The business of friendships

Get and Give back . Good as well as Bad. Have I reached a point in my life when hi-bye friends are no longer over-rated (or given their true due) by me? The passions have reduced, the possessiveness has gone, the feeling of the need to maintain (read as compromise for) "friends" who were really not loved has just vanished.

In school, friendships form naturally, without any selfishness, full of innocence, without even knowing what a friend means. We give and take easily, no complications, no expectations. We grow up with our bestest friends, forming bonds that will stand the tides of time. Middle school, high school we still just yet might be lucky enough to be sensible enough. We might meet unsavory friends in between. We may learn how to take care of situations like that or we may not. 

Then comes college. Freedom and new friends. Groups are formed, new relationships are forged. We begin to understand what we expect from friends. Just the expectation makes it something slightly different from true golden friendship. Call this silver if you want. We hang out with each other to hang out, for fun, for great times, "together". The innate human nature for companionship kicks in. We look for people like us, we no longer make friends out of the blue, like when we were kids. 

How many of our childhood friends are like us? Aren't we all totally different now yet love each other? But if we had met the same people when we were in college would we have ended up like that? It is human nature to change. Change our opinions, tolerances, understanding. More than anything, its laziness and necessity. Two things that really aren't separate. The more number of people we meet, the more friends we make, the more easily do we lose some other friends. When we have someone else to have fun with, we no longer see the necessity and the work need to maintain someone else a little less fun and maybe a little irritating.

The red thread wants us to meet so many people, talk with so many of them and end up as their friends, weather we match or not. Well there's the mistake. It becomes so important as we grow up and meet so so many people to choose and choose wisely whom we want to have as friends. Its no longer kindergarten when just about anyone has a chance of being your best friend. We are no longer Kuvempu's aniketana's, we are now people with our own opinions, tolerance limits, tastes and priorities. There is no longer time for everyone. There is no longer us ready to adjust, change a bit of us to accommodate a new acquaintance into our closer circle. We can no longer compromise but want only people specifically suited for us, our time and our tastes.

The best part is despite all the complications in making new friends, the true old friends remain the same way. We can talk anytime, we still find time for each other, we still listen to each others crazy stories and still are the bestest of friends. That must be the whole point of keeping some people at a distance, since there can be no way to maintain so many friends, unfortunately, we have to lose some. 

My Sleepless Night - for Eternity

I had never gone a whole night sleepless. Never in such a party nor a night-out the day before exams of crazy subjects like field theory or telecommunications networks ! who in their right mind set the textbooks we had i wonder for those few subjects, Add microwaves and radar too ! Digressed, getting back, i always wanted to have a totally sleep-free night. Once, after shifting to blr i had stayed up till four thirty and slept and woken up pretty late, my office has very flexible timings, i love it for that, so cant count that . The timings come with the sun. If am up till 6 then thats a whole night. So tonight and its alread 5 45 i guess i did it. N y ?

To what glory ? None, save that the sleep of may 17th had caught up with me a night earlier . Previous night i slept from 8pm to 8am. Hold on a min ! I looked outside and its so full of light already . The sun's up by 5 45. And the light, its pink and cream . I want to look at this light everyday.

While i was busy watching how i met your mother , the night has got transformed. But season 6 episode 24 was worth it. For all the himym fans out there, this episode has 2 surprises, one we guess, other, legen------dary. Might have been sleepless, but i did not lie on my bed, toss and turn, it was a sweet time, never realized how fast it slipped by to awaken the sun. It is time to stand out for some more minutes, look at the sky while its still as full of light but not yet bright , enjoy the breeze and the quiet and the occasional glimpses of the early waking humans, saw just a priest actually .

So my first ever absolute sleepless night comes to end in the start of a new day. :)

Cont. Part 2

     The searching continued till around 2 30 that night i blogged last . . . Did find some interesting data . There is one more consultancy which say they would help me out totally, get this, for no fee ! That is very surprising . I will be visiting their office monday morning and the "professionals" monday noon . Yeah , thats gonna be a busy monday .
   
Vtu transcripts are gonna be one more story with the bank from where i took the dd getting closed early today and morrow, may day, being a big holiday for the bank whose weekly day off is monday. Definitely no monday blues for them !

So thats the deal i have got for myself and i feel this should be enough to get me packing :) I still wonder about the education loans students take keeping their homes as collateral in banks . The needs serious thought and full confidence on our ability to pay the principle, interest and compound interest back . Somehow i dont think i will do that . My mom will pay my fee, Germany is not going to be a costly affair :)

Why do foreign universities seem so alluring ? Is it a wish of most young people to get away to a totally different place for a while with no one we know nearby , to take care of us so that we are entirely on our own ? There will be no one to depend on, everything will depend on the friends we make there, there wont be any relations in case of emergencies or your school friend to come over when you are bored .... Do i really want to go? Ha ha just kidding, yes i want to . It kind of lets us believe in ourselves when we can manage in such a different environment to survive on our own , happily , makes a huge difference, gives us the confidence that we can do anything and makes us ready to handle life, i guess .

That's it for tonight , eagerly waiting to see the oktoberfest ! (lets drink to it ! cheers ! :)

To Germany, In a hurry !

     The dreaded arranged marriage for any Indian girl can occur at any age after 18 . I had told my parents with no room for doubt that i would not be getting married until after my post graduation . Being Indian parents means they listen to everybody else regarding the future of their child except the 22 year old adult who is their "kid" . So it does not entitle me to get angry on them when they wanted to "show(case)" me to the parents of a guy who is in the USA, who planned to come back to India and start an industry .

      The row that followed when they tried to fool me by saying they had to come to bangalore and i did not have to come to mysore as they had "some" work spurred me to decide that i had to leave immediately if i did not want to get tied up .  So started my search on the vast but sometimes so useless internet . USA and UK admissions are closed, that leaves Germany as a good option . Consultancies calls start pouring in once we type higher education in google search and drop our numbers . There is one particular consultancy which seems very professional and indeed charge a very professional fee of INR 25000 !

     That meant i had to do the searching and applying myself which might take time while the consultancy assured me that i would be able to join this years September batch if i let them take care of all the procedures while taking care of just the fee transfer . I have decided to search tonight full . Night-out trying to save a substantial sum of money . By morning if am no closer to the methods of applying to German universities for the courses i want, i will be giving the professionals a call to help me fly .

I do or I do NOT

                         
There was a gold fish. Pretty dazzling in the cool blue water. Swimming with others, a happy existence.

One day... A shiny bait dropped down, completely unexpected to our character. It came on when this goldie was alone, leading it to make its own decisions. Our passionate swimmer liked the bait so much that it just couldn't stay away. Isn't it always that way? Why are so many addictions unhealthy?

Anyway, when intelligent brain blessed humans ourselves do the wrong things knowing its wrong, what could a small pretty young fish do? To do it justice, it didn't bite the bait. Survival comes first passion next. So the lovely thing decided to be near the attraction but far enough so as to not do anything foolish.

Its days became exciting, a whirlwind of wild imaginations and at the same time repeatedly told itself to be in control. It went on and our goldie had never had had so much fun, it had never known something so bad could entice it so much.

All things. good or bad, must come to end, albeit very sadly. The bait went away. The fish spending its entire life in the water had never felt so lost. It wondered how its days were, before it had felt so attracted to the bait. Days felt empty. It kept waiting for the bait to be back.

It was a good fish. Realized how lucky it had been to have experienced so many feelings and yet not to have got hurt. It went quiet for a few days. Just drowned in the way it had felt, took its time to slowly emerge from the aura of passion. It still wonders how it would have been to have taken the bait. What was there in the cards on the table?

Is Addiction really a choice? Yes, it is, a little fish told me so.

Marathon

We did have a normal marathon where we are supposed to run (i walked a lot more than running) a few km . But this post is gonna be about the photo-marathon which got over about an hour back.

Mysore- and all its photo worthy places were invaded today by the event participants. We had three themes and one photo had to be submitted per theme. Duration:5 hours.

Initially I was pretty relaxed, thinking 5 hours is succccccccch a long time. But time ran by faster than Usain Bolt can ever do. And the photos to fit the topics were not easy to come by either! First I went to a few places i knew and took a few snaps of the hardworking Mysore people. Then started my handwork! In the hot summer sun we just started roaming the city searching for clickable spots :)

Devaraja Market was a hot favorite as I found plenty of my fellow camera people just loitering everywhere over there, the caps which the organizers had provided being our sole savior from sunstroke.

I met a few contestants in a couple of other places too causing me to ditch the famous spots. I went out of my way (literally :) and visited places i never knew existed in Mysore though i am staying here since my birth!

More than finding out about Mysore's secrets, how hot the sun can be, how different a sherbet near Lashkar Mohalla is (the above snap was where i drank the sherbet) and how sweet our Mysoreans can be in letting us take snaps I learnt if not how to take a great snap, how not to ruin one :) The purpose of a camera all these days for me was just to click photos of myself, friends and family for memories. But photography can be such a lovely hobby.There is definitely much more to it than see it, like it, take it! There were so many stops while i was zooming by in my dio to take photos that at the end it was a real problem to choose which ones to submit.

All i can finally say is, May the judges love my snaps :)

An hour of E&C- Dont be scared !

 

 Time just runs sometimes... Before i knew it, it was 2010 and March already!Haven't been blogging much, oops, haven't been blogging at all and finally its time to make a comeback .. The below 'data'  was written while listening, with no other choice, to an embedded systems class on single custom processors. Here we go:

 "If one goes for a combination of guys we will definitely face problems. We will need a truth table to keep track of which truth has been told to whom. Therefore a custom single processor (read 'a handsome guy') with multi-purposes is implemented.

 He can be an adder( repairing things we break), multiplexer(decider of what we should wear based on situations), demux( buying all the clothes in the store though we selected just one), flip flop( being able to change according to our moods) , shift register( taking us to different places), counter( keeping count of our calorie intake) and a clock(saying we are not at much late even though we were, by an hour).

  Considering the guys group as a finite state machine, we can move from a state zero (most handsome) and based on output to different states (guys of course) , while an output high (smiles and joy) causes us to orbit (loop) around that state :)

 Now if we form our state table, with our moods as inputs and the outputs from the handsome state machines, we will be able to determine which combination works. The FSMs states too come into account but thankfully guys will be at a low or a high, easy to interpret!

 The ultimate development in this field is a FSMD. A FSM with data. Someone who can understand how we work, whats the best way to interrupt us, how not to overload, how to turn the heat up, how to compile us and finally, how to work together :)"

That is it, the bell rang and i had to shut my book close, hope you enjoyed the class :)