Moments

Durga Asthami: It was Friday, the 19th of 2007. Anand Srivastava, a friend on mine from school called me and invited me for lunch on Sunday. Enjoying the mid-semester break, I accepted his invitation and was also glad to know that he has invited a few more of my schoolmates. That was the beginning of this year's Dussehra celebrations for me. I also had another get together planned for the weekend. That was visiting my cousin who has moved into Gurgaon, a suburb of Delhi, after her marriage. She had been cajoling me to drop in at her place for the past three months and it was getting postponed due to some reason or the other. I had suggested a visit during the festive season but she had plans to go for a vacation to Rishikesh and Mussourie. On Friday, night I got the news that she has canceled her vacation, so I decided to go the next day. I also remembered that I had not yet kept my books for Saraswati Puja and resolved to do so the next morning. Maha Navami: On Saturday early morn...

जब पता चला कि हिंदी में भी blog लिख सकते हैं तो सोचा कि क्यों ना एक trial लिया जाये। यह blog लिखते समय google के इस नए transliteration tool का power महसूस हुआ। इतनी आसानी से हिंदी में लिख सकते हैं कि पूछिये मत। जल्दी ही google खोलिए और खुद ही type कर के देखिए।

The management at IIT Delhi has decided to block access to www.orkut.com from within the institute. Whether it is an attempt to police the innocent students getting over-enthused by the ongoing craze of dating or an inefficient means of regulating internet traffic, nobody knows, as there is not official announcement. But this abrupt blockage of the site using 'Content Keeper' has caused a shock to the student community. Orkut had been a topic of discussion among the faculty and the web administrators for quite some time. Many in the institute felt that students are wasting a lot of time browsing and scrapping on orkut. It may be true to some extent as I have myself seen situations in the lab where all the monitor screens show similar snapshots of orkut profile page opened up in firefox and people busy finding new profiles and scrapping to keep their network of friends going. A lot of BTech students are actively involved in various communities and are regular posters on all thre...

An old lady was sitting on the verandah of her house. She was in her 80's with gray hair and rumpled skin. Her voice quavered as she called her daughter in law for a glass of water. After waiting for a response, she muttered to herself, "Who cares for this old lady!" She was frail and spent most of her time on the verandah gazing at the street. Watching the busy market below was her hobby and favourite pastime. The sun was up near the zenith and the daily clamor of the people and vehicles was making the market look like a tableau of chaos. People were moving around with their bags full. Workers were unloading gunny bags and carton boxes of items from the pushing-carts and were taking them through the service doors of the shops. Amidst this commotion an old man was hobbling towards the traffic signal. His dress was shabby and was patched at lot of places. It could well have passed on as a designer stuff had he been walking on a ramp for a popular designer. But here the lad...

I am not talking about the cycle stunts that you see in your local circus. Neither am i talking about the motorcycle stunts shown by our Indian military during the republic day parade. Those are acrobatics. The cycle stunts that I refer here are the ones that I achieved in the recent past. Though it is belittling myself, but still I say here that two fractures that I have on my body are because of my cycle stunts. The first of them was 2 years ago. I was cycling back from the lab to my hostel at 4am. No I was not enjoying the morning air. On the contrary, I was returning after yet another night out, feeling sleepy. It had rained at night and the cycle had been washed clean in the rain. I was moving on the desolate road. The breeze was bringing in the frigidity of early morning and the overnight rain. I dont remember clearly what happened. After negotiating a turn, I find myself shaken up. The cycle had hit the divider. I was standing but I could feel bruises on my knees and elbow. Ther...

The journey from Udaipur to Abu road was a memorable one. The highway was in a total mess as widening of the roads into 4 lanes was under construction. The old highway was broken at many points with diversions made on to muddy tracks which were bumpy due to recent rains. To add to our woes, the driver was in a happy mood. Probably he was a rally driver who enjoyed such muddy tracks to feel his pulse racing. He was maneuvering the bus through the rough roads keeping us swinging left and right and bouncing up and down. It was a total roller coaster ride. The landscape outside was what fascinated us the most. We had been travelling in Rajasthan and never expected to see anything green around. All you expect in Rajasthan is barren lands and deserts. On the contrary, we were seeing lush green fields and bushes and forests as we passed from plains to the hills. We went through a few hair pin bends and it was like moving through the Western Ghats in Kerala, of which I have had enough experien...

Our day 2 started off from Jodhpur at 6 o'clock bus to Udaipur. The bus was a Silver Line (decently luxurious) bus of Rajasthan State Road Transport. It had push-back seats and provided us a not-so-bad position for sleeping. Sleep was necessary after the night out at the wedding, and expecting that we had finalised on catching this particular bus (The other buses in the morning are ordinary). The route to Udaipur was through a National Highway. The roads were good and the driver was a patient guy. He was in no mood to reach his destination quickly and so the journey took us 7 hrs where it should have taken only 5-5.30 hrs. Getting down at the Udaipur bus stand we were flanked by local guides, telling us about a few options for hotels. We took a guy in confidence to show us some cheap hotels to stay. The first look of the city had a depressing effect on both of us and the state of the art rooms of cheap hotels showed to us added to it. After rejecting a couple of pathetic rooms (rea...