The Needle Affair!!!

Needles were always part of my personal hell-tools. Never did I imagine that I'd get a tattoo ever in my life. I don't know when I decided to face my fears and go ahead with it. Every word on it is special. As I got it on a special date. 24th April 2012. A one year anniversary of a very special event. Well I'll put up a post dedicated to it some other day.
                 I used to sit and discuss with my elder sister what kinda tattoo I would want. I always wanted to get a Celtic Anklet done. Lets see if that happens some other day.

The "Shanti" part of the tattoo is a reminder for me to keep my cool and not get angry. Well that hasn't worked out so far. The "Om" symbolises the universal sound, the building block of each and every sound in the universe. Its a part of every sound in the universe and every sound in the universe is a part of it. Its present in sound as well as silence. Its a part of every one of us. Its there in our heartbeat, in every word we speak, even the sound of the air gushing in and out of our lungs. If you sit quietly without making a sound or thinking of a word and listen carefully you'll hear the "Om" even in the silence of your mind. I was always intrigued with the symbol. Never has there been a symbol that is perfectly symmetrical for me. How could I not have it as a part of my first tattoo.? Well the third part of the tattoo is something that you'll find only if you look carefully its hidden in plain sight. Now about that, its meant to always keep a part of a special person close to me. Forever engraved on my skin till the day I die.

For those people who are planning to get a tattoo, I'd recommend Godwyn Moses as the artist. Real sweet and highly skilled. Some advice, Think before you Ink!! Its permanent. Really people would you really go through all the pain of getting a tattoo and end up removing it and experiencing 10 times the pain.???                                                                                                                              

Anyone who want to get a tattoo from Godwyn check him out on Facebook.

This tattoo was one of the best experiences of my life and I'd never forget the day I got it. Thank you Godwyn Moses!!! You Rock Dude!!! And special thanks to Conrad Misquith for the support ,making me feel so comfortable and just plain being such a sweetheart.

My Experiments with CEC Part 2 of 4:

It is amazing how time flies. It seems just like yesterday that I walked the corridors of CEC for the first time and got lost a number of times trying to find my class room. Well I think tats not going to change even when I write the final part of this note. Now after finishing the 2^nd year of Engineering, believe me it is definitely not a breeze. After sitting home for a month doing nothing but watch T.V, surf d net and practically laze around the whole day I come back into d personal hell of my own choosing.

                       What can be worse than sitting in the first bench and practically drooling onto your notebook as the lecturer drones on and on about some godforsaken commands that u have to feed the computer if it has a Unix operating system, and looks at you just when your head hits d bench. (Well don’t worry I got away with it. I have mastered the technique of sleeping in the first bench)

                      Sometimes der is nothing you can do when all the words that the lecturer is shooting across the class flies cleanly over your head and you end up nodding as if you have understood every word he said. Well my fellow nodders u are not going to be able to get away with it especially when the said topics were there for the internals.

                 There are times when I wonder what in the world I was thinking when selecting Engineering as my goal. Well that is the time I remind myself that I would never have been happy if I had given up just because it was a challenge to keep my eyelids open for 4 hours (sometimes 7) in a day.    

                    Three years of my life devoting myself to this field that I’ve chosen is too much to give up in the final lap of the rat race. With the finish line in sight I think to myself, I might not come first but at least I’d have completed the task I had taken up. The mistake of not speeding up in the first 3 laps was my own. So my fellow to-be-engineers as a senior just one advice don’t give up and most importantly don’t slow down and take it easy it’ll be hard in the end. Even my seniors told me the same and what I did then and you are going to do next is definitely the same. After all no one is safe from Mr. Murphy and his law. “What has to be, will be.” All of you are going to nod your head, take it seriously for a few weeks then back to the same.

                           CEC is like a case of apples and you no doubt selected one which had shiny, red and firm ones. You pick up a shiny apple and bite into it to find that it is rotten. There are 2 things which can take place now. You either assume that only one was bad and keep the rest or you throw out all of them thinking they are bad. But till you reach the end of the case you’ll never know if you missed out on a real good apple.

                                 Now back to ranting out my frustration to the world. Third year in CEC marked the end of Giri and Naren Maam’s era of the Mahalasa café. The new café was under the management of the same people who managed the mess. It started off well, new items on the menu, coupon system etc. Who was to know it was another hell thrust upon the poor souls who joined this college. The ever bustling café was transformed into a place where people go only for food. The cafeteria of a college is the life of a college. Where love stories are made and broken, where friends hang out and make memories meant to be cherished. Now the only memories students make in the café is of the day they found chicken pieces in the vegetarian dishes they ordered ( Seriously which other college can boast that they serve everyone equally.), the day the dams of their rear burst and broke the record for most number of visits to the bathroom, or the day they found an odd layer of unidentified liquid floating on top of their soup. The students of CEC have stopped trying to complain and started praying that either giri and naren maam return or that they survive the few years that are left of their life in CEC in one piece. There has been an outbreak of groups like boycott canteen and SOS CEC mushrooming all over the net.

            All in all CEC has turned into a nightmare that every student that entered wants to come out of. I don’t know if I’d remember CEC with fond memories or in terror of having to visit it again. You may say that college life teaches you to adjust with real time situations. In conclusion I say that it may be true. If I ever get a chance to go on fear factor in the future and am told to lie down amongst disgusting bugs or told to eat nasty stuff I’d tell myself, “I’ve survived CEC, what is this compared to that.”

Till next time my dear CECians. Keep Safe!!

My Experiments With CEC (Part 1 of 4)

Firstly for all those ppl who din kno I am doing Computer Science Engineering in Canara Engg College, Benjanpadavu(or BE-JAAN-PADAVU as I lyk to call it) Mangalore.

Now tat we got that straight let me get to the topic at hand. My Experiments with Canara Engineering College Part 1 of 4. (Sorry Mr. Gandhi Hope u wont sue me with copyrights infringement).





                   I joined the college a bright eyed and totally blind fresher on Aug 31st 2009. It was my first tym living in a hostel, so far away from home and no more under the watchful eyes of my parents. I had tasted freedom at long last. But freedom is a double edged sword.
You know wat?? Peter Parker's uncle got it wrong. Its not only with power that responsibility comes. Freedom comes with a responsibility bigger than nethin else. Your own. Its lyk my dad always says, If you have not experienced hostel lyf, you have not experienced a major part of ur college lyf.
I was amazed by the campus, its hostel facilities, beautiful landscape and awesome infrastructure lyk everyone else who came here the first tym. Little did I know it was lyk calling “The God of Death CUTE” ( I lyk to be very dramatic sumtyms hehe).
The first week was a blur coz most of my tym was spent on trying to locate some dept in a college better suited to be used as a maze to turn students into patients (Its a good thing we don't have a medical college yet ).

By the time I finally got the hang of trying to navigate around hundreds of stairs, unlimited corridors , routes that lead to two places which look exactly the same but are not so and the so called shortcuts which end up making you land right back onto square one. Yes you guessed it. It was my own little personal Hell. It reminded me of Hogwarts, at least the staircases don’t move here (thank god for small mercies).
I'm sure the designer is laughing his head off somewhere imagining us cracking our heads about why we landed up near the toilets instead of the CAED Lab. Come on man imagine… there is one place where if you walk from the 3rd floor of a building you end up on the 2nd floor of another building. Now that’s a mystery even Sherlock, Poirot, and Mystery Inc( Scooby Doo) put together wudn’t be able to solve.

      As if that was not enough by the end of the first week I had managed to single handedly experience the full force of the so called natural beauty of this place. The dreaded Acid bug. I was the first 1st year to be bitten. Got a lesion in the shape of Africa (Now don't ask me why Africa coz seriously I don't kno) which burnt lyk Hell and left a burn mark which is still visible after almost a year.
Being a mess and hostel committee member I did lodge complaint. Turned out the management was as responsive as the govt pension office. The mess is just lyk it sounds… A MESS. The food horrible, The cleaning squad aiming to be future hit and run drivers practicing with their four wheeled killing contraptions(Trolleys). Most of the bug species swimming peacefully in the water jugs and most of all cooks who havn’t tasted their own creation and who don’t seem to understand that the milk to water ratio shud be atleast 1:1 not 1: 1000.

      As is that was not enough the prices in the canteen and general stores are high enough to turn ‘both’ the Ambani brothers into paupers. First half of the semester everything had been fine in the hostel (if you 4get the bug problems… we wud find an unwanted guest in our bed when we woke up in the morning) after which the the hot water came only in the afternoons (who the hell wants a hot water bath in the afternoon in the middle of summer), the cleaning staff only when we have only 5 minutes remaining to reach college( You can imagine the condition of my room… even if they clean it my room tends to remain messy…hmm there shud be a newton’s law written on it…) and the net had gone on a long vacation.(Still has after the thunderstorm).
So in short I was forced to diet (some might say I needed it), was teethed on by bugs like some chew toy (I din’t need this one no matter wat you say), was cut away from civilization (for those who din’t get it there is a reason why I call benjanpadavu as Be-Jaan-Padavu) and the thing that hurt most NO INTERNET!!! (just imagine).

       Ok some of you may say that I had gone to college to study and not have fun. Well no chance of that is there?

Heres the worst part. Try understanding a person who is talking as if you had the hearing capabilities of a bat, or one that has pronunciation which would have Shakespeare rolling in his grave crying for mercy or taking down notes from one who goes on dictating like the Rajdhani Express or listening to one that is a sure cure for insomnia. Try sitting in a class where you are afraid to breathe or in one where you have to duck to avoid getting hit by paper balls zinging in from all directions ( Never sit in the first bench in such classes ur head makes a jolly good thing for target practice and you can do absolutely nothing about it atleast not when the lecturer keeps staring at you as if you were the one who started it.)
Note to people who are still in school. Better increase ur writing speed or u’ll end up with a carpel tunnel.
Ok now enough with all the bad parts ( u ppl will think I have some anti cec campaign going on…although I am relieved that I got that out).

        College days are the best in your entire life. Even though all this happens I enjoy sitting in the class. Its like looking at a subject you might have learnt in school but through an entirely different angle. Learning entirely new concepts, new thoughts, new ideas. Thinking about things in an entirely different way. Nowadays when I look at a fridge or an AC it has me thinking about its working. Thinking about what if’s, imagining what might happen. I enjoy seeing a grim teacher secretly smiling at some joke the class clown cracked. There are many subjects that I enjoyed learning(not all lecturers are that bad…There are some good ones). Like Physics (I love the concepts) , C programming( those who kno me will say that it was very obvious) ,Mech Engineering( Its fun learning bout engines and stuff really and If you are reading this NP Sir lemme tell you that I really mean it. I do enjoy d way u teach.) and most of all civil (Remember the paper balls zinging part??). I found real good friends here who stick with you throughout no matter what (Even if the teacher is throwing you out or you want to plan a mass bunk).

Yesterday there was this huge thunderstorm here and we had our own little photo session. The current was not there but still we had loads of fun clicking pics and screaming when there was thunder ( not me… I love thunderstorms). Other instances like last year we had this small new year party, the whole hostel was empty except for the 1st years…(It was awesome we got this 2kg chocolate cake which ended up on our faces rather than in our stomachs.) We partied all night. The day our results came out where we were all huddled around one laptop waiting for the page to load. Other times when we go to mess and crack naughty jokes on the food or watch someone bite a chilly and run looking for water.













Well CEC is like a bit of hell and bit of heaven all rolled up nice and tyt (but I just can’t seem to decide which ones more hell or heaven). Sometimes I feel that these four years shud pass in a flash and sometimes I want it to last a little bit longer. Coz I kno in my heart that I am really gonna miss this place very badly… Also the people who made it worth trying to stretch time a little bit longer. In the far future when I travel down my memory lane I am sure to reach a marker along the way reminding me of all the good and the bad times I spent here and I am gonna remember them with a little smile on my face.

Its like how that song goes… “I’m really gonna miss this place, Am gonna miss my college days”

 

ACT One: Role of a Photographer

Photography is maybe not my life, but I would sure like to be able to use a really good camera. Landscapes are my preferred scenes while taking photographs. I'm especially attracted to cloud formations and rainy days to click pictures rather than of people.

         These photographs were taken at my college, Canara Engineering College, Benjanapadavu.
       I agree its situated in a remote location on top of a hill, but during rainy season it turns into a landscape photographer's paradise.

These pictures stand testimony to the little slice of heaven called CEC Benjanapadavu. If pictures taken through a 2Mp Phone Camera can look like this, imagine what magic a SLR can create at such points. Canara turns into a semi hill station during the rainy season with the occasional misty days where your vision area reduces to a foot's radius. Its also a Bird Photographer's dreamspot as the greenery and foliage provide perfect natural perches for the native avian species. The birds here are terribly bold and don't even fly away when you approach them. Well future canarites, gear up if you are a bird ethusiast. Stay tuned for my next post. Till then take care.