13 days to freedom..

"Radio - Marconi, Telephone - Graham Bell, TV - John Baird, Exams - ??. Tujhe pata hai kya? Nahin? Main bhi use dhoond raha hoon. Agar mil jaye to bata dena, milke sale ki dhulai karenge." My phone beeped with this SMS. Yeah, exams are on, and its a time when everything changes. Its a time when everyone studies,may he be a bookworm or a idiot. Today I'll share what we think during exams and after exams. This is a time, when most people plan stuff to be done after exam ends. For instance, watching a long awaited movie (3-idiots in my case), joining a gym, going out with friends, the list goes on.. But you know what happens? The movie goes out of theater, you again start going to college so you cant join anything, except BBC (Back Bencher's Community). Those plans eventually die. They arise again with new additions to the list (updates) in the next exam after few months. You again plan, count down the days to 0 like a 'for' loop, and when exam ends, boom forget everything. Those wishes get accumulated as you pass your semesters and never get done. I have thirteen days to go for my exam to end.

May be I have to stop writing now because I feel I have wasted a lot of time. The question papers wont spare me because I am writing a blog right now. :(

How I met a computer..

I don't know how I composed this poem,
Dont expect this to be professional as rest of my works   :)

How I met a computer.

It all started with DOS,
the day I first touched a Computer.
It was all a geeky command prompt,
neither was it facebook nor Twitter.

Computers are for Geeks,
That was what my little mind thought.
Then came Moore's law,
Transistor count doubled every year.
Today at duos, quads and extremes,
old CPU's with Mhz clocks,
In some dump yard still rot.

Windows arrived with a GUI,
How excited to use a mouse was I !
Myths busted, Computers were for Laymen too.
Who ever played Games, said this too.

98 took over the market,
with IE, movie maker and Media Player,
In its closet.
Yet no Chrome or Firefox,
nor Sun Microsystem's Virtual box.

My li'l sis used powerpoint,
created animations with head bent.
XP, the NT family, more lively,
MSN messenger still connect,
I remember the way we worshiped Mr. Gates.

I never saw a 2003 server or Mac,
'coz we got another windows years back!

Vista came in beta, people went frenzy,
To get their hands on Microsoft's worst nightmare.
Vista shattered dreams, of Gates and piraters like me.

It isnt the cost that hurts, for us
all software is free.
If you buy a genuine windows,
I must know thee.

Guys worked hard and brought us,
a windows more efficient,
enough to disable Vista's curse.
Yes, windows 7 is all I like.
For it is beauty with performance hike.

Its more cuter then Megan Fox,
Still old XP still rocks.

A quick post..

People like us who have a personal sort of blog, merely update them more than once a week. Its because, we lack a mindset to have the patience to recollect, organize and reproduce on keyboard. Consulting Digit, I got myself a new laptop, the well known and infamous Acer Aspire 5738. Digit describes it as a best buy. The only thing that's a con is the build quality of the keypad. May be Acer forgot about it completely. LOL
What's new, you get an Authentec Finger Print Reader, integrated for such a low price. Must say, this notebook tops the list in value for money. Still, there's more fault. Acer didnot give Finger Print Login Software for windows, although I got the correct drivers for the hardware. You have to download finger print logon software from authentec website. Or you can download Lenovo's Thinkvantage Logon software, which works perfect with this notebook.
Now, coming to OS, most people expected Vista Home Premium or Windows 7, but this is where the notebook wins, it comes pre-installed with Linux! Thus saving 5k bucks. We use pirated windows, so no one really wants to spend on Original Windows. The crystal Eye Webcam also turned out to be a winner. It is a VGA cam but Acer's crystal eye technology, makes it performance same for all lighting conditions. This cam is the best for video chatting! In all other cams I have used, video lags heavily in low light. Most of 'em are megapixel cams, resulting in higher video bit rate and thus more use of internet bandwidth, and if you are on a slow connection, video must lag.
A webcam is basically for video chatting and not for outdoor photography, so the image need not be a whopping 1280X1024. 800X600 will do and will be easier to transmit over slow Indian networks.
What's more? 4 gigs DDR2 RAM and a decent Core 2 Duo with 2.2gig clock lets you multitask quite well. Now don't expect me to say I got a Nvidia 9400. This book will just give you Intel Integrated GMA4500 MHD. Its decent though it cant run FarCry or GTA4 or NFS Shift.
I took two days to partition my drive, to decide the partition sizes. Now I have XP SP2 and 7 Ultimate X64 sitting on two partitions. The rest of them are soon going to get occupied with movies and stuff.
Bless the new 320 GB SATA HDD!!
All this stuff for just approx 33K in Bhubaneswar.

Wake me up when september ends..

Its 10.01 pm, an ideal time to blog. I was off my old, frustrating life for about 19days. I have come back from Bangalore with cold and cough, hope its not swine flu...:) I'm going to make this post descriptive, although there are no subscribers to my blog.
I was a severe stutterer before I leaped to the place, that has and is continuously changing my life. Within two and half days, I reconstructed broken dreams, started respecting myself, started falling in love with life. There was actually lot that one could do with life! I got friends from everywhere, interacted with people from all ages, all types -students, jobless, employed & self-employed. The environment was like full of positive energy. No, I am not promoting the place. These are just the words that come out. I am recollecting and writing all that happened in the last few days. Did I mention, I got a new friend Chetan? He is a fashion photographer and has done the photo shoots of Anushka Sharma. Yes, that's true.
And what's more, I learnt to be solitary. All my life I was a nascent Oxygen atom, dying to pair. I realized, real fun is in being unattended. For the first time, I preferred voice calls to chatting. Kept asking for phone numbers, calling, inquiring and hearing my own voice, amazed by the fluency and politeness my voice had developed. I suddenly felt, I could manage any job in the world. This happens when one finds a ray of hope in a continuous period of endless misery. Feels like wanting to try all good things in a moment that one previously just imagined.
September ends taking away all ashes of a miserable life. A new beginning, a new world, I vow to illuminate my soul. To you my life, I will be sincere and caress you to the fullest.
Apart from all this, spent 48 hours in a beautiful hill station in the South -  Kodaikanal. Its something like nature's playground, beautiful springs and falls, and air that one would love to breathe. The September life wasn't permanent, I have to return to the birthplace of my misery. I did it with courage. September ends and I find myself hooked to the old place, my hometown. In my journey I passed time with my hands on my first Apple iPod, and analyzing whats different in Bangalore. Here you can't hire a auto-rickshaw if you were more then 3 people. In my hometown, you can't hire one, if you are less then three..:)
Jokes apart, September ends..........

Broken Wings

One thing that people often compliment about me is that I was born with "Broken wings". This short but very meaningful phrase  can show the way I have looked at my life and all that life has endowed upon me. You can clearly get what I mean if you just visualize the scene described below.
"A hill top somewhere between an uninhabited grassland. Vultures flying all around searching for prey. One silent vulture is spotted on the top of a hillock, gazing towards his fellow vultures. The reason its so numb and silent is that it's wings are broken due to some immaterial cause. What is the one thing that's going on in its mind ? A bird without wings is lame. One need not exactly know what the thought is. Still, there's one word that is the gist of the thought -- hope." You may not fail to interpret the philosophy quite well here, unless you haven't read the Greek story of Pandora's Box. "Hope" was a fairy and some sort of anti-evil force as described in Greek mythology.
Philosophy apart, all I want to scribble here today is an announcement to myself that I have just decided to start writing a novel titled "Broken Wings". I will try not to be a copycat. But of course the novel isn't going to be full of boring philosophical lines as you expect. I am not a professional writer, and write only when I feel the urge to express. So, it'll be I haven't yet figured out the complete story line of the novel. Few days back somewhere I read certain tips about writing a novel. I don't remember the link although, but all I learnt was writing a novel of 200-250 pages requires a whole big can of patience. To write efficiently you need to follow something called the "Snowflake Method". It describes a complete systematic process of writing a story. On day one write in just one sentence, the complete gist of the novel. On the second day, expand the sentence into about 10-12 lines. On the third day try adding details and make it longer. Proceeding in this manner will make a novel more organised and better to understand by the end reader. TIll then..

Shopping @ Alishan

Alishan is one of the oldest fabrics stores in the city. I have been hearing the name from the Milind Soman days. Though Milind had no six packs, he was called a super model. Ad agencies were mad after him, until a big controversy hit him and another 90's model Madhu Sapre, when they were filed under for posing nude in a shoe Ad. He has been spotted in movies like "16 December" and one of Alisha's hits "Made in India".
Alishan has the tag line "of Men, by Men, for Men" similar to a quote by on of the need-no-intro guys, Abraham Lincoln. The only good thing that is going to happen to you there, is that you wont get to see much girls there, so you can decide and make a good purchase.

The store has lot of good brands, including top players Turtle, Louis Phillipe, Allen Solly; along with new comers like Swathe. I wouldn't describe what I got for myself as it isn't going to interest me or other readers. Whenever you visit a showroom, you get to see all kinds of people there. Even you see some guys who have lots of free time to waste, and come here to try at least 16 trousers but make no purchase at the end. Its not new that you get stuck in traffic, though not that long in Bhubaneswar, on a rainy day. Same was the case that day, but the reason wasn't a huge trolley or an accident.
Guess what, it were buffaloes. Not one but a herd was having a kitty party right in the middle of the freeway, leaving just one lane free for people. Looked like they had booked the other two lanes from BMC for the party.

People managed to drive through that single lane. Even all the horns in the city roaring at once, couldn't move the buffaloes. I got down to take pictures on my phone, as I always do when I spot unusual things. I waited a while to see who would the first person to drive away those buffaloes. No one came. I didn't disturb them either. Came back home, logged into twitter and updated my status "Bhubaneswar is one of India's cleanest cities".

Cock Fighting

It isn't everyday that you start a new blog with such a topic, with most visitors thinking "other things" seeing the word cock in the title :) Well, I know what a cock means - male chicken, who do not lay eggs if I'm not wrong. The only way I thought humans used them was selling meat for 120 Bucks and the price rising by 10 bucks every Sunday.

Well, today I found cocks are also used for a colloquial sport called "Cock Fighting". Its as simple as letting 2 cocks to fight in a place and tear each other apart with spectators (mostly humans) applauding and cheering. Some people are lucky to even earn a few rupees by laying bets on the cocks, much like cricket betting. Cricket betting has been the theme of a couple of hit movies. Well, the difference in case of cocks is that you cant 'fix' a match as in cricket, even if you tried to, cocks wont get what you speak, even if they knew your language they wouldn't do such thing for money, and even if they did it, there are no shopping complexes for cocks, to spend the money. So, cocks wont agree to fix the match. Today I accidentally landed at a place on the city outskirts with my friend, who had just taken a ride to an alien place. My cellphone showed just one network bar and that showed the remoteness of the place. Stopping over by a large ground with a group of people gathering around something, we noticed there was some exciting thing going on there. It was the cock fighting tournament in action, with people shouting and cheering as if India was going to win the world cup.
"Haven't seen anything like this before, have any idea?" my friend squeaked from behind. I had pushed myself a little forward to have a view of the thing. "Me too, man what kinda sport is this? And why the heck are the people shouting?" We waited for all this to end. Well it did end and even much before I'd expected. A big man came out with people following him, as if he was the mayor distributing iphones in a slum. He was distributing money in return for tickets to those following him. Within a few minutes people had stopped surrounding him and he was now alone counting money and occasionally glancing at other people. Meanwhile, some others had clung to refreshment stalls selling local junk food.
My friend walked towards him like an FBI officer does in Hollywood movies. "Excuse me sir, I want to know about all this happening here." he delivered in a slow monotonous tone, enough loud to make the man put his money into his pocket and turn back to answer. "Are you press guys?" "No. Do we look like the press?" we said in unison. "Well how do I confirm?" "We have no cams, nor microphones. We are just students, here's my id" I said. Well now, I could do anything to know about this stuff. The big man now smiled, and explained the system to us in short. Well I didn't keep my words of not being the press. I am writing this in my blog and I'm definitely doing what the press does.
People bet money on the cocks and they even have named the cocks as in horse races. If the cock wins then the guys who had placed the bet get good money, else they go back home and hide their faces from their moms. This isn't a new sport as the big man said. This has been around since years, well it was only your luck that would decide whether you'll win. Intuition wont let you go far...