Think twice before you put your pen to paper...

Yeah...I have been trying my hand at writing quite a lot over the last month. I realized that my writing skills suck (no wonder no one reads my blog). My spellchecker is hopelessly corrupt and I definitely do not have a strong grasp on the intricasies of english grammar. I also found that my technical skills suck. Yes...this is going to be a post of endless self-realizations and puking...Plz skip this post...Its meant to be a vent for my vesuvious.
Of all the things, I still do not get the spelling of tomorrow (I hope its right now..), nor do I get the spelling of focused(The number of s's definitely gets me..).
I also find that my confidence levels on the command over the english language have been dropping. Definitely not a good sign for english is going to be my exclusive communication medium for quite some time in the near future. I guess this happens to everyone when they embark on their writing ventures (yeah..the usual excuse). I seriously thought that I was a good communicator in english until recently. Man this post sucks..I have cribbed so much that even my keyboard has stopped responding to me.
I have always been a jealous guy all my life..yes..yet another self revelation. Being content has never been my way of life. Looking up to guys around me and trying to compete with them, has been my birth trait. Life used to be so peaceful when I was a kid and never understood the word "life". It is only education and "growing up" that have instilled a reason for life and hence poisoned my innocent happiness.
Inspite of all these ramblings, I am still not satisfied with whatever is happening. I somehow feel that I have been lucky to get along so far in life. Maybe I do not deserve to be where I am. I definitely love where I am and what I am doing but whether I am worthy of all this. Life has never felt this way for me...Somehow I feel that I have gotten too far ahead of myself in this race for life.

Work hard..Play hard...

Of late I have been involved in these long discussions with my class mates about balancing professional career with personal life. I guess everyone faces this issue once they exit their undergraduate life and enter the outside world. The fact that you are being paid money to do work (finally!!!) gets you really pumped up. You enter your office, in the first few months you see a lot of teams working their souls out, to meet their project deadlines. As time progresses you see more and more such incidents and get inspired to work your way into glory too. After a months you realize that you have landed directly at the footsteps of hell. Time flies past you and time spent in your day-to-day activities virtually reaches zero (No wonder I cant find time to blog these days!!!). This is a typical scene in every freshers' life in the part where he takes up a new job.
Initially I found this a bit surprising, but soon realized this is a common phenomenon in every software engineers life. When I looked at the ramblings of some of friends, I actually started looking at the issue with a whole new interest. It was infact amusing to note that even some of more sincere and hardworking friends also felt the same way. (I never even thought that these guys would ever crib about work in their life...I guess they are human too).

Ramblings of a Restless mind....

Of late me and my room mates have been involved in a lot of philosophical discussions...all thanks to PJH whose involvement in a religious movement sparked the whole debate. Although we never come to any sort of conclusion from our out-of-the-world analysis, it does seem to lots of interesting questions. Yes, the same old question of why we are doing whatever we are doing right now.....The search for a suitable answer has been on for several thousand years now and my guess is that it will be on for millions to come. Although we may never find the suitable solution, it is quite interesting to confuse PJH whenever we feel bored.


My search for a good research problem seems to be meeting too many dead ends. Either all the interesting issues in the world have been resolved or I am not looking at the right part of the world... No matter what the fight will go on, atleast for a few more years, after which hopefully I will give up and graduate (The same old story of a graduate student...).


TTC (time to cook) has somehow reduced drastically (both for food and for stories...). The main reason i guess is the fact that we are slowly mastering the recipe for survival. Frozen vegetables have cut cooking time by half and the fact that we have decided to cook only one dish a day has reduced it further down. Why am I making a big deal out of this? well..somehow it seemed to me earlier on that cooking was taking away a lot of my time, now that it takes up so little time I feel that I have regained control over my daily life. Now thats important isnt it...


I need to get my priorities right.. I still have a typical student mentality of concentrating on courses and exams. Somehow I must come out of this spiralling system out into the world of research. I guess I can wait for one more year and get done with the courses, but I also have a feeling that by that time I would be so far away from the research world that I may never be able to catch up. Lets see how things go in these early days of my research career..hope the end result is good to graduate [:)]


Dearth of courtesy among car drivers in this country is driving me crazy... I know that they do not have any time allocated for rain in their agenda but they should understand that neither did the pedestrians allot time to take a dirt bath. The speeds in which they zoom past you instills anger and fury...Who knows maybe I might behave the same way when I am driving my car. It is this aspect of the human mind that I have observed everywhere in the world...Even the most jobless of people think that they have something important to do when they are driving and forget that the others do too. One more of the peculiar idiosyncrasies of the idiotic mind i guess.

same old new year celebrations

It is New year's eve and party freaks have gathered in the downtown to usher in the new year in the usual manner. I had a funny feel this year that new year is not something to take lightly coz it marks the end of an year. It is the event that marks that you have wasted one more year of your life doing basically nothing. New year is a sign that you are getting old. I do not generally crib about the new year but this feeling seems to have surfaced in the hearts of many people this year. It could be a general psycological phenomenon. It is true that one must feel happy for having had experienced an year of their life and celebrate that in the new year mood. But somehow the downsides seem to outweigh the upsides.

At every point in life I had been looking forward for the next big thing in life. When I was a kid I wanted to get to high school. Once in high school, I always counted the days to the end of the academic year. Once in college I wanted semesters to get over as soon as possible. But suddenly I want time to freeze. This may seem like running from responsibilities of work and family, but I cant refrain from admitting these feelings.

Life is great, If time freezes at your happiest moment. Somehow the human mind tends to forget all the nice things that has happened to it over time and looks forward to the next biggest thing. There is always the saying that self-content is the secret to happiness, but somehow one never seems to give up from looking for the next biggest thing.

As time progresses, I somehow feel that I may not achieve what I wanted in Life and have to settle for something. This feeling has overshadowed this new year celebrations. The other thing is that I am not sure as to what I want to achieve. Being the best in anything is simply unachievable, I am always going to be that some active guy in some area. Then what is it that I am looking for. Sheesh....wouldn't it be great If everyone knew precisely what they had to accomplish in their life and work for that?

Somehow the purpose of life seems to have not been written down properly. This came out from random discussions with my friends. What are we working ahead for? I mean even animals are living a happy life, why are we unnecessarily building stuff when we can live life as it is. These are never going to be answered. What have we gained over the ancient civilizations...what will our future civilizations gain over us. It is not clear If we have advanced...If so.. in what respect? Somehow the preachings on self-content seem to be conflicting with these advances that we are making with technology.

After a lot of arbit, unconnected ramblings...its time for me to signoff....I have a preemptible kernel in hand now...

Signing offf

Of nostalgia and more

I seem to be really jobless today...exams are over and hols have started...here i am sitting in my lab in front of a kernel build thinking about things that have whizzed past in my life. College life is supposed to be real fun and play. I am not really sure If I can say the same about mine. I never thought that I really had fun in my college. Ofcourse it could be partially because that I never take fun out of anything in life. I am a serious guy even when I try to be funny.
Now when sitting before this blog and trying to remember all the nice things that have happened to me in my college life...I am amazed at the number of things that come into my mind.... I must definitely record them now lest I shall never get to meet them again in my self assumed busy schedule.. (kernel interrupts..gotta go...save my draft....it has got enough work to do now...lets continue)

Where was I...Yes college life...it has been quite a great time in college, though i never realized it when I was there. Now that I am having my hols and have nothing much to do... I have decided to post a series of episodes in my college life (Hmm...one more of those commitments that I do not care about)... The best experiences in college life...Lets start with what happened an year before this post.... ICPC... yeah we got a chance to go to the Inter Collegiate Programming Contest to be held at Amrita Vishwa Vidya Peetam in coimbatore.

One thing that gave a real change to my interest in CS was the introduction to programming contests in my second year.... I never realized that there were so many intelligent people in this planet(yeah...i am a egoistic maniac...I think too much of me and get away with it times though I know that I am nothing in this world my mind simply hates to accept the truth). I have always aggressively wanted to be a smart guy and thought I could make some fanfare through programming. It was interesting, we had lots of contests and they were all simulating. Memories are still fresh in mind of the days when we used to get ready for the contest from 4 in the evening, sitting under the bodhi tree, meeting up with friends and anxiously waiting for the contest. Once the contest starts we are in a different world. I was never a great programmer but always pretend to be one...one more thing that my devilish mind never wants to give up. We code and mostly we lose, my mind being the evil thing that it is will never want take that it lost. I will therefore ask the others as to how they did things, aggressively arguing about questions...our discussions last well into the night and we reach back home at 10 not having done much useful that evening.

My programming got a new face when Leo started solving contest problems in online judge, madhan and varadhu followed suit. As usual the egoist stepped up, I spent hours and hours doing those problems...like I told you earlier I am no great programmer but there was that feeling of competition. I spent a lot of my time and finally ended up in the top of my batch...but could not do more..I just admired at the people in the top..Like I told you I am a no good programmer.

These programming episodes led to a bit of programming experience. We ended up first in the local selection contest, we were definitely not the best team, lenin's team was better but I guess luck had it that we got an extra problem in the kitty when they got stuck in a wrong one. I was a happy that day that we made it to the first place but my good half of the mind said that may be we really did not deserve it.

The online prelims were up for two asia regionals one in kanpur and one in coimbatore. The better teams will eventually end up in a better place, lenin's team got through to the kanpur regionals...they got the fifth place there..hats off to them. The coimbatore prelims was an eyewash and they wanted as many teams as possible. We packed our bags to coimbatore. I can still remember that night, when I boarded the train hoping to make it big (The egoist in me is still hoping he is the best).

I got a good sleep in that train, me and prasad had seats close by in the same compartment while madhan, lenin's team, vijay and pradeep were in a different coach. I woke up really early in the train, I am not so much of a sleeper in moving vehicles besides I was excited too.. Prasad came around and met me sitting in the sear next to the compartment door. He asked me how much it will take from there to coimbatore, I actually did not know... but the egoist in me never says that out in the public... I said "one hour" and kept on secretly hoping that the train would reach there in an hour... As you can guess it took much more than that.

We reached coimbatore and the group gathered. It seems those guys had some arbit food at midnight in salem and were not feeling so great. Praveen was on the phone all the time, supposedly talking to a friend. We came out of the station, went to the hotel opposite and had some food. After muching some hot idlis (man..do I have a good memory) we stepped into a taxi. Praveen's friend had come, I thought he was talking to some silly friend who wanted to meet him but this guy had come to take us to amrita. That poor guy parked his vehicle in the wrong place and had to pay a fine. He offered a ride to half the group. I was with the juniors on a taxi. As we reached amrita, the place got greener and the air was fresher. We waited for some goods train to pass by, It was a beautiful campus....

My fingers are numb...so the post stops here...
I never wanted to record much of the facts above, but my guilt needed an outlet lest it may never see the outside world. Putting this post in a blog that no one will supposedly read will gimme some satisfaction that I never buried the true facts in my life.

To blog or not to blog

I dunno why I want to write these blogs...I dont write interestingly, neither do I write regularly...then why do I write this damn silly blogs....waste of time ofcourse. I would love to keep a record of what interesting things happen in my daily life...but what If some of it is too personal to go public. It would be cool to share some of the information with my friends though..but then again who the heck is going to be even bothered to read into my blog in this busy world.
Blogging is a nice way of maintaining a record of your sweet and not so sweet memories. Life may not shine itself in full brightness all the time but when it does do so, it is great to have a record of it. It would basically be a lot of fun later on when you are free....(may be when you are retired) to go through your posts and look at how life has treated you. It would be the best way to relive your youth, cherish your life and satisfy yourself.
Blogs are also cool ways to express your thoughts and dreams. It gives publishing power to pundits and pranksters alike. I am not too much of a dreamer or a writer but there are lots of them out there in the blogspace who have really great talents. I still remember those days when I spent hours and hours reading blogs of helmet and kabi. These guys are awesome bloggers and they have a natural flow of thoughts and command over the language to blog on....It was then that I got this childish desire to blog. I have never been a regular or successful blogger but when I want to kill time I am sure that my blog comes to my rescue.
I think when I want to spend some time, I must come visit my blog and pour some arbit nonsense as I always do.....

Trip to the dream Univ

Life seems to whizz past you... I can still vividly remember those days when I prepared for GRE...had a rotten Barons Book in Hand (Supposedly my aged book ;) )... The days when I spent sleepless nights searching university websites for interesting projects to apply...The day I had my first admit when I was browsing in the net-lab... My phone interview with my prof...Admit from my dream univ..shopping and the unforgettable visa interviews (Yes... I had 3 of them to get 1 visa)

Here I was at the International Airport, there was my family waving their hands at me... I was standing at the Departure Terminal. Suddenly ARV, who was travelling with me broke into tears...he hugged his mom and wept for a long time. It then occured to me, behind all this excitement and joy of having got into my dream univ, there is the silent but mammoth sadness of leaving my family for many many years to come. I might have a great career... But life will never be the same.

My first fumble started at the airport itself... I placed my document bag in the trolley itself and went to chat with friends...Then we went to the check-in counter where I realized that both my bags were overweight. This was quite a shock 'coz I had weighed them already back home and they were fine.. I ended up paying 2500 bucks in fine :( Then we boarded the flight and had a good nights sleep and landed the next day morning in Europe.

I started feeling sick once in germany..the smell of stale food was recirculating in all the buildings and it made more nauseatic (I think I got this word wrong!!!).. I boarded the next flight with arv and my stomach started jumping up and down. After really painful last few hours, we landed and I almost vomitted. Atlast! Here we were, the place where I aspired to get all these years..but I was in no mood to enjoy the journey or the view.. I just wanted to get some place and sleep...

Not all journeys that you dream for are happy when they happen in reality!!!

Google Bungle

I cant believe that google did this... Look at the spelling of Athirshtam (Luck in Tamil)