rather than putting it in the donation box. It all semed like really big lucrative business. This all really saddened me and as we were walking back I decided to convert from Hindu to Celtic Neo-Druid Pagan. Ahem!

The fun and games began again in car. From the back seats a live radio station was started using a circular comb as microphone and several hot issues were discussed. The last point of the visit was Sangam, the holy meeting point of three rivers Ganga, Jamuna and Saraswati. It was almost night by then. After spending some time there admiring the view we turned back. The dinner was at a roadside dhaba. After this long dinner break we again packed ourselves in our Qualises (ahem). Everyone was dead tired and one by one peopel started falling asleep. When driver also started to join sleepers, we knew it was time for a break. We stopped at a dhaba for tea and some rest. After about an hour of rest the journey came into its final leg. People started dropping to sleep again. Me, Arjun and Vinaya played this games of 20 questions wherein one person thinks of a famous personality and others have to guess the person by asking tmost 20 yes/no type of questions. Rachana and Nature Boy also chipped in for a round or two. It was a nice time-pass game. After that I fell asleep at some point. We finally reached our campus at 5 in the morning and this short, fun-filled and memorable trip came to end.

--

Among other things, I have consumed a lot of good media recently -

• German movie Run Lola Run - One of the most thrilling movies you'll ever see. It is a most unusual movie for its portrayal of same story from different perspectives. Plus it has a really nice, fast background music.
• Western Movies For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Western movies are known for their style and these two were definitely best of them. Good, Bad, Ugly was simply too awesome and it has a most recognisable and cool musical score.
• Big Fish - This was a nice fantasy movie. Think of it as a Fairy Tale Forrest Gump. It was quite a decent movie.
• Memento - I watched this movie for second time. This is probably the most complicated movie of all times. The movie runs backward and forward at the same time and understanding it is not a trivial job. I watched this movie with Sachin. Surendra also dropped in my room as the movie was ending and we had a nice lively discussion on the movie. I think I managed to understand most of it this time.
• 12 Angry Men - This one is an absolutely brilliant movie that proves that you don't need big budget to make a good movie. This whole movie is shot in just a single room! It is a pure Crime, Drama movie completely devoid of any Action! I saw this movie with Sachin and Varun in my room and we would clap out, shout or whistle at every good argument put forth by the jury members. Varun and me actually tried simulating the killing with knife afterwards and we formed our conclusions and reasonings!
• And probably the best of them all, I watched 2 seasons of this supremely comedy British Television Series - Yes, Minister! It is a masterpiece depicting the life of a British minister and how he learns to play all the politics. The word play, the amazingly complicated sentences used in it and the situations were all too hilarious. Only other stuff that cracked me up so much were Monty Python and South Park.

I thus spake!

The Mexican Staring Frog of Southern Sri Lanka

Bacardi Blast

This week saw a hatrick of birthdays viz Neeraj's, Sravanthi's and Anjali's. Going to Nescafe at 12 midnight became so much a routine thing that on next day it was sort of disappointing that nobody was born that day. Anyway, Neeraj's birthday was a really fun-filled day. We (in alphabetical order - Aparna, Arjun, Ashish, Kaushik, Mausoom, Me, Neeraj, Palak, Sachin, Sumit and Varun) went to city to have dinner. It was again a Chinese restaurant we raided - "Chung-Fa". It is quite a distance from the campus, almost at the other end of the city. Now since this city is our universe, it was a restaurant at the end of the universe for us (I know its PJ, don't hit me!). Continuing, as always, Vikram was the mode of transport (this Vikram thingy will take some time getting used to if you use Mercedes Benz S Class to commute)...

All these Chinese restaurants have their name and menu inscribed in their Kanji style script which I find very intriguing. They represent a magical world for me and my desire to learn them is growing all this while. Anyway, the food and the service were really good there (the chowmein was fantastic). The good part of the evening was to come after it. We stopped by an Ice-Cream shop, Temptations, on our way back. The names of the Ice-creams themselves were very interesting - Fruit Fetish, French Kiss and Litchi Lolita were some of them. I decided on Mocha Nut Mischief. Everyone had their own picks and after that it was free for all. Like all those group sex scenes where everybody is licking everybody else, we too did the same (only restricting ourselves to Ice-creams!). All the Ice-creams were really really tasty and in all, it was a heavenly experience. We returned to campus after that in, you guessed it, Vikram!

But no real birthday is complete without some drinks. The "stuff" was arranged at dinner time only. So at around 1 AM all the drinkers (Ashish, Arjun, Me, Neeraj, Palak and Sachin) assembled on the terrace of E1 block. Neeraj brought his laptop also to the party. Amidst the faint glow of its light and our Rock Favourite songs we started the drinks. The target was to finish 2 bottles of Bacardi Rum and 1 bottle of VAT69 scotch whiskey. The best part about these daaru parties is the talk - we talked about the bad effect of globalization and about the root cause of religious fundamentalism in the world (Har har har! Gotcha! Ofcourse it was about girls and sex!). Everybody had a story or two to contribute. The party went on till the wee hours of the morning. And I added the bottles to my ever growing collection of them. Each of those bottles tells me a tale of its own!


Random Stuff

1. In HAM club we learnt that each station gets a particular code. For example, someone's code here could be VU2WRX. When establishing connection, we would speak out the station's code as a word for each of letter. For example, the preceding code would be read as Victor Uniform Bssotwo Whiskey Romeo X-Ray. Each alphabet is assigned a word, presumably a clear sounding one. So A B C D etc are said as Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta and so on. Numbers too are encoded as Unaone, Bssotwo, Terrathree,Kartefour etc. The good part is the . or the decimal. It remains as decimal only but is pronounced as desimaal! Honest! Then there are some Q Codes - long sentences that are encoded as 3 letter combination. Like QRA means - What is the name of your station? Some numbers also mean something - 73 means Best Regards and 88 means Love and Kisses. And it is very disappointing that 69 does not mean anything. I personally verified this with the instructor in the class.

2. I saw this very nice Korean movie this week - Spring ,Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring. It is a very beautiful movie - the location for the whole movie was a very amazing temple in the middle of a lake. The whole movie was very symbolic, each and every action in it symbolizing something. It was around a 2 hour movie and there was hardly 5 minutes of dialogue in it! It is a very interesting experience watching these off-beat films from around the world.

3. Sachin pronounces Kaushik as Co-Shik which I find very funny. It sounds like some sort of "Set of Isomorphic Homogenic Rings in a Finite Dimensional Inner Product Space of Orthonormal Bi-Linear Vectors in Higher Order Non-Uniform Quasi-Hadamard Basis". And I have no idea what the hell I have written in previous line.

4. Among other things, I manged to get my login account disabled, meaning no Internet, Messenger, Mail, Newsgroup for a week (doing this post with some trick). Apparently, a cute, innocent and funny message I sent to the local newsgroup was deemed to be too obscene. I must write a long, thought-provoking article about the importance of Freedom of Speech and the declining tolerance level in society one of these days. Anyway, the ban comes with a fine of Rs 200 (thats like 3 full Tequila shots for those unfamiliar with Rupee denomination). Though, something tells me that this is a signal from God (or whoever is up there. Martians?) to use this time for studying!

5. I must talk now about a very disturbing thing - Bathing. Now, before you misunderstand, I will clear that it is the frequency of bathing that is worrying me off late. It has dropped to almost about twice a week now. I am going home soon and there it is sort of compulsory to do this exercise everyday otherwise it interrupts with the meals - I don't get one! After bathing continuously for about 5-6 days, I plan to return here carrying that phenomenal momentum and will set an example for mankind at large and students here in particular!

6. The dinner last night was again outside in a nearby restaurant named Lucky. The pretext was the closing of mess. I have observed that my cost of living has increased a lot recently with all this partying, booze, eating a lot in canteen due to the crappy mess food etc. This clearly calls for some drastic cost cutting measures. Obviously, partying and booze cannot be compromised with, for those 2 are some of the most essential things in life. Also, I cannot survive on this mess food entirely so can't stop going to canteen too. I did a lot of brainstorming and came out with one bold step. From now on, I will pump in the air in my bicycle myself and not take the help of costly automatic mechanical devices. The amount saved with this will not be too big but it will definitely be a courageous and inspiring start. I will report on the progress soon!

That is pretty much all for now. I will politely ask you to fuck off now. Thank you :)

An Amazing Week

Chapter 1: 3 Frags Left!
Our department has provided us computers and cabin space basically for playing Quake 3, Counter-Strike and for *beep* *beep*. All nighters indulging in these activities are pretty common. Among games, Quake is my first love. I love everything about it, be it the physics, the weapons, various trick jumpings like with weapons like rocket launcher, plasma gun and grenade launcher. And we have a lot of really good Quake players here on our LAN. It is really a pleasure playing with top players of the country. My game has been steadily improving for past some time and I hope I will be able to take on top players one-on-one pretty soon.

Quaking is actually one thing that I like more than anything else. I prefer Quake to waching movies, watching pr0n, bathing etc. Somehow Quake is like sex for me. It gives pleasure, feels really good, you feel exhausted after a few rounds, plus you can always go singleplayer if no one else is interested in doing it with you ;)

I have been playing some Counter-Strike(CS is a Half-Life mod) too recently because of people around me. It is a fun game - you need lots of strategies and there are different modes like diffusing a bomb, rescuing hostages and helping a VIP escape if you are playing as Counter terrorist. Opposites, if you are a terrorist. But, for me, it doesn't compare with Quake in the amount of adrenaline rush one gets, the pace, the movements etc. One awesome quote says it all for me: CS is Half-Life, Quake is Life!

But still, gaming is gaming and variety is important too. I hope to try out Age of Empires 3 and World of Warcraft soon. And something tells me I will like these games!

Chapter 2: On the Rocks!
Well, so much for gaming! It was Friday and everybody decided that we need to drink because [insert some excuse here]. So, all the bewadas of our dept went to city in this nice bar (I forgot the name). We started with chilled beer and after a couple of rounds of that we decided to go royale! It was time for Scotch. It was first time for me and I had it "on-the-rocks" (ie mixed with big ice cubes. one drinks it slowly as the ice melts). It tasted good and had good effect too :) Finally, we decided to have a Tequila shot served with salt and lemon simultaneosly and in one gulp. As expected, it was very strong and it smashed my buffer! We went to have dinner at a chinese restaurant, Chin-Mi in Rave3(a local multiplex). En route to Rave we said and did lots of crazy things with me and Sachin in the lead. We travelled to Rave on a Vikram (don't confuse with Vikram of Vikram Betal. That Vikram carried ghosts!). At the entrance of Chin-Mi were the stautes of 3 chinese monks. They looked like some zen warriors, masters of some exquisite martial arts and still were smiling very serenely as if they had their powrers and high life-force quietly under control. One of them reminded me of Pai Mei from Kill Bill Vol 2! The dinner was quite average for me but the guys who had non-veg said it was great. A Chocolate Velvet Ice-cream shake at Barista's afterwards compensated nicely for the dinner. We returned to campus after that and thus ended this awesome tour.

Chapter 3: In Dots and Dashes
After waking up late on Saturday, and missing breakfast in the process, had a very normal lunch with no hangups from the previous night! After that I went to SAC(Student Activity Center) to participate in a workshop organised by HAM Club. We were told about Morse code and its dots and dashes. After that we had to make a circuit for implementing Morse code, basically a beeper thingy (a short beep would signify a dot and long one dash). We were given components like bread-board , resistors, a 555 timer chip, capacitances, switch, speaker, battery, wires etc and we had to solder and connect them according to the circuit. Thanks to the HAM club guys for a nice samaosa-colddrink break in between. After about 3 hours my circuit was done and it was a very joyous feeling when it produced a beep for the first time (much like a surgeon performing a complicated C-section operation and hearing the baby cry for the first time!). Anyway, me and Kaushik have registered for the license of Amateur Radio Operator and the classes for it are starting soon. Let's see how the thing goes.

Chapter 4: Relic Hunters
Later that night, we were having dinner and Palak suggested about participating in the Treasure which was to start at 10:30 pm. And I thought - Chalo ye bhi kar ke dekh lete hain :). So we reached SAC and registered our team "Relic Hunters" having me, Palak, Ashish, Neeraj, Satyam and Abhijeet. The format was like this - there would be a starting clue and we have to guess a movie name from it and the location of the next clue. The location itself may be derived from the movie name. So off the teams went scouting for clues after clues throughout the night.It felt just like to star in that Amir and Juhi movie - "Daulat Ki Jang" :-). Armed with cycles, cellphones, and googling in between from department, we went from one location to another. The superstar of our team was Ashish - he has seen all the movies that exist here. He cracked one movie after another. The relation between movie names and location was sometimes pretty awesome - for eg from a clue we inferred the movie to be "You've Got Mail" and next clue was to be found at the Post Office! We scouted whole night throughout the campus. Imagine being perched atop the six storey high Water Tank at 3 in the morning or seaching throughout the huge Faculty Building for a tiny clue! The FB part was the most frustrating (we seached at the most improbable of places. I myself looked in atleast 4 Girls Toilets for clues. Such was our dedication for the game!). Neeraj brought some paranthas from Hall 4 canteen for everybody while we were stuck in FB (you rock Neeraj!). Anyway, we were the joint winners for Treasure Hunt which ended at around 9 in the morning. It was a unique experience participating in such an event and I will cherish it for a long time.

Chapter 5: Everyone's Favourite Sport!
While doing Treasure Hunt we were at SAC and in the morning at 5:30 AM Nature club had organised for a "Bird Watching" tour near the campus. So I took a break from Treasure Hunt for about one and a half hours and went with the Nature Club guys. There were 7 of us on the trip (Please note that 7 is a prime number and the only prime number between 6 and 8. Amazingly enough, it is also the only integer between these!! You may now marvel over my advanced mathematical and analytical skills!). Now, our campus is situated in middle of villages and fields and the boundaries at the back just dissolve into these. We left on cycles from the exit in front of Health center and were immediately stopped by a security guard there - "Where are you going?". "For Bird watching". "Kya?". "Chidia dekhne!" "Achha! Jaayiye". After this permit we left the boundary and entered the neighbouring village. In village, I saw several people scattered around sitting in the fields. I assume they were also doing bird watching. Anyhow, we reached a sort of main road of the village and we stopped every now and then when we saw a bird sitting nearby. Our tour leader had a bird encyclopedia which had photos and description of every bird. He would find that bird in that book and we would learn its name, migratory habits etc. One of the guys in group had a very powerful binocular and watching the closeups of birds through it was a very enlightening experience. The richness of their natural colours could probably never be captured on a 32-bit computer display. We kept on following this routine for some time and were watched by bemused looking villagers at several places. At one point when someone was watching a Kingfisher sitting on a field wall through binoculars, one village guy approached us and said - "Ye aap log kya kar rahen hain? Yahan ladies baithi hain (told you it was early morning) aur aap duurbeen se dekh rahen hain!!!" And I was like - "Damn! Why didn't this occur to me earlier?".(On a more serous note, I think it is unfortunate that we haven't been able to provide for basic facilities like electricity, water, sanitation etc to large section of our population. I wish the situation would change sooner rather than later). Anyway we explained that were watching birds but were told to go forward near the canal. We went on and pretty soon we reached this medium-sized canal. We turned our cycles and descended on this small road running parallel to the canal. We kept on going for a long time, stopping every now and then to watch birds like cranes, sparrows, swallows (the bird of true love!!!), kingfishers, and quite a lot of other exotic ones whose names I can't recollect. We covered the entire breadth of campus from behind and a lot more and then moved towards the campus through makeshift roads of bricks or mud (basically a path through the vast fields). We entered from the other side of campus and this educational trip came to an end.

Chapter 6: Fuck Off, Its Over!
I dozed of through most of the day and it was one the best weekends I have ever had. I am sure more will be coming soon!

Chapter 7: Abhi khatam nahin hua c******
That *beep* *beep* in chapter 1 was "doing thesis" and you thought it was *beep* *beep*, dirty you! This also reminds me of doing some work! Bye for now :-)

Epilogue: Le b*$%@#^!&
Note that there are 7 chapters in total!

The Journey Begins

I was thinking of starting a blog for some time and it has materialized now. I won't start by writing all about myself - will do that slowly in bits and bytes. For starters, I am doing my graduate studies in Computer Science and I live in a hostel far away from home.

So finally, today I managed to shift to Hall-4. I got this medieval room full of various kind of dusts, cobwebs, insects etc which I was trying to clean for past few days. It was a battle in itself - mighty spiders I chased to their doom, slashing their cobwebs here and there. Cleaned away every last speck of dust too over several rounds. It is all over now, thankfully!

Got up late today - around 12:30 PM, had a sumptous lunch in VH, courtesy a visiting company. After that, I went to auditorium with Arjun and Palak to watch this nice French movie, Belle de jour. It was a good drama movie and was funny and erotic at times!

Came back to room after movie and did some things one last time there and then proceeded to complete the packing. Now packing is not an easy task as I found out again - packing the computer alone took around 45 minutes! If anyone wants to improve his computer packing time he should just practice. Like, pack you computer every Sunday when you have free time. Then you can increase it to packing everyday. After sometime you will be really good at it. Then you can just pack your computer everytime you have to switch it off. You will become a master packer and may even earn place in record books. Anyways, back to main story again - I scouted for a rickshaw and together me and the rickshaw walla fully loaded the rickshaw - the comp in 5-6 dabbas, 1 bag containg clothes, 1 having books, 1 having sex toys (just kidding :)), baltis containing hangers, soap, shampoo, oil, shaving stuff etc and my dvds! That awesome looking rickshaw started towards Hall 4 and I looked back all sentimental and stuff thinking of all the good times I had in my previous room (the luxury of attached bathroom is difficult to forget).

And here I am now - new room, new hall, new (girl)friends, new semester and renewed zest for life! Interesting things are going to happen in life. And I will be writing all about that and more here!