Room-hunting......

The onset of the second year (pre pre final year!!!, a sub conscious voice within me involuntarily corrects me…) brought with it a rather unique experience for me --- that of room-hunting…

Now, it so happens that every year, the authorities take the immense trouble of allotting rooms to each student in different halls according to some criteria they consider as suitable.... and on the other hand, as for us, spending a whole year with unknown, incompatible roommates is nothing short of a horrific proposition, that is why the students refuse to abide by the actual allotment scheme… that is why, every year, at the very beginning of the odd semesters, just after the formal room allotments, the hostels get transferred into a free trading market for rooms --- every kind of activity they taught you in economics is present, be it bargaining, plain trading or bartering, you'll find here....

This market does possess quite a few similarities with the bigger economic systems that we have had the chance of being acquainted with during our lessons in economics, like presence of differential sectors, different groups , bottom feeders, etc…. here are just a few instances--

1. There are different groups with different kinds of hold over the market--- some zones , by virtue of their superior strength in numbers, consequentially possess more bargaining power, while some others, due to presence of greater influence over the participants in the market, have greater trading opportunities….there are always some who do exercise their “connection” muscles, benefitting from their acquaintance with the previous possessors of the concerned property(read: rooms)…. And then, there are the usual bottom feeders, those which do not possess any bargaining power or influence in the market, and are nearly always left to scrap up the left overs…

2. There’s also an overall controlling authority, much like the government in an actual economy, which tries to maintain some amount of equality and justice in the market…in our case, those are the wardens and other college –appointed authorities entrusted with the responsibility of seeing to that the actual allotment sequence gets followed… they are overtly active during the initial stages of the market, however, their interest in the matter wanes within a week, and after that, its oly the free market forces that call the shots…

3.Tthere is always a fair amount of under-the-belt tactics for getting rooms---frequent stages of capturing rooms and exiling the bottom feeders, subsequent intervention by the controlling agency and restoration of the rooms to the rightful owners, then recapturing of the room once more, and so on…. One also gets to see a fair amount of double-crossings, under the table dealings( usually more than the permitted limit of people getting forced into one room) , threats , hard bargaining…..and everything which would put any market management assignment to shame….

This whole matter lasts for about a week or more, but ultimately, things settle down as most get their desired rooms or partners, while the remaining find it useless to protest, and thus have to compromise…. However, this real version of monopoly, sans the luck element, does serve as an interesting as well as an educating experience, I must say :)

Well, gotta go and clean up the mess in my alloted -cum- captured room now.....

so,

signing off....

Rishi....

My ad(hoc)ventures......still continued( this'll be the last one, I swear!!)

3. My tryst with CWD…

Recently got enrolled in the Bidhannagar Youth Computer Training Centre, hoping to become the next wiz in web designing… and everything was going on quite smoothly for a couple of months… I mean, with us enjoying the classes and learning quite a few interesting and new stuff like html and javascript and all that…and the instructor promising to move on to advanced designing with “Dreamweaver” very soon….
But as can be expected in the majority of cases, the dedication that the instructors possessed towards the students and their courses was on the wane…there were brief periods of complete inactivity, and though we integrated those inactive periods into our “gossip” time, still, it was really not worth travelling more than twenty kilometers just to hear some juicy stories…
The growing nonchalance of the instructors, their refuge in frequent “just-ask-me-if-you-have-a-problem-with-your-earlier-lessons” cases, quite a few instances of days where the previously mentioned sessions were all that was done in classes made us a bit skeptical about the future prospects of this course…and the instructors seemed contended to let us search for our doubts class after class without really coming up with anything…
And when all these factors were forcing us to rethink our future course of action, came a sudden stimulus in form of a demand from the institute, asking us to pay two installments for the course fee in order to continue with the course….so, already having paid around one and half thousand bucks and feeling convinced that the future classes were going to be no more interesting than what was going on now, I was confronted by a decisive question—what to do next?? The fact that I had always been a bit of a miser did contribute a bit…but mostly it was the other factors I mentioned before which forced me to decide that I ahd to quit this course…so on the very day they had asked to submit the next lot of installments, they got the message that I had decided to give up this venture for good….
So there ended my aspirations to become a web designer…well, not completely, ‘cos I did manage to learn quite a few important stuff during my brief stint as a student, but the fact remains that there indeed remained a lot to be covered….
So much for “Dreamweaving”……….
Signing off,
Rishi…

My Ad(hoc)ventures.....continued

2. It is common for college students to feel the cash crunch pretty much frequently…and I am no exception to this phenomenon. Some of my friends, who started giving out tuitions to kids in order to supplement their pocket money, inspired me to try out this means of earning some bucks for myself. Thus, I was able to add a second activity to my “have-to-do” list--- I had to get myself some kids to teach , and I would easily gain some bucks every month. I was not too much worried about the money I would be getting---after all, students from NIT, or R.E. College don’t come as cheap tutors, and the people know that…so, that was not the problem.

The real problem was scouting for guinea pigs who would willingly subject themselves to my attempts at teaching, or rather, campaigning for myself as a tuition teacher… I couldn’t find channels through which I could make it public, or atleast attract some attention. I am not the kind of guy who goes out and proclaims that he was ready to give tuitions—nah, that’s too cheap for my liking. So, I patiently waited, hoping earnestly that someone will have a brainwave like –“ Oh!! This boy’s from a good college, and he’s idle at the moment, so why not ask him to teach my daughter (ok, maybe son)....” and approach me with the request. But unfortunately no one noticed that, and I got no such requests… well, actually I got two, but accepting those would amount to travelling about thirty kilometers for three days every week throughout the three months of the vacation in the grueling summer heat; I do like a little bit of extra cash, but not so much that would make me accept such a daunting challenge…so I had to reject these offers for something more convenient (read: near home).

I did not have to wait for too long… the perfect opportunity was offered to me during a chance encounter with a former acquaintance… he literally cajoled me to teach him a few chapters of physics during the vacations as he was gearing up for some entrances at the end of the year… I was a little bit apprehensive—physics had always been my least favourite subject( I abhorred mechanics in all forms, and still do!), and I could never justify myself as an expert in teaching a subject which I myself was more than a bit uncomfortable with…nevertheless, I decided to give it a try… so I accepted the offer, without even mentioning any terms on my part…I mean, after all, he was my friend’s younger brother—obviously I couldn’t just go and ask him, “How much are you gonna pay me?”…it would have been really rude!! And then, surely he himself would broach on the topic when the time came… Thus I found myself trudging along to his place, twice every week, to explain to him the nuances of gravitation and waves and thermodynamics and all those stuff which I myself had not understood when I first studied them… I daresay I did quite a decent job, and we proceeded through waves and thermodynamics and calorimetry smoothly… at the end of one month of my first job, I was literally salivating to lay my hands on my first payment—the first time I would have earned anything by my own work!!! 
Unfortunately, pay day never came…I waited for a week, two weeks, three weeks, but there was not even a mention, even indirectly, that there should be a payment for all my exertions and toil…and by the time I had resigned myself to the fact that no one was paying me anything, not atleast now, two months had already passed, and I was getting more and more skeptical about how everything was going to turn out… for a brief period, I entertained the thought that maybe this stint as a teacher was meant to last only during the vacations, so perhaps I would be getting my payment at the end of the vacations, when I formally announce my resignation, and this thought was able to pacify me enough to continue my incentive-less job for a couple of weeks more, but after that, the sceptic in me won over, and I had to devise various excuses and yarns to avoid the classes…so one day I pretended to be out of station, another day I needed time for allotment issues, and on most other days, I had other important matters to take care of…and all the while, fervently wishing that this vacation ends so that I wash my hands off this “tuition”…..

But my student turned out to be a tough customer !!

He keeps on dutifully ringing me up every other day and asking me if I am free . No amount of veiled rebuff is enough to make him understand that I am no more interested in that job any more, not when it does not provide me with any incentive!!! But he persists, and so, on rare occasions, I still have to give in and carry myself to his house and explain all that stuff to him….. The last time I went there,I was determined to get the fact across that after college reopens, I would not be available.............                                                                                                                       But before I could say anything on the topic, he said, “You do come home for the weekend, don’t you?? We can continue the classes then…atleast one class? Please?”

So much for “resigning”……………

My ad(hoc)ventures…

I definitely am aware of the unsuitability of the title to this post…and the fact that if I were to start justifying my reasons for using it, it would probably take more than one post to make my intentions clear… so I am clearly side-stepping all those stuff here, and just for the general understanding, here I used the term ad-hoc to refer to “temporary”…I guess that would make the crap that succeeds this a bit more understandable…

This three month holiday was quite unique and different in quite a few ways -- being the longest one I ever have had,  quite unproductive, too, and probably the most depressingly boring vacations that I could ever have had!! It is the usual norm that students usually await holidays eagerly after a long stint at school or college, but perhaps this will be the first case witnessed by me when the students have been literally fed-up by these holidays and are yearning to return back to college…

Well, I already mentioned that perhaps these holidays were the most unproductive… that would not be quite literally true, because just like every other instance of a holiday, I did have quite a few activities lined up in my “have-to-do” list…and just like every other time, this time too, most of these activities were too unrealistic to be completed successfully…it’s not that I was not aware of the extremely low chances of my aspirations being realized…nevertheless, I persisted…with varying degrees of unsatisfaction as a consequence, though…

So now, as the three month long endurance test of patience draws to an end, I give to you an extensive detailed list of my (in)activities during this period ----

1. The foundations to this were laid a long time ago…even before I was aware of the existence of Slash, Santriani or van Halen, let alone their exploits with this wonderful instrument… perhaps it was the classy appeal of the instrument, or the fact that it was something that could be used as a suitable accompaniment with the fast-paced hindi tracks, which made it a much more coveted instrument than the bulky tablas that I was literally forced to learn during that time(no offence meant, though)…With time, I have learnt to respect the table as a really fundamental percussion instrument, and did learn it for a long time, but all that did never ever cause any reduction in my yearning to learn the  guitar… 

So it was natural, with a three month long holiday on the cards and a real scarcity of any productive activities to involve myself in, I made sure that buying a guitar and learning to play it would make it to the top of my list… but it was the learning part with which I messed up…

It was my plan to avail some of the online tutorials which teach you how to learn guitars(yeah, I know now, that was preposterous…) and I sure did act accordingly, downloading tutorials and theory books and videos…I downloaded everything that I came across so that there was nothing lacking in my arsenal(of tutorials)… thus armed, I began my quest to become a guitarist…

The first few lessons were easy enough… I mean, what’s the big deal in memorizing the names of the six-strings and stuff??

But then came the part where the videos kicked in… and though the tutor was an affable person with a patient face and an understandable accent, I somehow, even after repeated screenings of the video, failed to understand his fingering techniques..  and even though I tapped in my extensive resources of tutorials…I somehow couldn't help feeling that there were quite a few things that i was missing out......

Trudging through that section, I reached the part where they taught you how to read stave sheets, and this was a bigger disaster….because no manner of explaining could really knock anything inside my head, and all those signs and symbols really felt like pieces of alien language to me…and because all the subsequent lessons involved playing pieces of music written on those darned stave sheets, I had to abandon my idea of self-learning guitar …and to add to my woes, there was a humongous amount of money charged by those unfeeling telephone authorities  ( my habit of downloading extensive tutorials and high quality videos for my “self-learning” purposes also contributed to it, though...)

Finally, in the end, I succumbed to the traditional option of getting myself an instructor to teach me how to play…..and irrespective of the fact that we are proceeding at a frustratingly slow pace….I do feel I’m making some sort of progress, and that does satisfy me quite a bit….

SLOW DANCE......

I found this in an e-mail forward....claiming to be composed by a terminally-ill girl, whose last wish was to see how many people would receive her poem before she dies, so that she can convey to them how she thinks people should spend their lives (supposedly they are tracking the forwards to calculate the number of recipients).....

I definitely don't know if its just another ploy to illegally obtain e-mails by those omniscient spammers,or  if it really is what it claims to be---an email sent to respect the last wishes of a dying person...

But I really found the poem to be somewhat endearing...

Usually I'm not the  sensetive or sentimental type...but I thought that posting it here would make it a better way of honoring the last wishes of the author.......

so, here goes.....

Have you ever watched kids on a merry-go-round?

Or listened to the rain

Slapping on the ground?

Ever followed a butterfly's erratic flight?

Or gazed at the sun into the fading night?

You better slow down...

Don't dance so fast.

Time is short.

The music won't last.

Do you run through each day

On the fly?

When you ask How are you?

Do you hear the reply?

When the day is done

Do you lie in yourbed

With the next hundred chores 

Running through your head?

You'd better slow down

Don't dance so fast.

Time is short.

The music won't last.


Ever told your child, 

We'll do it tomorrow?

And in your haste,

Not see his sorrow?

Ever lost touch,

Let a good friendship die 

Cause you never had time 

To call and say,'Hi'

You'd better slow down.

Don't dance so fast.

Time is short.

The music won't last.


When you run so fast to get somewhere

You miss half the fun of getting there.

When you worry and hurry through your day,

It is like an unopened gift....

Thrown away.

Life is not a race.

Do take it slower

Hear the music

Before the song is over.

Did you like that?

waiting for your comments.....

till then..

signing off...

Rishi......

Let there be light??!!

They always ask you about your religious preferences…don’t they??

More often than not, I have my mailbox cluttered with invitations from various social sites(and frequent reminders, just to remind you that you forgot…..), imploring me to join their site just because they had managed to hoodwink one of my friends into obtaining my email address….and as if it’s not enough, they sometimes even happen to place subtle hints of how devastated that friend would feel if I happened to reject that particular invitation (“ please accept this invitation, or else X may think this and that….. ”)

And, the emotional fool that I am…. I can’t bear to see my friends disappointed, so I grudgingly accept all those requests and find myself engaged in filling up endless forms regarding every insignificant details about myself, like what I would like to eat, what people are likely to notice about me at once and all the usual bullshit…. I mean, does anyone even care to read them?? But then, keeping aside this “all-social sites-are-crap” tirade…let me come to something which I really wanted to talk about… a query demanding your religion with a cascading menu beside it, waiting for you to take your pick from among a dozen of options…the one where I always, unknowingly, unthinkingly select the “agnostic” option and proceed on into less intriguing questions of the form…

But, when it really comes to the part where I really try to ascertain my religious preferences( yes, I occasionally, indulge in introspection…so what?), I always draw up a blank… and I have failed to fill up this blank with something positive, something concrete, however hard I try…
I mean, its easy to proclaim before the world that you are an “atheist”…all you need to do is scoff at all forms of religion and religious gatherings, call every ritual unnecessary, declare every god-fearing man to be a superstitious imbecile, denounce every miracle in history as products of imagination, and swear by the omniscience and omnipotence of science….
But agnostic?? Nah, it’s a different ball game altogether… but only when you are a real agnostic, and not an atheist disguised as one just to evade the chances of being labeled as unsocial…. You really need to “not know”…
Yeah, I know it sounds like an idiot…but then, not knowing is the basic principal by which agnostics swear….
I have tried my luck at both being a devoted follower of god, and an indifferent cynic of religion, but unfortunately , both of them failed to hold my attention long enough….and soon I discovered, that this suspended-midway stage is the one which suits me best….I really revel in the thought that I "don’t yet know"….

That speaks tons about my preferences, doesn’t it??

Finally, let’s come to the finer points of agnosticism…as understood by me(uh oh....)

I really, genuinely feel sad and sympathetic for those people, who have been sucked into the world of meaningless rituals and superstitions without any conscious want of doing so… there are hundreds of people worldwide who have succumbed to the fanaticism of religious leaders into following a way of life, which is highly illogical, follow some stupid rules only because some bigoted people think it to be necessary, and shun science only because these bigots think that science and technology are just some heathens’ efforts to “divert the faith of people from the devotion of the almighty”…. And this restricted outlook is one of the several reasons which makes me wary of being a devout follower…like for example, what’s the point in fasting just because some distant relative( whom I had never heard of before, let alone seeing…) had suddenly deceased?? I mean, it’s really understandable if someone follows these rules and regulations with pure belief in the objectives, but I don’t get the point in forcing them on unwilling individuals… I doubt if such actions reinforce the faith in the minds of the followers, as they are believed to do…

But then again, is all these really some pointless superstition?? All this believing, worshipping, and rituals….have they really got no point?? Any atheist would readily answer-“any doubts?”… But as you are currently reading something written by a tried and tested agnostic, the answer will be different…..

And that is not because deep inside, I have some kind of potent faith in the existence of a superpower, not because agnostics are supposed to be midway( meaning they don’t out rightly deny or confirm anything. don't misinterpret the "midway" part.....);but because I really feel envious …envious of those people who can simply bank upon their faith in the Gods when the going gets tough, people for whom peace and solace is so readily available just because they believe that there is someone who is watching over them, people who lead a life of discipline and virtue, just because their religions direct them to do so in order to justify their lives, people whose beliefs make them tide over the bad and the worse without really losing hope…

Isn’t this what everyone wants?? Atheists might scoff and smirk…but then, that’s exactly what I don’t want to … ridicule everything and turn into a pessimist… I want to be happy…( I know, that’s definitely asking for too much…)

Sometimes, I really do feel that accepting the asylum of a religion is really worth all the trouble, because combined with it, you get the emotional support of hope, belief ; coupled with that, you get the directions of leading a good, peaceful life... sceptics may be sceptic about this(:P), but we all know that human nature is most conducive to choosing the wrong path when confronted with a particularly decisive choice between good and bad, so I really feel we do need a beacon to guide us sometimes.......

So, I guess, with such a constitution of equally balanced repulsion and attraction towards belief and religion… I guess the only path left before me is the one which I have been walking on till now…till I decide on my preferences( which, going by past statistics, is going to be a really long time)...

signing off...

Rishi....

Does it have to start with something??

I definitely have got no inkling as to what prompted me to commit such blasphemy- yeah, I am talking about me publishing a blog in English…. 
I still don’t have the slightest idea regarding what all rubbish I would be able to cook up, so that I can assuage my misplaced and misguided ego….Yup, I am referring to the one which keeps telling me, “Go on, write something….”

And last but in no way the least, I am writing this because I hate to see this place lying barren and empty for so long…. Believe it or not, this blog was created around a year back…and somehow, the lazy-bum of an “author” decides to inaugurate it after such a long time, and that too, with a complete pile of crap (you really should have believed it when you saw the url)….

So, all those who mistakenly or forcibly ( I guess that will be the only category :P) happen to be reading this post, please spare a moment to pray for the success of this endeavor of mine….(and then spend every day praying that the earlier prayer gets answered) …. Oh, and by success, I mean to say that at least half of my posts should be readable and understandable by people who have been forced to read them (I know nobody’s going to read it otherwise)….

So sit back,

relax…

And keep hoping that I do not pester you to become a follower…  :p

Signing off,

Rishi.....