Blogging from a mall which has wifi. First time experience. Nice experience.

Being amidst a crowd that's moving and continuously changing makes the environment a lot lively. There's some energy about it.

Shot a "How to make Chicken Biryani" yesterday when Uncle and Aunt made it for the three of us. A youtube video shall be out soon.

Came to the Forum mall to catch up with friends cum classmates who are interning in the same city. The Bengaluru city! Didn't really have much to do. So we thought we would shoot something. I had got my hanycam with me.

We caught up few guys, told them we were from IIT Madras and were here in Bangalore to shoot a documentary. I told that the documentary was on the difference in rural lifestyle and metro lifestyle and that we would like to know if they would ever be willing to contribute to the betterment of rural India's life. I appeared confident and they thought we were serious. And they talked bullshit which didn't make much sense! :P But nevetheless it was a nice timepass. :D I will upload the videos for you to see it for yourself how serious they were (and how serious I was :P )

But to be frank, our aim was to get to talk to babes! The mall was full of them. It was Sunday and this was Bangalore! After our warm up session with guys, we started looking for girls. Single girls roaming without any stupid looking males around. We hardly found any! Of course not a surprise. And I was kinda too nervous to approach the few whom we could spot.

After a long long time (read one hour), finally one of the friends went over to a babe (he doesn't think she was a babe!). It appeared that the whole thing would go off well. She was listening. And then all of a sudden, she asked for our I cards! Fuck her! We showed her mine. And then, tragedy struck. We saw her waving a loving 'hi' to someone on the escalator. He was a stupid looking male. Coming down the escalator. Looked like her boyfriend. He came over. We chatted for sometime, but finally they fuckin refused to appear in our doc. Attitude! Fuck em all. They refused to listen to us, IITians! Fuck em real hard! Fuck their attitude.

We gave up. We dropped the idea of shooting any more. One friend had to leave.

Once again, there was nothing more. The two of us were wondering what more to do when we saw something happening at the AMD stall. Guys were screaming! We reached there. Whoever screamed "AMD rocks" loudest, would get a tee. Cool! A black ADM tee!

With an intel based laptop lying inside my bag, I jumped up on the small stage, and shouted "AMD rocks". I was loudest as was one more guy. Both of us got the tee. Yayyy. AMD rocks!! :P

Never before in my life, I have spent morning till evening in one mall. There was something else in my mind which kept forcing me to be there for as long as possible. Someone out there, readng this post will understand what I mean. And to you 'that someone', I would like to say 'Yes, I missed you all the time I was there'. By the way, Forum looks like home to me now. Both of us are sitting in McD sipping coke. And it's time we leave because this female attendent just came over and asked if we are done. Fuck her!

Sunday. Funday.

The cable post should tell you that after my first shopping experience in MG Road, I was left with only nine and a half bucks. In coins.

The bus fair to reach home from office is ten bucks.

I was supposed to withdraw money from ATM. But I remembered it only when I was there at the bus stop. There's an ATM close to my office but at the bus stop I could not find any. Ah, why did I forget?. It was 6:30 PM. Bus no. 201 would reach any time. If I missed it I would have to wait for another half an hour for the next bus. But then there was no other option but to walk back to that ATM near office, withdraw cash and then come back to the stop. There was no other option, unless of course, I generally went and asked someone to lend me fifty paise. :)

I wished I were in IIT where it was really easy to spot people anywhere, people whom you knew and could ask for money when in such conditions. I looked around. I saw a logo. It was the IIT Madras logo! Were my eyes playing with me? I noticed the t-shirt which was sporting that logo. I had seen many people wearing that t-shirt back in insti. This whole thing was real! The eyes were not playing! I looked at the guy wearing it. Hell, I knew him! He saw me. We waved at each other. He was coming towards me. The t-shirt was the latest hostel jersey. He was a hostel mate, a Civil junior. God is Great!

But of course, the first thing that you do when you run into a known face in an unknown place is not to ask him for 50 paise. In fact asking for 50 paise is too cheap a thing to do. You should at least ask for a rupee coin. :P

I greeted him. We talked about each other's internships and few more things. I didn't mention anything about my need for 50 paise. We were still talking when I saw 201 pass by.

Hey that's my bus. I gotta go. Do you have a rupee coin?
What?
A rupee coin.
Yeah sure.

I took that coin from him, rushed to catch my bus and waved him a goodbye while still running. There was no time to explain the situation to him and I guess I left him totally confused. When inside, I paid 1o bucks. All I was left with now was a 50 paise coin. I held it with my right hand, looked at it and said to myself, 'God is Great'!

I decided to stroll. Stroll in MG Road. It was the lunch time. The weather was cool. I wished I had a girl friend around, with whom I could walk with and have ice cream and talk about beautiful things. I strolled alone. I was missing someone.

Tonnes of babes can be spotted in and around the MG Road market in Bangalore. Babes weren't on my mind though. Something else was. A cable. I wondered if I could find some shop which sold firewire cables. For those who don't know, these cables are used to transfer videos from a video camera tape (analogue) to the computer (digital) without undermining the quality (unlike the USB cables).

I found a nice camera shop. It had the cable that I was looking for.

'350 bucks', told the shopkeeper. An internet search on ebay, some time back before the lunch, had told me that the cost was around 15o rupees. So, it was a shock to hear him asking for double that money.

'The last time I bought one, it cost me only 150 rupees. Are you sure that it costs 350?'
'Oh, then you must have bought a local thing. This is a JVC original cable. You can get the local thing in this shop called Computer Planet on S.P Road.'

'Do you think, there's any advantage in taking an original by paying so much more? After all, it's just a cable'!
'Yeah, I don't think it matters. In that shop, you should find both original and local. You can check out for yourself'.

He told me how to reach that other shop. I reached that other shop.

'350 bucks'.
'No, get me a local one'.

'This is a local one'.
'But I just found out that a JVC orginal cable costs 350 bucks. How can a locally made cable cost the same?

'Ok, pay 280 bucks for it'.

I had a look a the cable. Black. New. Sealed. A cable is just a cable, I thought. Let me buy it. I browsed my wallet. 270 bucks. And nine and a half more bucks as coins.

'Can you give it to me for 250'?
'No boss'.

'At least give it to me for 270'.
'Rima, make bill for sir'.

The bill was a computer print out on an A4 sheet. Total waste of paper! Nevertheless, finally, I was a proud owner of a black cable. But the pride didn't lost long. In fact, it lasted only till I reached home later yesterday evening. The four pin end of the cable that was supposed to go inside the firewire port of my laptop, wouldn't fit properly and hence would go undetected. I tried it a few times and then during one such trial, I kind of applied too much force and that was it. I was done. One of the pins got crushed and lost its alignment. The cable was done. The black new cable. The local cable. I had not bothered to read the bill when at Computer Planet. Sitting on the sofa, I took out the bill lying somewhere inside my bag, unfolded it, and read it.

Goods once sold will not be taken back or exchanged.

You see me standing inside a running local train in Chennai. In this city, people hardly avail the local train services. This was my first and so far the only experience in a local in Chennai.This pic was taken some time back in early May but posting it now 'coz I received it late.

I have lived in Mumbai for some time and there's one thing for sure. Inside a Mumbai local, no one thinks about taking pics. Or rather, no one has the time to do so. Mumbai locals are crowded like hell.

But tell me, what's the fun of riding a local if you don't have to face a crowded cabin; where you need to struggle to get in, struggle to stand, struggle to get a seat, and struggle hardest to board off? The fact is that in Mumbai, the crowd speaks about the efficiency of the local train service. You have a train every two minutes there. It runs fast and it runs on time. No wonder everyone wants to use it! No wonder everyone uses it!

Twilight Fairy's post where she jots down the first word that comes to her mind when she thinks of the letters of the English alphabet, made me come up with a similar post.

Adobe Photoshop
Blog
Coffee
Die
Exercise
Fag
Gmail
Hate
Ice
Juice
Kiss
Love
Ma
Nescafe
Orkut
Princess
Queer
Rich
Sex
Tata
U
Vatsap?
Work
XXX
Yawn!
Zero

By the way, if you are also a blogger, why don't you go ahead and post your A-Z. Believe me, it's fun. And like me you will end up editing some of the words that actually strike you first! :P So that you appear cooler than you actually are! :P

Let's have sex.
No, I am not ready for it.

As if I am.
Then why are you asking for it?

I wanted to see how you'd react.
So I thought. But tell me, What if I had said yes?

Opportunity doesn't knock your door twice. Bye.
Shit.

....
SHIT.

In Chennai you cannot survive a second without a fan. A running fan. In Bangalore, you can. I realized this on Saturday when there was a powercut the entire day and yet I didn't sweat much. It's sunny but the breeze that blows is cool.

The other thing that I have noted about this city is that you will rarely find a State Bank of India branch here. Not that I needed to find one. But I was surprised to observe that in here, what you usually come across are branches with names like the State Bank of Mysore, State Bank of Patiala, State Bank of Travancore, State Bank of Hyderabad and on and on! I am trying to find out how many more such branches with interesting names like these exist. It would be awesome if I could come across a State Bank of Patna. :D

To kill the ninety minutes that it takes to reach office, I started reading 'Eleven minutes'. This is a book by Paulo Coelho. I didn't pick it from amongst many. One friend passed it on to me a couple of days back and I decided to keep it for some time.

I have read 120 pages of the 275. The book is interesting. The book is about a prostitute. Or rather, the making of a prostitute. The book occasionally talks about love and a couple of sentences did leave a mark. Let me quote something for those who haven't read 'Eleven minutes'.

In love, no one can harm anyone else; we are each of us responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame someone else for what we feel.

It hurt when I lost each of the various men I fell in love with. Now, though, I am convinced that no one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone.

That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in world without owning it.

No I wont rank the five posts that I have picked up for this week. It's very stupid to try doing that. In fact I already had a tough time picking these posts from the infinite that I read. Don't really want to put more energy towards ranking them now. Having said that, here I go.

Here, you will find a different yet interesting movie review of Spiderman3 while here, you get to see a funny graphic take on the same movie. Moving from funny to something serious, a 'thought provoking' reflection on being a teacher can be found here. The remaining two in this week's Vatsap 5/7 are neat, informative posts. This introduces a nice site for listening to nice music and this informs you about a flickr game that's on.

Today is the fourth day to work. And I have no work. Lucky me?

Sometimes, I think I should go and ask for it. Ask someone to give me something to do. But something from deep inside whispers to me (in a low but firm voice) that asking for work myself is a bad idea. A bad, stupid, dumb idea! In fact it isn't even an idea. It's a crime! This thing from deep inside tells me that once real work actually comes my way, I am going to get pretty busy. So till work comes my way, I should enjoy my freedom and chill out.

The sad thing is, I am not sure if I really am chilling out!

There is this other something (though may be not so deep inside), which keeps reminding me that it IS a total waste of time to travel for one and a half hours in a non AC bus to reach this AC office and then do nothing. Nothing that can remotely be labeled work! Nothing for eight hours.

But 'no work' is what exactly I have been doing since last three days. Today is the fourth. And I am very sure, it's going to be the same. Boredom is creeping in. Slowly. But yes, it is. Afterall, there is a limit to kill time just by being online. Most friends have got work and hence aren't available for chat most of the times. And more so, even when I don't have any work, it some how doesn't feel great to be orkutting and chatting full time. So, I end up reading some infrastructure stuffs which are kinda boring. I mean reading pages and pages of 'useful' material makes little sense when you have no idea when and where you are going to use them.

This place, so far appears like a cyber cafe to me. An air conditioned cyber cafe where you are allowed to use your own laptop. A cyber cafe where they serve you hot coffee twice, once at 10AM and then next at 3PM. A cyber cafe where during lunch time, the office boy comes and takes order and then gets you food. A cyber cafe, where they don't charge you for using net. This IS the most ideal internet center that can possibly exist! And yeah, they of course pay you 12.5k per month for visiting!

After a long long time, I really don't feel excited with the fact that I have no work to do. I don't even like blogging so often now. Best blog comes when you have other very important things to do, but you just don't feel like doing any of them. But when leave alone 'very important things' or even 'important things', you simply don't have 'things' to do, you end up writing a boring blog which still receives comments.:P

Some time back, I had decided to regularly update whats up in my blogging circuit. But now, I feel that this doesn't make much sense. Just because I read infinite blogs doesn't mean that others who are regulars to my site should also read them.

The blogging circuit however still makes sense. If only, I cut down on the number of blogs that I promote in my posts. How about five posts per week? Sounds cool?

So shall I call it like Vatsap's five favourites for the week? Eh, too long a name! Okay, how about 5/7? Naah, "Vatsap 5/7". Yeah this is good enough (till of course someone comes up with a better name).

So here goes the declaration: Vatsap 5/7 shall release every Friday on this site!

Wow. It's 6:20 PM already and no in the office appears to be in any mood to leave. Someone please tell me when does this office close.

I've been going through infinite pdf pages to kill time since morning, just because the project in which I am supposed to jump in hasn't yet been finalized.

Bangalore, welcome me. Two months to go. Hope the work gets interesting. By the way the office is cool. And so are the people who work here.

Update: ended up staying till 8:15 PM!! Gosh. And when I came out of my cabin, I saw that only two people were still there. One was a female working on her desktop. The other one was the security guard!

This is the raw version of the External Publicity (EP) Tee for Shaastra 2007. If you wanna grab this tee, be there to help the IIT Madras team that arrives at your college for putting presentations on Shaastra. They have other free goodies to offer too. So all the best.

If you have read the last post, you should be knowing why day before yesterday I labeled a train delay 'delightful'. God didn't like my attitude. And I think He also didn't like this post where I cribbed about traveling in a sleeper class. So he made sure that I didn't get to do even that in my return trip. He put me inside hell. For thirty hours. Disastrous return trip! It wasn't even supposed to be a return trip. I had to go to Bangalore but here I am, back to insti!

So what exactly happend?

The train from my home to Kolkata got delayed so much that by the the time I reached Kolkata, the other train which was to take me to Bangalore had already left! Thank you so much God! I didn't have the time to kill Lalu Yadav or I'd definitely had! I felt like crying! I missed the train just by half an hour! And for no fault of mine.

But then, it was not a time to moan and cry. It was a time to face the challenge. Like a true Spartan, I decided to face the challenge.

Another train would leave for Chennai in like two hours. I waited for it and when it came, entered the general compartment. And what followed was hell. No, wait. Hell is an understatement. If hell's a two bedroom apartment with an attached discarded toilet, then what followed next was that discarded toilet.

The night when I crashed

I could find no seat initially. Seats were of pure wood anyways. In some time when I did find a small space for my tired ass, I realized that the rest of the body was equally tired to stay awake. Sitting on a wooden seat for two nights and one day was not something I was prepared to do. I decided to crash.

The only place where I could stretch myself was the dirty compartment floor, amidst stinking bodies. One dude had already taken position. He was flat. If I waited any longer, even the floor area would be gone. I had to move fast. I moved fast. Soon, I was lying on the dirty compartment floor. Not even a bed-sheet to make things easy. Awesome night. An awesome dirty night.

The day and the night when I didn't crash

The next day and the night that followed were worse. After getting up in the morning, I moved to an upper berth. But of course not without having to enter into a heated argument with those already sitting there. I didn't argue much. I just sat.

In some time there after, the number of passengers in the compartment started increasing. Exponentially. Within few hours, the compartment was so fuckin full that at certain station, few passengers could not even enter it! I looked around from top. The whole coach was fuckin full in all the fuckin sense. People were hanging out of doors. People were sitting over doors. People were lying in the side-shelves meant for luggage. Every inch of the floor area was occupied. People between seats, inside seats, over the seats. People. People. More people. The only way one could move across the compartment was by climbing up the edges of upper berths. Everyone who was fagging, was fagging a bidi! Everyone who was not fagging was stinking anyways. Traveling in a sleeper class is thousand times better than traveling in a compartment where there is no theoretical upper limit to the number of passengers that can jump in.

You will wonder if vendors come when in such air tight places. Believe me they do. Especially the samosa vallahs. For them its makes pure business sense. People=money. More people=more money. They will climp up, jump around, hang in mid air and sell samosas! These guys can seriously give inferiority complex to Spiderman and Batman. No, I didn't buy any samosas from the samosamen but I was mesmerized by their hard work.

And well the real reason why I didn't eat or drink much was that I didn't want to use the toilet! :P For two nights and one day, I didn't use the toilet! The train-toilet to be precise. Only once did I leave my upper berth before arriving Chennai, coz I HAD to. I am human afterall. But that time, I left the train itself to find a place in the platform. When the compartment itself is worse than a toilet, who even wants to take chance by visiting the train toilet! My life is precious to be wasted dying a cruel death inside a train. The short break out of train was refreshing. In all its sense.

The bottomline

I missed my first day of internship. Nice beginning! Why is that the first day of internship, always so happening? This is what happened last summer.

Lesson learnt

Never crib about traveling in sleeper class. There are worse ways of traveling.