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As the wind was riffling my hair, I thought….
What the hell? I hate wind riffling my hair.
PS: This is what I meant when I told Rain Tree that I experiment with my haircut!
PPS: Someone asked me whether I went to Tirupati when they saw me. I replied that I went to the local barber shop 
I just remembered about my blog which was gathering dust. It has been more than a month.
Anyway, I wrote in my last post about quitting my job. The reason for that is something which I had been contemplating for more than a year. I am following the footsteps of some of the fellow bloggers in my blogroll and going to get Permanent Head Damage.
Well.. it’s a different field, in Electrical Engineering, but you got the drift.
I will be traveling on 23rd of this month. 10 days at my uncle’s home in Sacramento, CA. Then I’ll be back to academics at North Carolina State University. Wish me luck!
There was a reason I didn’t mention this earlier. I thought I’d better wait until my visa is approved.
Meanwhile, I’m enjoying my 2 month vacation in Palakkad.
That’s it!
I did it and it’s over!
I am back in the state of being unemployed, after 4 long years.
3 years with Batwings*, and I didn’t feel any “normal” emotion (i.e. sadness or elation or anxiety) when I quit my company.
I could not help myself from posting this video, because this symbolizes my exit really well. Think of my company as the sinking boat and me as Jack Sparrow. (Sorry.. Captain Jack Sparrow)
Sorry if I’m showing this video to some of you for the umpteenth time; I just can’t get it out of my head.
Oh… the company really is a sinking boat, because it has been losing market share for quite some time now.
And I really am indifferent about all that.
Of course, I have other intentions with my career, of which I’ll write in a later post.
* Not the real name of the company. But if you can guess it from the name, good for you!
I got a topic to blog about (Finally, after more than a month!)
And quite obviously, it is about another round of troubles. For some reason, I often find myself in trouble through the most bizarre ways.
It all started when I went to HDFC Bank to pay the fee for a US Visa Interview (VI). I filled up my name as it should have been (and I thought it was, until 5 seconds later!) in the passport. But the snake eyes of the clerk, who matched it with my passport, found out that I had written my name wrong. According to my passport, I had no Given Name. My entire name was my surname. So I was wrong about my name all along. He told me that if I don’t fill up my name as in passport, there will be a problem in my VI. It was all weird since I have once traveled to USA with this passport, and by giving my name as it should have been. Evidently enough, my B1 visa had my name correct. The Given Name field indeed was Deepak here. It was funny that nobody had noticed that till now. I failed to notice the discrepancy for a whole 9 years.
The clerk suggested that I write my name like in passport in all matters henceforth. I didn’t think so. I didn’t want strangers to call me Mr. Deepak Ranganathan, and my friends to call me “” (I don’t know how to pronounce a nullity of characters)
I told him I’m not paying the fee. He asked me the quintessential question of modern day bankers, “Why Sir?”
Like in
Telephone caller: Hello sir, we are offering an excellent personal loan for you.
Me: Not interested
Caller: Why Sir?
“I’d rather change my name in the passport before scheduling the VI”, I replied.
So I was here in Palakkad, for a vacation of 10 days, one of my mission objectives being the change I have to make in my passport. The lesser objective was to be a couch potato at home, which would have succeeded, if not for the constant power cuts which made sure that I moved around so that I didn’t sweat.
On Tuesday, I set off on my crusade to the passport office - a grueling journey of 3 hours in shaky buses with little padding on the seats and not enough room for your legs. It was close to 10am by the time I reached there. The queue was already a gargantuan slithering python. Slowly it moved until there were about 10 people ahead of me. It was 1pm. Closing time already. We pleaded and cried to the lady at the counter. It was just a matter of 12 more people. She was ruthless when she asked us to come back the next day. After having so many trysts with trouble, I should have seen this coming. I start to wonder if a little optimism is a dangerous thing. It seems like that to me. Murphy’s law is a fundamental principle around which the world revolves.
The next day, I caught the 5am bus, so that I will be in the forefront in the queue. Luckily enough, I was about 20th (!) in the queue at 8 am. The counter opened at 9am, I filed my application by about 10, and I was told I could collect my passport back at 3.30pm. I had to kill time till then. ( Wandering aimlessly in Malappuram was better than a bus journey to and fro) I had my breakfast, then went to an autowallah and asked him to take me to any cinema where a good movie was running. Unfortunately (again!), there was only one where a morning show was there. The movie was “Malabar Wedding”. I hadn’t even heard of it until then. As my luck would always have it, the movie was a bore, except for a few scenes which were humorous. There were like 10 people in the entire theater.
It was about 2pm now. I went back and waited in the passport office. By 4, I was back in the return bus. Later that day, I couldn’t sleep on my back, nor could I stand up. My buttocks hurt because of 12 hours of journey in the last two days. My feet hurt because of hours of standing in the queue. But, as a consolation, I got my passport corrected.
I’m not frustrated by the whole incident. I think I have found an equilibrium with the whole trouble-seeking phenomena. Nowadays, I just blog about the trouble I faced, with an air of a connoisseur carelessly using French terms to philosophize. Sigh! That’s life!
I am partially back in action. A successful surgery at Hosmat and I am back in Palakkad now, to take rest. But being the internet buff that I am, I couldn’t ignore the call of my PC and the internet. So here I am, typing with one and a half hands, a quarter of a bone less and 13 stitches in my inner elbow.
I had quite some revelations about my conditions as well as about some of my friends through the course of this recent development. First of all, this was not a cyst and was some other “benign lesion”. It was nevertheless harmless, because, well, it was benign. The doctors just removed the head of my radius bone instead of grafting a bone from somewhere else. That spared me another cut in my body. Anyway, I had my surgery on Friday, hand was on cast for one day, I was discharged on Saturday evening and a couple of the nurses were pretty.
I was feeling a little underweight because of the piece of bone which was removed, but it was quickly compensated by the weight of the minuscule facial hair which sprang up in a matter of 3 days. After discharge, I came back to Palakkad, supposedly to take rest, but I’m taking everything but rest here. That includes taking pills, taking occasional punches from my brother for bullying him and taking food with my left hand. I have become adept at eating with left hand of late. Guess it is only a matter of time before I become ambidextrous.
I got bored easily, watching the idiot box, so I decided to clear my backlog with mails and Google Reader. But I was flabbergasted when I saw the number of unread posts in my Google Reader. It was a tad less than 100 in 5 days. Now I have to work hard to read all those. Plus I have a pending tag.
Another important thing that I found out was who really cared about me. I found out that some people who I thought were friends, were not my friends, after all. Honestly, all that would have taken to show some sign of concern, was a phone call. I’m not whining here. I’m just thankful that there was one good thing about my condition - I could separate the wheat from the chaff.
Thursday, 8th November - 0600 hrs
So I was taking a break from work for 11 days. Let’s just call it a vacation at my native. My agenda - Diwali on 8th, Kalpathi Ratholsavam over the next week, and a visit to Chelakkara, my mother’s native place, after about 10 years.
This has been my most expensive trip home so far. I had to take a flight to Coimbatore and my dad came about 50km to pick me up. The reason - No train or bus tickets were available as it was peak time. Forget peak time, you won’t get tickets to Kerala even on normal months. I remember seeing 93 seats available on the first day of booking (that is 60 days before the journey date), and it quickly went into wait list in 15 minutes. Traveling from Bangalore to Palakkad (or to any part of Kerala, for that matter) is a pain in the butts, mostly because you have to take a bus (because there are only a couple of direct trains) and your butts will indeed be painful by the time you reach home.
Deprived of all cheaper means of going home, I thought of taking my car. That would be a drive of 7 hours. But my mom thought that was a bad idea (Read: “Forget it! You are not taking your car alone for such a long distance.”) It almost seemed as if she sensed that I was in Diesel Mode of late. Diesel Mode is the term given by my friends to my random rushes of adrenalin wherein I drive my car like a race car driver when I find stretches of road where there is not much traffic and there is no risk of people crossing the road, for instance the Inner Ring Road or the Mysore Road. The name is derived from the role of Vin Diesel in The Fast and the Furious. Anyway, my mom said “No car. Period.” So I took a flight, shelling out about 2000 bucks more than what I’d spend for a train ticket.
The flight duration was 1 hour. I was wondering why it took so long, given that it is not even one third the distance between Bangalore and Delhi. I made up a theory. Coimbatore was so close that the plane would have passed Coimbatore and gone further South by the time it gained altitude. So it had to turn around to land in Coimbatore.
Mathematically speaking,
Optimum Altitude/Rate of altitude gain of the plane < Distance to Coimbatore/2*Ground speed of plane
The flight was supposed to be uneventful, but as it would always be the case with me, it was eventful. The event was that I got two free sandwiches and a coffee from Kingfisher. The “unevent” was that I got those not in the flight, but in the airport, because the flight was delayed by 2 hours, owing to the shortsightedness of the Coimbatore lads. (They said the visibility was only 600 feet and they couldn’t see farther than that. This is called shortsightedness or myopia.)
For records, this post is delayed by at least 20 days. Talk about being lazy!!! Sigh!
It is a magic held by any undergraduate college. When you visit your alma mater, you cannot but have that heightened feeling of nostalgia.
I went to the college where I learned so many lessons of life, the most important one being how to live. I passed out of college (luckily, never “passed out” in college) in 2004. That’s more than 3 years now, so there were only two people in the college who I knew personally (Or, better to say non-academically) - Dhanaraj, once my senior, now a faculty, and Paro, who’s a student there. Well. I met another guy I knew - Ravi. I was perplexed, because it was a canonical impossibility, but he clarified that he had a back paper in final year, and was still in campus because of that.
Oh…the back papers. I remember I had escaped narrowly in a couple of my courses - all those ones without any mathematical problems - Computer Organization and Architecture, Digital MOS etc.
So this was more like a professional visit, (I’ll disclose the reasons, if fate permits, at a later time) but I still couldn’t resist a stroll around the hostel area, and around the library, computer center and DB.
One thing I noticed was that NITC hadn’t changed as much as I thought. The impression I had in my mind, after the news given by some fellows, was exaggerated. It was a welcome sight. There were a couple of new disciplines, a few new buildings, a few modified ones, and everything else was more or less intact. As I strolled around, old events kept flashing in my mind. I’ll try to reproduce them here. It’ll at least make this post more readable. 
As I entered, I saw the gates which were not there when I was in my final year. (I had seen the pictures from Ajith’s blog though) Inside, the Rajpath looked the same, except for the fact that it was well paved now.
The Rajpath…with a new look
It was a Sunday evening in August. We were returning to campus after a weekend visit to our respective homes. The pavements were so slippery with moss that people seldom walked on them. However, Antony was not among those faint at heart. I warned him, “Don’t walk on the pavement. You’ll slip”. He shoved off my warning with an air of nothing-can-happen-to-me. 5 seconds later, he fell on his ass.
Back in hostel, the others were narrating this incident to Dinesh, when he told, “He seems to have a black tongue. Two days back, the same thing happened to me, and 5 seconds before my fall, Deepak told me that I will slip.”
I got infuriated, “Come on, man. You fell because it was slippery, not because I said it was slippery. Grow up, man.”
I saw the new Central Computer Center building. Again, I had been misinformed that they had built it on the basketball court. I used to think what a pity it was, because the court was close to my heart (or something close to that) as I used to play basketball (or something close to that) every day (or something close to everyday). But whoever said that, was wrong. The basketball court was in tact. However, to my alarm, I saw buildings coming up in the football ground. Where will they have the Monsoon cup from now?
FBG…Triangular Notice Board….gone…all gone
As I went through the Main Building, I was in for another shock. The Triangular Notice Board was gone! It was where we all used to vent out our feelings.
Monsoon Cup 2003.
Badshaz (Used to call ourselves “Bad”shaz, for an air of superiority) were the reigning kings. Just on the eve of the kickoff, we stuck one poster on the triangular notice board.
First year - Semifinalists
Second year - Runners up
Third year - Winners
Fourth year - We need competition!
February 15th 2001
The day after Valentine’s day.
A poster read:
Henceforth, we will mourn every February 15th as the Broken Hearts’ Day. This day will be dedicated to all those hapless souls who no girl cares about.
I went to the department, met a few professors and then, Dhanaraj. We had a lengthy chat, which was mostly enlightening for me. I learnt that Papachan and Mamachan were still open. It was another wrong tidings given by someone that Papachan and Mamachan were closed because of bad business as all the back gates from college were sealed now. Also, someone had told me that the Kattangal economy had crashed due to the sealing of the gates near the D Hostel, which meant that guys had to go all the way to the front entrance and come back to go to Kattangal. But living up to the true NITC spirit, they are still taking the pains to go that extra mile. That means that there are as many motorcycles now as there were bicycles at my time and as many cars now as there were motorcycles at my time.
As usual, we had bunked our 9 am class and sitting in Mamachan having breakfast. We were having a heated argument. (For those who don’t know, Papachan, Mamachan and Chechi were the local hotels)
KK: Papachan is the best. The food is so delicious.
Me: Chechi is better than that. The food is incomparably good.
KK: But Chechi is not clean. Nobody can beat Papachan at that.
Me: Papachan will take a lifetime to bring you food after you order. You’ll die of hunger by the time he brings food.
KK: Grrr..
Me: Double Grrr…
Ragam 2000
Mock Press competition was under way. The guy was enacting Jackie Chan.
Guy from audience: What is your purpose of visit?
Jackie Chan: To visit Papa-chan and Mama-chan.
(Although, I felt that this question was a pre-planned one, the answer still was amusing.)
I went running after my purpose of visit, which took almost till lunch time.
Had lunch from canteen, since I didn’t feel like walking to Papachan, with my heavy laptop.
After my lunch, I decided to take a stroll. The first place that came to my mind was D Hostel - The lair of the famed D-Tops, and of course the Wallstreetguys (Contrary to popular belief, the name has nothing to do with Wallstreet, nor is it related in any way to economics!)
The hostels were changed, but D Hostel was in tact, although it had lost it’s trademark dark-red colored walls. I sat below the mango tree outside for quite some time, relishing my moments there. I went in to visit my room. It was locked.
Outside, the 4’s Arena ground was still there, with all the nets and all. 4’s Arena was a kind of mini-soccer, played with 4 on each side, and slightly modified rules.
4’s Arena Final
Fierce match. Rain-soaked. (And I think it was floodlit) I was watching that from behind a goal post. That was my first mistake. I forced myself to the forefront of hundreds of viewers. That was my second mistake. I was directly in line of Sameer’s shot. That was my third and final mistake.
Since this was a small field, it was more like Table Tennis; you needed to have a good reflex. Sameer mishit his shot. The ball was above the bar by a good 1 foot and it was coming straight at me. I was not fast enough. The ball hit directly in my abdomen. I had this burning sensation in my stomach for the next 3 hours. My T-shirt carried a patch of hexagons and pentagons for the rest of its life.
I then went to MC, which brought out another nostalgic feeling of ordering Bread Pakoda and Tea at midnight. Now that I check my camera, I realise that I actually forgot to snap the MC. How could I do that?Anyway, I returned, tried to finish my business, but couldn’t, so I went back to city, came back the next day and finished my business. By evening, I was back in Palakkad, mission accomplished, and with a truckload of renewed memories.
I’m falling into a state of depression. I can’t believe the last book of the Harry Potter series is out and I have already read it. I just can’t take the idea that I won’t get the chance to wait eagerly for the next book.
Being a faithful follower of Harry Potter, I won’t spoil any of the plots of the book. I thought I’d just mention how my day went on 21st Saturday.
I pre-ordered the book in the bookstore nearest to my apartment, obviously to reach home as soon as I bought the book and start reading the book. Unfortunately, the earliest opening time anywhere in Bangalore was 6 am. And, to my dismay, Crossword Indiranagar, where I was to get my book was to open only at 7 am.
So, me and KP decided to go at 6.15 am and wait outside the store. The others were not interested in Harry Potter. We left them to their pathetic life devoid of imaginations and fantasies. (Take no offence if you are reading this, guys, but your life is really pathetic, trying to spoil the plot to us with snapshots from a traitor which came on the internet on the previous day, and jeering and calling a spell casting as a mere stick rotation)
But typical to the nature of bachelors, we started off 15 minutes late. I was wearing my favorite Harry Potter T-shirt and shorts. By the time I parked my car near the shop, it was already crowded, with a queue of 30+ people. I felt a tiny bit of guilt for not showing my fidelity. I should have reached at 6. I should have been in the front.
That feeling faded away soon when the shop was opened and the first group of about 10 customers were let in. From then, it was a feeling of longing. A part of my brain even thought about gatecrashing, throwing the receipt to the counter, taking a book and running out. We couldn’t get in for another long 30 minutes.
I got the book, took a bookmark from the counter and started reading the book on the scene(until KP collected his copy and came outside). I was engrossed wholly in the book even as I walked towards my car. I heard someone call out, “Take your time, dude. You have all day to finish the book.” I grinned at the group of people sitting near the pavement, waiting for their turn to get inside.
We drove back, I parked my car in the most lopsided manner that could be possible and rushed to my apartment. I continued from where I had stopped. By 10.30, I had finished about 100 pages. KP, being a voracious reader, was thrice as fast as me. I skipped breakfast, and went for lunch only because I was really hungry. I even considered taking the book to the restaurant to read it while having dinner. I had already lost about 4 hours because I fell asleep afternoon after having a heavy lunch. Throughout the day, I was interrupted (to my great annoyance) by a number of phone calls. I never received so many phone calls in one day. It had to be this day! Sigh!
I finished the book at around 2am, had a quick browsing of the internet and started my reread. I won’t tell anything about the story, but I’d say this is one of the best books in the series ever. I’d say third best after GoF and PoA. The book is really fast-paced, and we are in the thick of the action from the first chapter itself.
Ecstatic though I am after knowing (or living, rather) how the saga ends, I also feel strangely depressed. It is as if someone has abandoned me in the muggle world and I don’t know the way to get back. My only hope remains in the two films that are remaining. Nevertheless, I can only feel grateful that I lived in the times of Harry Potter and Joanne Rowling.
Too many drafts of late. I’m never finding enough time to finish those and post them here. Sigh!
I went to Palakkad taking a week off last week. Needless to say, I found myself in trouble again. This knotty situation was all about “the knot”.
The knot is a physical tying of a knot which they say is metaphor for the knot or binding of the lives of two people, the man and his wife (For female chauvinists, the woman and her poor “Mr. bechara” husband), but it actually is a rather knotty problem — from then on, you need to have a lot of discipline and responsibilities. So, I reached my home on the fine morning of Friday, a bit soaked in the drizzle. I had my morning chores, which I couldn’t finish off in the train. Then I had my breakfast with my mother. It was then that the lightning struck from the skies, right on to my head. My mom said some distant relative had come with a marriage proposal of some distant relative of hers. So it was twice the distance!
The conversation went like this:
Mother: I’ve started checking your horoscope. It is very difficult to find a girl from our community and with good family background, and for you two to like each other.
Me: NO! No No No… Don’t start it.
Mother: You are 24 years old.
Me: You know, it is good to hear someone say I’m getting old, for a change. But not in this matter.
Mother: I’m not asking you to marry immediately. It will take about a year to find the right girl…
Me: I have aspirations right now; you know that. I want to study further. I don’t want to marry until I’m 27-28.
Mother(As if she didn’t hear what I said): …then you can get engaged and wait for another year if you want.
Me: You can do whatever you want with the horoscope. But I will reject it outright if you show me some alliance before I’m 27.
Mother: As a matter of fact, there is a proposal now.
Me: WHAT?
Mother: You know Annam (She was the distant relative), don’t you? I’d met her in Chelakkara when she asked me if I started looking for alliances. I just nodded. Yesterday, she met your aunt and complained to her that I was not interested in the alliance.
Me: Great! So now everyone knows there is a proposal coming in!
Mother: Look, In this case we don’t have to worry about the family. They are known ones. We just have to match the horoscopes, and then it’s up to you two to talk and decide if you like each other.
Me: I don’t want to get married now.
Mother: Don’t worry. I won’t ask you to get married soon.
Me: I don’t want to get married now.
Mother: You can get engaged if you like each other and then wait for a year.
Me: Sigh! I don’t want to get married now.I went to my grandmother’s house. We had the first death anniversary rituals of my grandfather. It got over by noon.
When the Vadhyar (the priest who presides over the ritual) was having his lunch, he asked for more rice, “Koncham annam kondu vaango”(”Annam” also means rice). On hearing the word “Annam” I nervously looked around. I saw an evil grin on my aunt’s face as she looked at me. After having a heavy lunch, it was time for a post-lunch family gathering. My mother’s siblings and their family were present. My uncle and family had come from US.
I somehow always liked small gatherings like this. I always enjoyed talking to my aunt because she was the only person who was more talkative than me.
So there I was, tired after gobbling up lots of food. When I saw the evil grin in my aunt’s face again, I sensed it was coming.
Aunt: I heard you are getting married.
Me: O really? I didn’t hear any such news.
Aunt: It’s about time you got married.
Me: No. I’m only 24.
Aunt: It is good for you. You won’t have to struggle with bachelor life anymore.
Me: That is true, but I’m just not ready.
Aunt: Come on. She is a very nice girl. And it is our family.
Me: Yeah, right. Something like my grandma’s cousin’s son-in-law’s sister’s daughter is family. Besides, you haven’t even seen her to say she is a nice girl.
Aunt: So we will be back in India again in an year.
Me: Shut up, okay? What the hell is this pulling-legs for?
Aunt: Just some after-lunch entertainment.
Me: Right. I’M THE VICTIM.
After some emotional blackmail (I finally got my chance to get even with my mother), my mom agreed that she will just match our horoscopes for the sake of being courteous with her “distant relative”.
I was so relieved on having escaped from the knot (for the time being) when another less lethal issue came. This too was about “tying the knot”.
My brother came to me asking me to teach him how to tie a tie.
I went on, “Watch carefully. The perfect Windsor is an art…”
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