लेखन

On this 15th August, afternoon, I was sipping on a tea at a roadside stall, sitting on a bench, waiting for a colleague, when I heard an aged female voice over my head, 'चहा पाजतु का दादा' ('would you help with some tea'). Before I could realize that there was a fairly old couple, woman having a limped leg, and old man, mostly her husband in 70s, were asking the two cab drivers for some tea, the cab drivers responded, 'पाजतु ना' (sure why not). I generally have a strict rule of not heeding to the pleas of beggars (and I have my moral position on that considering the beggar mafia openly ruling the streets in Mumbai), but once in a while some one catches your attention and you just can't help stopping yourself from doing something if not just giving away 2 rupees. This time the instant assurance of the cab driver to buy them two cups of tea caught my eye and especially ear. The old couple did not look exactly like beggars, their clothes were fine for someone ...

It's been several months now that we have been brainstorming about the logo and caption. We all were thinking on lines of both creativity and value offerings. Gautam was continuously thinking on lines of how to communicate imagination and implementation parts simultaneously, the left and right of the brain. Many tag-lines popped up, but always there was something missing. Finally, me and joy took up these two words from Gautam and simply put a dot between them. It sounded so crisp! 'Imagination.Implementation'! Meanwhile, many of us were trying to come up with the design ideas. For me, playing with various shapes of 'K' and using whatever minuscule knowledge of calligraphy/typography I had, became my regular pass-time to keep myself awake in gaseous classrooms. In later stages, I got stuck on the idea of creating a character out of K that can personify the values we worked on so long. Finally emerged the k-man that is so carefree, cheerful, and aesthetic. Joy took t...

A very unplanned trip to Agra turned out to be pretty eventful. Having considered lot many people to join in, it actually ended up with only two of us die hard travelers to go on our own. Firstly, not getting on the spot tickets of train to Agra, I got into a tourist bus, that had its entire plan of the Agra-Mathura-Vrindavan trip pre-planned. Here is a short picture story. First encounter is this huge Agra Fort which took three Mughal generations to build up. And we are allowed to see only 1/3rd of it! Right in front of the fort is this hurriedly clicked, statue of Ch. Shivaji Maharaj. Aurangzeb would have never thought that once his prisoner, Shivaji, who made a great escape from this mighty fort would be standing as a proud statue in front of the fort itself! Then there are several huge and beautiful buildings inside the fort. Notice the Taj Mahal in background. This must be the only view for Shah Jahan himself for his last seven years spent imprisoned here :( . Taking the Hot Seats...

Yesterday we went second time to a mall bit far from office to complete the earlier failed mission of watching this 3D movie, Clash of the Titans. On ticket counter, we were first told that evening show was house full. Then we asked for a night show, and were told there isn't any show then and the gentleman handed us the pamphlet of all movie schedules. We checked on the nearby digital kiosk and also on the printed schedule to be sure of the show timings. Then went to second counter, and asked the lady for the night show tickets, and without any problem got the tickets for back seats. In fact this show was hardly 20% full, wonder how the evening show became houseful. But the biggest wonder/blunder is yet to come. On the entrance we were stopped for having a laptop bag along with (we had went straight after the office). In spite of having checked the bag, we were not allowed, because laptops were not allowed inside! Then we asked for keeping it at the baggage counter. But then, the...

Its been about six months since I have been distanced form the regular spheres of open source and language computing community, partly by choice, largely inevitable. It was obvious that contributions will decline after leaving Red Hat. Life at IIM has also been busier than expected. Problem with student life is that it gives you some degree of freedom, but at same time, puts enough constraints to ensure the under utilization of that freedom. Feeling a bit sorry for missing the hat-trick for foss.in. It would have been third consecutive year of participation had I been able to do so this time. Hope things have been as interesting as ever at foss.in 2009. Anyway. Meanwhile the only significant touch with foss has been being on the user side of it. I haven't found any instance of any linux distro (in use by students) on campus except the one I am running, that too as a parallel machine. Even the B-school guys seem to be reluctant to leave the windows world. I used to wonder why many o...

It wont be easy for many people to believe that I could cook, but last night I tried this adventure once again. The story started out with some heavy snacks in the evening that made me and Sandy very full. So we both were not interested in having a proper dinner. I planned to make something like omelet to carry on the night and avoid going out to a regular hotel. Later on it came out that even Sreedhar Anna was not willing to go out and Pyadu had also came to our place. So plan for my personal omelet got canceled and Anna suggested rice and egg-curry. Since it was Tuesday Pyadu could not have egg due to his own rule to do so. So rice could not be made plain. It had to be something that can go alone. So the Khichadi/Masala Rice was the only option. Since Anna cannot even make a tea(he can at least boil the water which my some other friend cannot), it had to be me to take the charge of kitchen. It wasn't my first attempt to Khichadi. I had learned a bit about Indian style cooking by...

It was a lazy Saturday and I spent a lot of time playing around with the layout of this blog on a frustratingly slow home wifi connection until I got settled into this fairly well structured design. Next I kept wondering how to categorize the posts, when I finally looked into a proper source i.e. Help section on blogger itself. Should I have started posting, I would have noticed the labels field. Anyways, its a Sunday early dawn and I am still up, not cared to get up in morning. Earlier today(or should I say the last day now) the bandwidth played bad on me. My email client kept complaining about mail deliveries and still I got acks for few of the mails. Bearing all the trouble I still managed to reply on the Lohit fonts issue. Now going back to relax to a movie , goodnight everyone. [LC: not again.. I am struggling to publish even this post.. is someone from reliance broadband reading this?]

Here is the festival of Dahi-Handi, celebrated as a birthday of hindu god Lord Krishna. Some dudes here called it Yogurt Pot festival for a change. The video shows the fun part for which we had to wait for something like three and half hours. All of the rest part and even before that people were just dancing on the beats of a localized DJ. Of course we were not part of the dance. The huge crowd right in the middle of a crossroad and the entire traffic had been diverted, but still we were less bothered about going home before the end of game happened. Although they had to lower the height of Dahi-Handi (the pot they are suppose to break to steal the Curd/yogurt inside) since none of the crew had enough man power to reach up to the original height, it was still a game of huge physical expertise and skills. The dudes rocked it in their first intended attempt without a single mistake or hassle.

Now this is obviously a sequal of the earlier one the "sleeping late", infact the consequesnce of it. Generally when I sleep.. its almost next to being dead. Nowadays mosquetoes don't bite me or atleast I don't mind cause as said already.. I'm next to be dead. But it really matters when someones knocking on the door while I'm sleeping inside. It happened today morning when a friend of me had to call me up on a cell phone next to my ear after ringing the door bell for several minutes. While "sleeping late" was developed in school days, "waking late" started in college, where attending first lecture was never manditory and I always managed to get the second lecture only 5-10min late. But now I'm just afraid of it, cause its making difficult for me to attend morning meetings in office.. anyways one more time I have decided to get rid of this habit from next week. wish me good luck.