About Jane ...

I was reading through reviews of Maroon 5's latest new chart busting album "It Won't Be Soon Before Long", when I got to know of the interesting fact that their, equally awesome, first album, "Songs About Jane", was written by singer Adam Levine, entirely during, and about his traumatic, and heart-rending break-up with his girlfriend. It was then that this started making sense to me:

"This love has taken it’s toll on me
She said goodbye too many times before
And her heart is breaking in front of me
I have no choice cause I won’t say goodbye anymore"

So much for you Jane ... you made a huge mistake.

The Tenets of Peace

Having gone through this arduous pilgrimage called life, thus far, without overly much adversity, I have, through my powers of foresight, supreme judgement, keen observation and adaptability, garnered and treatised on the tenets of peace. Enjoy!

1) Peace is all about listening to good, soul-soothing music and sipping on Bacardi breezers.
2) Peace is when you spend 160 bucks, to travel halfway across the friggin' countryside to bungee jump, only to be informed you can't, and then realize the wild goose chase was totally worth it, when you see your friends around/with you.
3) Peace is about standing on a high rise rooftop, feeling the wind in your hair, and watching the occasional kite soar past you.
4) Peace is all about sitting at Nescafe, and wasting time.
5) Peace is NOT playing taash at Nescafe, with Dhar, Goel and the casino gang, no matter how many times the bastards ask you to.
6) Peace is what Attachee, Tallu and I normally do in Moti's room!
7) Peace is when you reailze that Sumeet Khullar, Akshay Gautam, Abhimanyu Talwar, Rohan Jain, Sanny Choudhary, Ramajjla Vivek Govind, Gaurav Lodha, Mohit Mittal, Gagandeep Singh and Abhishek Arora are gods!
8) Peace is about realizing that it is futile planning trips to Pondicherry or any other godforsaken place, and reconciling yourself with the fact, that you'll just tag along with any other trip someone else is planning.
9) Peace is about figuring out who are studs, and who are choos.
10) Peace is about realizing YOU are a stud!
11) Peace is about realizing YOU are a choo!
12) Peace cannot be attained through fags, booze, dope, fuseball, pool or AOE. They are fraud.
13) Peace is about realizing, what you thought was everything in life, was actually a small fraction of what life is actually all about.
14) Peace is about staring up at the sky and admiring the clouds/ sunset/ treeline that you see.
15) Peace is when you are at home with Mom and Dad.
16) Peace is when you are hugging huge, furry dogs called Simba and Iris.
17) Peace is when you realize how fortunate you are, to be in the position, where you're at, and be grateful that things are not as bad as they could've been.
18) Peace tells you that skunks stink ... they are smelly, disgusting creatures!
19) Peace is all about moving on from kiddish, immature nu metal, deth metal and other similar rubbish to hip-hop, pop, electronica, jazz rock, progressive and underground.
20) Peace is all about hogging on biryani, sausages, ham, bacon, ilish maach, and the plethora of other non-veg dishes out there (Mama, I'm coming home on the 21st!) .
21) Peace is confidently telling your stoutly Bengali grandma: "Aami bangla bolte paari na!"
22) Peace is when you sit around at Central Park in CP, with friends, in the evening, and admire the brilliant sunset, across the backdrop of the not-so-brilliant CP skyline.
23) Peace is when you realize that drumming sucks, and it was a guitar player that you should've been all along!
24) Peace is about realizing how fortunate you are, to have had the honour of playing alongside Mridul Ganesh.
25) Peace is when you realize that you're a friggin' compu tchienticht at IIT Delhi!

and lastly,

26) Peace is all about ... F* ALL, screw the peace, screw the skunk, screw the copyrights .... be at peace!!!

:p

Love Story

I found this sentence from Erich Segal's "Love Story" pretty cool:
"The pain of not knowing what to do, was overshadowed only by the pain of not knowing what I had already done."

Humpty Dumpty

Fig.1 The crack in the chair, which lead to the disaster. (Picture courtesy: me)

Fig.2 Moti and the chair, collapsed in a heap on the floor. (Picture courtesy: Ramvajjla Vivek Govind)

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall ... and in this case all the king's men kicked his arse thoroughly after that! Yeah, Friday the 15th, June, 2007 was a momentous day, in that, Moti finally accomplished the, seemingly impossible, task of making a sturdy steel chair collapse under his gargantuan weight (which, by the way, is now less than mine ... hah! finally ... ).

How it happened was this: all of us were sitting around a table and joking around, when suddenly Moti came up with this extremely gross joke on Khullar. I will not go into the gory details of the joke, but suffice my telling you that it was sick, on the verge of making one vomit (the joke immensely appealed to me, however!). All of us burst out laughing at this joke, and all of a sudden, before we knew it, plop! ... the chair and Moti collapsed in a heap on the floor ... which only made us laugh our guts out, even more!

The gODS

If I have been able to live through this internship at Yahoo! inc. , thus far, in this cursed city of Bangalore, then it is solely because I, a mere mortal, have been graced enough, to spend my time here, in the divine and benign presence of three gods.

I used to be a fool earlier ... a sinner ... a blasphemous blotto, wasting away my life in ignorance of the fact that these very three immortal gods were right there, all along, for my salvation. Fortunately, this Bangalore trip made me realize and appreciate this fact, and now, I can truly say that I have been graced! These gods manifest themselves, here on earth, in human form, in the unique, and rather diversified, forms of Mohit Mittal, Gagandeep Singh and Abhishek Arora. Like I said, their forms are rather diversified: Mittal is tall, stooped, apologetic and pigeon footed; Arora is short, squat, tubby and confident; Gagan is soft spoken, and of medium build, medium height and medium confidence. Deceivingly human, but gods nevertheless ....

The gods are here for my salvation. Two of them, Mittal and Gagan, sit on either side of my desk, to provide for easy remedy of any of my problems related to Linux/C++, which are numerous, manifold, trivial, frustratingly trivial, exasperatingly trivial and trivial on the verge of permanently branding me a blemish in the name of Computer Science and Engineering, at IITD. These two gods generally alternate between each other, in listening to music, and so when one god is listening to music on the headphones, I approach the other god to help me. If, by some unfortunate circumstance, both these gods are simultaneously listening to music, I holler out across the cubicles to the third god, Arora, who sits a couple of cubicles away. In the end, one of them is always there for my salvation!

The music these gods listen to is ethereal, and primarily consists of heart stoppingly fleshy videos of such illustrious artists as Akon, Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, The Pussycat Dolls and The New Virgos. In between rescuing fallen souls, such as mine, these gods spend most of their time here at Yahoo! inc. sleeping, eating, watching Japanese animes, listening to the aforementioned music and their corresponding videos, kicking each others arses, taking intermittent coffee and pool breaks, Orkutting, chatting, and whenever they have nothing else to do, quickly finishing off the trivial work assigned to them at Yahoo! inc. Like the greek gods, these ones also spend most of their time in pointless infighting and multi-pronged efforts to psyche each other out. The primary allabys for this kind of infighting are failed friend requests sent random girls on orkut, the HR chicks floating around office, and any other chink visible in their armour. Oft, when they reach a stalemate, they redirect their angst and ire against me, a helpless soul in the face of all this flak. I see stars when they do that ...

But nevertheless, they are gods. Temperamental, moody, funny and hilarious gods. And they are here for my salvation. And so I shall be ever grateful to them ... the gODS!

Optic Flow Field Segmentation and Motion Estimation Using a Robust Genetic Partitioning Algorithm

Yeah, that's the name of the paper I'm trying to get through. Trying to comprehend the very meaning of the paper title took me about an hour. It's almost been a day ... a day of banging my head against a brick wall ... and only ending up smashing it into pulp! This paper would put a Spartan to shame, from all the looks of it. It is impenetrable, and it just won't let me by. Seeing this paper brings back horrible, and forgettable, past visions of NSC, drifting in. There are enough epsilons, betas, rhos, Ws, Xs, matrix multiplications, inversions, transposes and complements to make even an army of Einsteins flee, tails between their legs. And then they expect me, a mere mortal, to get through this ...

... time to listen to some mind-numbing Meshuggah!

Copyright violations!

Not fair! Agreed that I am not as much of a stud, as I think I am, but I am quite a big stud. In the brief course of my life, thus far, I have come up with several, very catchy phrases/dialogues, and it is much to my ire, that I find folks copying my copyrighted dialogues. Not fair! Here are some instances:

1)A person with a wonderful taste in music, whose name I shall not take, and who happens to be a very big fan of Feedback (alas, she will see the truth soon :P), copies my trademark Feedback related catch phrases: "Kick some royal arse" and "Do give us you feedback".

2)Sumeet Khullar, steals my very own philosophy of "peacing out" (from the Uncle Skunk fundaa), and uses my favourite peace-related dialogue: "Peace maaro yaar".

3)And yesterday, someone uses my very own, extra-special "sorry" phrase : "I'm so very sorry" ...

Life is not fair, but then, what can you do? Well, you just shrug your shoulders, and get on with it. Screw the copyrights, screw Uncle Skunk and screw peace.