Adventures of Yours Truly and The great Indian Trailways

I know it has been a looooooooooooooong time since i posted any stuff, but, contrary to popular beliefs that I have been working too much here, I was in fact too lazy to post something. A lot has happened between last post and now. No, I have not been thrown out of the institute.At least, not yet.

In this period I have watched about 25 movies, watched the entire 10 seasons of F.R.I.E.N.D.S again, read all the TinTin and Asterix comics, finished close to the bottom of the class in 3 tests and unceremoniously made my debuts for both the cricket and hockey teams of IISc. Need I even mention that we lost both my first matches!!!

But,for me,the crowning achievement during this period was the grand realization of my total stupidity which was hitherto a foregone conclusion for everybody but me. It all happened when I went home to chennai for a weekend. I had booked the return ticket from bangalore itself for the Mysore Express. I decided to bring back my computer to my hostel(who will I be kidding by saying that it was for "educational" purpose only!). So having packed everything, I,along with my dad, came to the station promptly at 10:30 for the 11 pm train. I told the porter that i was going to bangalore and asked him to load my stuff in compartment S10.

After settling down in my seat, I got down to buy a bottle of water. On the way back, I decided to see if there were any 16-25 year old females travelling in and around my coupe from the reservation chart(a usual practice for despo guys like me).
To my horror I found that my name was not on the chart. I also found that this was not the Mysore Express but the Bangalore Mail. Not to be outdone, I cursed the porter for bringing me to the wrong train, hailed another porter and asked him to take me to Mysore Express only to be told that Mysore Express had already left at
9:30pm. In between all this I had run up and down the length of the platform, trying to find one of my friends who was supposed to be travelling along with me. Finally i was left stranded on the platform as the train chugged away. I could only but smile at my sorry plight(old Gothic proverb:"The man who can smile when things go wrong has already thought of someone he can blame it on")

Finally I put back everything in an auto and reached home by 12pm to wake my parents and yelled at them for not looking carefully at my ticket and blamed them for me missing "important" classes which i would have slept through anyway. But through all this, one thing was clear. I had come to chennai with the objective of spending "quality" time with one special person.But as luck would have had it, we didn't get to meet and maybe I missed the train so that I could meet the person the next day!!
(didn't happen either).

The Moral of the story is
(1) Even if there is a nuclear holocaust and I am the last person on earth apart from you, do not entrust me with any responsibility.

(2) Keep reminding me everyday(through fan-mail or phone) that I might have a train to catch that night. For all you know you might be right and I might have forgotten.

So long and thanks for all the rotten fish you are ready to throw at me!!!

For a Headful of Hair!!!!!

Yesterday, august the 9th of 2004, I decided that I was going to clean my room. Well, It had been only 10 days since I moved in. But, the room was already dirty before 65kgs of filth that walks, talks and produces more garbage(yeah, thats me!) moved in. The whole room was in a mess to begin with. And then I started sweeping the room. I had to get acustomed to some job so that I can be ready for the industry by the time they throw me out of this institute. I dont care much about blue-collar,green-collar etc..Anyway i only wear a collar-less T-shirts if at all I wear anything.

Coming to the main point, as I was sweeping the room, I found lots of strands of hair scattered all around. This upset me so much that I momentarily put a halt to operation Cleanup and sat to think about my future. Well if I lose so much hair in a week then by the time I turn 25, KinderGarden children would be taught the natural numbers with the hair on my head. What would happen to my love-life(which is presently blooming so much that I spend saturday nites reading "The hitchhiker's guide" and Valentine's Day by praising the Sangh Parivar's efforts to stop such frustrations) once the cardinality of the set of hairs on my head asymptotically tend to zero!!

After the period of depression came the period of introspection. And I arrived upon an amzingly egoistic theory which satisfactorily explained the loss of hair and also consoled me about this predicament. The theory goes thus:

The mass of the head becomes a constant( including brain,hair,skull etc) once you attain full growth. So as the brain becomes more and more capable(pause for applause),it grows in size. Thereby, to balance this increase in mass of the brain, hair loss occurs. To put bum's law(the name of this law after the creator) into a mathematical perspective:

E=M*C^2.

Where E is the constant mass of the head. M is the value denoting the mass of hair(M-ayir in tamizh).And C is the C-ognitive ability.

There were many points of singularity for this law(Einstein,APJ Abdul Kalam etc.) and then I came to the egoistically satisfying conclusion that this law would be true only for heads belonging to persons by name Hastagiri, living in Bangalore and writing such a stupid post about it.

Well for more on the hair business, I also looked up at famous personalities who were sharing my plight(nay!-honour).Instantly thousand names popped in my bum's law obeying head. Andre Agassi, ZiZou, Harsha Bhogle, Bruce Willis etc. etc. So I belong to this elite club. I would request all readers( I seriously doubt if there are any other than the writer) to carry out experiments to verify whether their head obeys bum's law or not. Maybe, I(the male chauvinistic pig) have found a simple explanation to women being cognitively inferior to men. I also request those from the scientific community to recommend my name for next year's Ignoble prizes after results of meticulous experiments have been completed.

Anyway, I have to prepare a paper on this topic to be sent to the "69th International conference on Pre-Mature Balding" conducted by the Association of the COMpletely Bald-suitably abbreviated to A-COMB.Add comments and results of painstaking experiments in the comments section at the end of this post. Your names and results will appear in the acknowledgements section of my landmark research paper.

IISc Misfits and cricketing Blues

Well, 10 days have passed since I entered the "hallowed" portals of IISc(Indian Institute of Science) and I have just begun to think if the Professors haveerred in giving an admission to me. I had registered for 4 courses and am auditing( no exams,only lectures) 3. Out of these 6 are math courses with 2 courses directly from the math department. As I attended the first class in each of these courses, I found that they all had a striking similarity!! I understood nothing in any of these classes. Probably the only times when I knew something were when one Prof. was discussing something from "surely you must be joking Mr.Feynman" and when my cryptography professor was giving a historical overview of cryptography.

Speaking of Feynman, one of the reasons i got fascinated by scientists and research was the books "Surely you must be joking Mr.Feynman", and its lesser known follow-up "what do you care what other people think?". Another book which in fact put me onto Game theory(supposedly my research interest) was "A Beautiful Mind" by Sylvia Nassar. John Nash shone through as a man of true genius and was beautifully portrayed by Russel Crowe in an award winning performance in the movie "A beautiful Mind". These are must-reads for anyone who plans on an academic or research oriented career.

Well, the end of the week, brightened things up a lot. I came to know that Dinesh Karthik(KKD to friends and fans) was selected for the national cricket team. Dinesh had played his first match in India for my team(He was living in UAE till he was 11). It gives me great pride to think that someone who kept wickets to my bowling is now going to keep to the likes of Pathan,Zaheer and Kumble. I dont claim that I was a good cricketer. In fact my claim to fame was that I hit six sixers in an over but that was when playing with my 10-year old cousin on my terrace!!. I proclaimed myself to be a "fast" bowler but I doubt if I ever bowled faster than even Kumble. That I played cricket for school, college and for a Third Division side in TNCA league may be called as acts of chance.

Friday was amazing because there was our Fresher's party in the night. It was a nite of fun, games, music and dance(unfortunately no booze!!!!!). At 2:30 AM saturday we started a treasure hunt game that took us all around the IISc campus(430 acres!!!) and ended at 9:30 in the morning. From there I went stright to the atheletic ground for the institute sports meet. It was a fun weekend with 2 days of non-stop atheletics after a nite of running around the campus. Well I am tired to the bone and could probably sleep for 20 hours continously. But at least I have
1 gold(high jump),4 bronze(long jump, Triple jump, 4X100 relay, 4X400 relay) to feel proud about. Maybe if I had gotten a proper night's sleep on friday, I could have won the overall championship too!

But I shall never regret the fresher's party and just hope that would stay long enough to have a farewell party too! On that highly optimistic note I end this rather loooooong blog with a very patriotic SMS that i recieved.

H_ndu, Musl_m, Chr_st_an, Pars_,S_kh.........
see how we lose our identity when we
forget the "i" of INDIAN.

Jai Hind!!

Mom, i killed your kid

I was really hurt to know(about two days earlier) about the suicide of Nafisa Joseph. The fact that I had met and spoken* to her made matters even worse. I was bogged down by this question "why do people really commit suicide?". what could be so much more important than life itself. And then I found the solution.If you could be so stupid to end your life over a relationship or any other silly thing like that, well you really dont deserve to live at all and thats why you should die. I am sure that even if you have no meaning in your life, there should be some meaning and purpose at least in your death. External factors cannot be controlled but putting an end to your own life is the heights of insanity. I seriously believe that the penal system should consider failed suicides as attempted murder as in both cases there is an attempt to kill a human.

As for me, the only reason I would attempt suicide would probably be if i wanted to know what happens to us after death(Now you know, I have a valid reason for suicide). I want to know if the theories of judgement day or the boiling oil cauldrons are true.I know of two suicide attempts at a personal level with a fifty percent success rate.The 'one who lived' still regrets its(lost the human quality after the attempt) decision to go in for the ultimate step.

*Nafisa was the quizmaster at NIIT brainbusters-a huge intercollegiate quiz competition where thousands turned up and about 50 participants were chosen by lots(true!). I was chosen too and got upto the prefinal round before taking a bow. I had spoken to her after the event advising her how to be a quizmaster as i could not hear her over the noise of the crowd.

discovering IISc

hi ,

no more code this time. i am typing this blog the computing lab at CSA dept. at IISc. It was the day of our orientation program and it really was a humbling experience. We enter the welcome program and lo behold! it was a who's who of research personnel in computer science. And here are the professors totally down to earth and so very friendly! We had to select courses to do in our first term and had to discuss with all the faculty and the seniors before deciding on the courses.Speaking of seniors, there were a bunch of the most brilliant minds in the country leaving all their research and spending hours guiding us and taking us around the department. It was an illuminating experience.I think with learning comes humbleness. This proves that i have never learnt anything in my entire life!!!!!!!!!

We were given a pool of 20 courses just to choose four and the striking feature was the flexibility of the program.We could just sit for the courses and not give the exams if we dont feel like it.(sounds good but is slightly complicated). will key in more info next time. have to rush for dinner at the mess before coming back for some orientation course in programming offered by one of ou seniors. the class starts at 10 and God(I?) knows when it will end.........

my first time

hello world

#include my_stupidity
#include ur_patience
#excuse my_miskates


void brain()
{
i am writing this blog sitting at a net cafe near(hopefully!) IISc. Imagine coming out to a net cafe to access net when enrolled at india's premier technical institution!!!! well, its not bcos of lack of facilities. it is bcos of my stupidity.i was directed to the comp. centre and i landed up at some obscure exit gate. so i jus came out to this place and was inspired to wrote this blog. well if u think writing my first blog was a sucess, then definitely success is 1% inspiration and 99% percent perspiration(imagine walking 3 km to the wrong place , it sweats even in blore). well enuf crap for the first time.

return comments_to_hastagiri@rediffmail.com
}

void test(char* feedback)
{

if feeedback= bouqets return feedback_to_hastagiri@rediffmail.com
else return feedback_to_isfhisahfjwherjuhjdsfh@aksjkaj.com

}

bye!!!!