Happiness happened today. Insanity happened today. It’s not very often that I am so content and at peace with myself at twelve in the night. Usually, at this deathly hour, I’d be wallowing in self pity or bothering myself over petty assignments or fallacies of people around me, but today I am super happy. I’d just recap the whole day one moment per line. That’s that!

Morning Chai

Upma

Bath

Second Chai

Half completed acerbic blog post

Photocopy shop

Temple

iDiva

Balaji Wafers, Bingo Mad Angles, Parle Smart Chips

Mint

Vicks Action 500

Priya Ramani – LSD editorial

Gautam Chaturvedi stories

Pratap Kaul stories

Chinmay Kamat stories

IRock

Taj President

Rishkul Kulkarni

Girish Das & Kshemu Desai

Sugar cubes

Quizzing startups

Giri Pickbrain Balsubramanium

Mahatma Gandhi-Rajiv Gandhi Sea Link

Tea

Strawberry Muffins

Cookies

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Wild Card Round 1

Singapore Airlines

Hyundai

Buzzer Tests

Mike Tests

+12 Characters created for Commonwealth Games 2010

Project Guttenberg. Decent guess. Didn’t work out.

Ricardo Semler. Bad miss.

Pierre Omidyar. Ebay. Shit. Shit. Shit.

iCon Wiley Publications. Bad miss.

-3 Strawberries

+6 Ginger

-3 Tata Elxsi

+6 Ashok Leyland

20th Century Fox. Bad miss.

BMW. Bad miss.

Last question. Nothing to lose.

+12 ITC

35000/-

Tata Crucible bag

FastTrack eyewear

MoserBaer DVD player

Slight Pangs of disappointment – should have won this. Shit. Shit. Shit.

Theobroma

Choco chip brownie *2

Bade Miyan

Baida Roti, Chicken Reshmi Kabab, Chicken Tandoori Kabab

Bagdadi

Butter Chicken * 2, Naan *2, Chicken Biryani, Caramel Custard

Gateway of India

How Roman numerals work ? A quick tutorial by Abhijeet Badrike.

Ice Cream

Haji Ali – Grape Juice

A few moments of disappointment

Sleep in the car

Final goodbyes

Bath

Phonecalls

Mirth

Blogpost

More mirth

And hopefully some sound sleep!

Edit:
Time for some indulgence. I clicked a couple of snaps, thankfully with no animate objects with their tongues sticking out. Below is the heist (Ed: will put it up in a day). Clicked in all its glory. The ‘dream’ was to make the stage at Crucible. Doing well is just the icing on the cake! Yes, National Final would have been nice. But it’s totally cool. You can’t have your cake, get it home delivered and then eat it too, all the time. I would not mind retiring now. Spending the rest of my time telling stories to my grandchildren

The Barclays Premier League evokes very passionate reactions from many youngsters of this agrarian country. The excitement provided by the footballers, their ill-perfected skill and their phony girlfriends reaches orgasmic levels at times. This devotion towards the game – especially towards some silly League in England – which is broadcasted at prime time on one of the better channels on Indian television is fast becoming a concern to the intellectual integrity of this nation.

On the day when the Prime-minister’s daughter was feted for her contribution towards science and its development in this country by none other than the Infosys Science foundation – the pioneers of slumdog outsourcing, many ill-advised youth were deeply engrossed in dissecting the bones out of Manchester United’s loss to Leeds united.

The photograph above has some illustrious personalities from(L-R)-

NR Narayan Murthy (Mr.Infosys), Amartya Sen (Nobel Laureate), Hamid Ansari (Vice-President of India), Upinder Singh (Award Recipient), Kris Gopalkrishnan (Cool Dude Infy CEO), Mohandas Pai (Infy HR Head). The most notable fact about all these great minds is that none of them have ever bothered discussing football in their lives – let alone incidents in some obscure league in England.

The complete apathy towards one of the “nearly” great fairytales of all time combined with the lack of willingness to bother about other league not shown on television at primetime is a huge matter for concern to Infosys and to the nation. The biggest outsourcing company is losing some of the best brains of the country not to football but to the Barclays Premier League.

Education is considered of prime importance in our country. Engineering doubly so. The employees of the Premier League are not exactly education enthusiasts. None of the characters who make a living out of the eyeballs that are glued to the television in India and China bother to go to Universities. Neither do they know Fourier Transforms, Binary Phase Shift Keying Techniques or Effects of Deforestation. Quite contrary, the Barclays Premier League is always on the look out for exploiting the educated and “unsettled” Indian viewer. A quote by Manchester City CEO Garry Cook brings out my point more clearly -

“China and India are gagging for football content to watch and we’re going to tell them that City is their content. We need a superstar to get through that door. Richard Dunne doesn’t roll off the tongue in Beijing. Ronaldinho brings access to major sponsors and financial reward.”

Only the noble outsourcing companies, can save this country from this growing malaise. Infosys need to market themselves better and make themselves more appealing to the masses. In order to rival the entertainment bouquet provided by football and BPL in particular, Infosys should start primetime shows educating the masses about Software Development Life Cycles, Acceptance Tests, Beta Tests, Clean Coding Convention and Practices. With a few desi items showing ample cleavage to keep the insatiable engineer interested, the programming would be a grand success.

If the situation worsens, Infosys will no longer find able engineers to perform data entry jobs for big clients like General Motors and British Airways. This situation has to be nipped in the bud. A mass awareness campaign should be initiated making the youth of this country aware that – India is primarily an agrarian nation. That they have an opportunity to sit in a cubicle and attend calls from US clients. It is a privilege that most youngsters who dont have a broadband connection to read this post dream about. To discuss about follies and shortcomings of uneducated, impassionate European and African chimps who earn more in one week than the Prime Minister of our country earns in one year is not sustainable in the long run and will have disastrous effects on Infosys and Indian economy on the whole. The faster this problem is sorted the better. Else Infosys will never ever earn the cult status that Intel or IBM enjoys. And it’s all due to Barclays Premier League.

For the last two days, I’ve been thinking over what my “comeback” post should look like. I had made up my mind to crib about how difficult the last six months have been – the sheer physical exhaustion and mental tiredness et al, why one should choose his project topics carefully and so on. But today’s proceedings put me out of this conrundrum. What follows is a simple account of today’s events. It involves a lot of enthusiasm and a slight sense of resignation.

I have missed the last two quizzes due to “educational hazards”. Practicals, lack of enthusiam, and lack of partners ensured that I wasn’t able to attend the Sweden Memorial Quiz at IITB and the NITIE Biz Quiz. So, it would be an understatement to say that I was eager to attend today’s Biz Quiz at NMIMS. With two spots in the finals reserved for student teams, qualification was an added incentive.

Mr.Diniz agreed to partner me and we were all set to have an almighty crack at the elims. Another bunch of enthusiastic juniors who call themseleves Mayuresh and Gautam were also sailing in the same boat. The 25 question elims was what you’d call a horror elims. It was like facing Lasitha Malinga’s inswinging yorkers wearing Kolhapuri chappals. We flapped our tiny little grey cells forward and backward, often in futility, and managed to get a grand total of 4 questions correct which gave us 4*2=8 points . Mayuresh and Gautam got anything between 2.5 and 4.5 questions correct, a fact that we haven’t been able to establish yet.

Partly dejected and totally deflated, we whiled away time, having a quick bite at the nearby eatery. And while we were snacking, Mr. Diniz’s phone did a jig in his pocket. A pity that we didn’t pay any heed to it. Two MICA teams had qualified from the students’ “quota” but had to leave for Ahmedabad. Hence, the organisers had to replace them with teams three and four.

As we were sitting in the pretty cozy audience environment and having a really good time drowning can after can of the greatest energy drink to come out of this country – Cloud Nine, we suddenly realised that the student teams on stage had scored 6 points each. At that precise moment, I hit my head against the table in utter frustration. Next thing we managed to do is to call the “missed call”. It turned out that the person on the other end was just ten yards away. He came up to us and we had an animated discussion which culminated with the realisation that we’d missed our chance to make the stage because we had failed to answer the call !

Ah. A day of missed chances. Why was I not called when Oswin didn’t pick up his phone ? Why weren’t Mayuesh or Gautam never given a ring when they too had got more than both the student teams on stage ? We gulped down some more Cloud 9 finding it difficult to distingush the bitter taste of disappointement from the equally obnoxious aftertaste of Cloud 9. (Seriously, who the hell drinks Cloud 9. How do they manage to sell this thing ?)

Not many B-school quizzes have reserved seats for students’ in the final. And battling with the corporate behemoths is a real challenge. Hence, it hurts to be stripped off a chance to “make the stage”. But there will be a next time, provided these menacing cell phones don’t sell us down the river.

I feel like a politician today. False claims. All talk, no work. All smoke, no fire. The blog is dying a slow death. And I’m not really bothered to be honest. Because there has just been too much work over the past two months. However, I did manage to make a small little Film and Entertainment quiz for the college quiz club though. Just a have a look. The half that could not be converted by slideshare will have to be downloaded though. Have a dekko. Hopefully, I’ll post soon.

The other bits can be found at -

www.chinmaykamat.com/IR.ppt

www.chinmaykamat.com/IR2.ppt

With the fifth semester just dawning upon everyone in college, we have a lot of time to sit and talk. Talk about absolutely anything. In the past two weeks, I have been lending a patient ear to not less than three really disturbing stories. Apparently, there is a trend in which the educated Indian parent thinks in a very Neanderthal fashion. A lot of friends of the better sex have been “complaining” that their parents would not allow them to pursue higher education as it reduces their chances of getting a suitable groom. This has come as a shocking revelation and is a bit hard to digest.

Apparently, in the marriage market, the husband has to be better educated and should earn more than his wife. From what I know, people marry to be happy. And which uxorious husband would not want his wife to be more successful than him ? Well, that we he could always say that he made the better choice. (:P)  But the more serious aspect is that – the country is possibly losing out on some of the great female leaders.

This episode perhaps sheds some perspective over the various mahila vikas yojanas of the Centre. If the educated city folks are so unrelenting, the village farmer won’t think twice before marrying off his daughter to a Sheikh or a goat. All I can do is sympathise – because one can’t go and try to put sense into someone who has seen more summers than you.

Also, keeping aside all the problems that the nation would possible face with regard to dearth of female talent, what would people like me do ? Unmarried at 30. Looking out for females – when most of them have been married of to ugly guys five years older to them just for the heck of it !

Just one of those things where you think of the times – one step forward, then two back.