Marriages and ceremonies

by Rishi on Friday, June 10, 2011


When I was young, marriage ceremonies were irritating. I wasn't jealous or something, it was the atmosphere in the mandapam, I wasn't very comfortable with it. But nowadays, marriages are becoming fascinating experiences.

In a recent marriage, I was sight-ing a girl. She looked quite good. Awesome, actually. Her hair was jet black, her face was like the moon, her... well, I'll write more about that somewhere else. I was very careful not to get caught staring. Suddenly, a sappa figure near her saw me and made an ugly face. Maybe she thought I was looking at her! As goes the saying, "nalla figure kooda irukura sappa figure podra scene iruke!?!!"  I sighed. Getting caught by the good-looking girl would have been better.

During another function, since there were no good-looking girls, I was just smiling at everyone, cause I really get confused with distant relatives. So why bother? Smile to them all :) Time-to-time someone would ask me questions like "How is it going?", "What are you studying", "Why are you studying in Chennai? Didn't you get a engineering seat here?". I was blabbering some answers.

Suddenly, an aunty, a somewhat-distant relative, caught me red-handed with her question, "Do you know who I am?"

I told, "Yeah… You are….", expecting her to complete it. She did not. She let me stammer  for a while, laughed and then introduced herself. Whew! At least she didn’t get pissed off.

Since I had finished dinner (the actual reason why I was there), I rushed home before another such event could occur.

Brainy by birth

by Rishi on Sunday, May 15, 2011


Note: This article has nothing to do with caste discrimination. If there seems to be any implication, that's probably on your own mind.

Some people are wondered if they are brainy by birth. There is a good chance that they maybe. I am an average college student, and I used to wonder how some people are able to score mercilessly-high marks. I have also noticed that almost half of such people are Brahmins.

When I was surfing the web for some random stuff, I went through the Wikipedia article on Brahmins, which said that Brahmins had genetically evolved to be more intelligent than others, due to their involvement with studies and stuff for thousands of years!

On a study conducted by the University of Florida, it was found that Brahmins had a high tendency to carry genes related to intelligence. Russians and Ukrainians had a similar tendency but not as much as Brahmins. This was also found in some tribes of central and south India.

But intelligence alone isn't the key to development. Development requires hard work and also creativity. Neither the Chinese nor the Americans have these genes and I need not tell you about their development. But still, being born with intelligence doesn't hurt, right?  ;)

Call them thayir sadham or sambhar sadham, but you still have to accept the fact that they are more intelligent than you! :)

First day on internship

by Rishi on Monday, May 2, 2011


I was frustated once again when the security asked "Internship na?". These genius guys worked at an IT park and didn't know what an internship is!

"Oru training madhiri sir", I told. Ash, who had come with me, showed his offer letter to the security, "Idho paarunga offer letter".

"Aapar letter na?", the security asked as he looked at it. Ash had much more patience than me, he tried to explain him what an offer letter meant. "Oho", the security told, as if he suddenly understood the 3-page Terms & Conditions of the company at one glance. He got my offer letter too and 'checked' it with a suspicious frown. Finally, he was convinced that I and Ash were not here to bomb the park.

He used his card to open the 2-and-half-foot-tall glass doors, which seemed useless to me, I could walk over it. But still, an IT park needed all this to be an IT park.

We got to the 8th floor, where we were stopped by another security, who mistook internship for interview, and asked us to sign the interview candidates list. After a few minutes, we were fortunately rescued by an employee of the company, who knew what an intern was and that we were interns. He guided us into the company . Two other people from MIT Chrompet joined with us. We were given our own ID cards. Thank God, I thought, I needn't have to convince securities about opening glass doors any more.

Our host's speech had some unnecessary accents which was irritating. Worse, he accentuated our names. He gave an 'interesting' tour of the office - cubicles, some-acronym lab, cafeteria, and something else which I don't remember. The dialogues which my brain decided to store were, "Free lunch is provided for interns", "You could have biscuits and coffee at the cafeteria anytime",  "Do you have a bank account? So that we can credit your stipend".

Later, there was a supposed-to-be-interesting talk by another guy, who told us the usual back-then-we-didn't-get-all-facilities-you-guys-are-too-lucky talk the elder people give. I wanted to tell him, back-then-you-didn't-have-all-competition-you-guys-were-too-lucky, but I didn't, maybe because I was tired and hungry or I fell asleep due to the air-conditioning.

We were introduced to our mentors, me and Ash to one and the two MIT guys to another. The mentors were kind enough to excuse us for lunch, after briefing us about the two projects which we had to complete. The free lunch didn't taste good even though it was free, but it was still better than hostel food, except that we couldn't have more than one appalam per person. I guessed maybe appalam was costlier than air-conditioning.

When we came back to our cubicle with a yawn, the girl next to me was checking out Facebook and LinkedIn. (Earlier she was busy - reading The Deccan Chronicle on one tab and Gmail on another, besides the chat window which popped out from a corner of the screen. Multitasking!)

I sat before my machine, the internet was very fast, surprisingly faster than the intranet! So, you know, like every other human, I too was tempted to do some useless browsing. After checking Facebook, Gmail, Ymail, Blogger, WordPress and some other sites, I opened NetBeans and began to code. My mentor came and advised me not to starting coding until I get a clear idea of what I intended to build. He even told some Software Engineering principles and terms (If you are a CSE/IT student, you might know how I would have felt then).

With tired ears, I and Ash went to have coffee again (again x 4 actually). The MIT guys were there and complained that their mentor expected too much out of them. The poor guys had made notes which ran to two pages. Paavam, I thought. We suddenly realised we had worked too much for the day and stepped out. And that was my first day on internship.