8. Should I, should'nt I ....Sleep

They came, they taught, we slept ……this is the story of every engineering student(may be every student even). “Hall sleepers”(of the lecture hall) is a new generation of people, a new race with an attitude, still in it’s evolving stages. Will come back to this later.

Have encountered so many profs over the 6 semesters, there’s one common element in all of ‘em. That being, their incapability to understand a student’s reluctance to voice his/her questions in a huge classroom!! Come on man, these people have done such superb specializations, done double-triple PhD’s , earned god knows how many gold medals, but cant figure out this one basic thing! We (students of my college) are all habituated to sitting in a normal classroom (one of max strength 60) all our lives. Even there it’s only after a lot of hesitation did I manage to call a lecturer and get a question answered. Here, it’s a lecture hall, a class with 300 capacity, with about 200 people sitting!

The professor, like stands on the podium, 50 feet away from the nearest row of students, speaks into a mike and uses a huge slide projector and all sorts of gadgets to substitute a basic chalk + blackboard combination. How is this different from, say , a distance learning program, or an online education program? Even there you get to see a screen with slides from a power-point file and the interaction is one way. I am comparing it with distance learning also , because many studs ( I am one of them ;) ) aint accustomed even now to this environment and end up sleeping through most of these lectures. Now sleepers come in 2 baskets themselves, one group of sleepers are the ones who don’t care going to the lecture hall and sleep in their rooms, while the other group care enough to come to the Lecture hall but have a good nap there. In fact, distance learning is still better, don’t have to go through this drudgery of “only physically” attending these lectures while being “mentally snore-driven”. Then there is this guilt feeling that crops up every now and then.

Rahul - Arey, we should not sleep in our rooms during lectures man, we should try to atleast attend lectures.

Me – What’s the use bey, u’ll go and sleep there too.

Rahul – But that gives a different, some sort of a satisfying feel dude, we can say that we atleast tried. Atleast get to see girls naa. i know whom you look at all the while....You Chupa rustham, bastard!!!

Me –yeah right! but she's like always first row baap, hard to catch a glimpse of hers from the last benches sadly :( Anyway, see the practicality behind it, at least you get to sleep in the cosy blanket in your room, you need to crouch, bend and sleep at awkward angles over there …. Hahaha

Rahul –The profs are always armed with those sleep missiles in their tongues baap. The minute they start talking, we all fall down immediately..lol

Me- It’s more like a lullaby, the moment you hear it, it takes over you and closes your eyes for you. These people can be great hypnotists man…..or they can even offer Sleep-therapy.

Rahul- Ya, that will be great. We’ll open a new health service, caption “For all the sleepless people of India…Come, welcome into the world of Signals, Probability and Microelectronics….we have experts from all over the country, gold medalists…If you don’t fall asleep in 5 minutes, we’ll give you back your money.(by the time you wake up , we’ll be off with your money …LOLZ) ”.

Very few professors even care or give a thought to the student’s inhibitions to raise his/her voice in a classroom. A better communication mechanism between the prof and the students will certainly improve the student’s learnability and throughput of the system as a whole. Till a solution to this problem is found, you’ll find lecture halls filled with sleepers and girl – gazers like me ;)

7. A Little less conversation :)

Here’s the scene, 3 guys (we are BTech students), Me tarak and srikanth goin out to get ourselves cell phone SIM cards. We move out of the hostel to the auto stand nearby, one of the auto drivers comes up and asks “kidhar?”. We say sector – 11. The guy, first shouts something in gujarati to all the other drivers in the stand, then says 30 bucks no less. None of them will agree to take us for 20 now, whereas it actually costs even lesser than that. Fuming, at the first TOPI we are made to wear for the day, we hop in. The auto starts

Tarak - Bloody fellows, it’s a monopoly they run, they know we are helpless, cant go anywhere else for autos (our college being in a semi-jungle doesn’t help).
Me - Once we pass out of here lets start an auto business, make a new stand, with 10 brand new autos….caption will be “ faster than a Ferrari, cheaper than a Maruti"
Srikanth (gonna call him Sri frm now on) – Arey seriously baap, if i don’t get placed this May, then my parents are gonna kill me. i haven’t prepared for any competitives, my score is way below Danger Line…
Me – No probs bey, our auto master plan will succeed u see….
Sri – Stfu.
Tarak- guys guys, lets talk crap, we do it the best. After 3 years in college, the best thing that has happened to us is, the fact that we can talk loads and loads of non sense and make people listen to it as well. It’s a refined art u know !
Me – ekdum right. We have discussed on so many issues, below the belt ones, above the thigh ones ;), extremely volatile ones too, not to forget.

Then we see a few girls (some cute some not) walking on the footpath.

Sri - Gujju girls have no dress sense.
Tarak – tht is ok, our AP girls have no sense at all.
Me – hahaha….look at that female, wearing Pink…..GAWD… I hate pink
Tarak – My dad bought me a Pink T with hearts all over it, I told him “ dad never ever buy me anything tht is even close to pink , leave alone hearts.”
Me – he’s from Old school naa, will take time to understand why pink sucks. Did u know purple is a gay colour ?
Sri – really ! how ? when ? where ?
Tarak - :o wow, this is news
Me – It’s not some flash news tht has cropped up all of a sudden, it’s been there for years. In Spain I believe, if u wear a purple T and walk around, guys are gonna come and flirt with u…what a situation that would make right
Sri – I mean, here we are, conservative Indian guys, very conscious of ourselves, being chased by guys in a country where it’s all legalized, so cant even goto the cops :)
Me – I tell u, this colour choice fiasco will never end….all colours will gradually be taken by some new category of ppl (I meant a category with a newer and more weirder sexual inclination than all the existing ones right now..not being racist baap..spare me tht crap)
Tarak – ya, tomorrow , u will get up and realize,all we can wear is the silver coloured suits which we see aliens wearing in futuristic movies.

Sri – don’t u think all possibilities have been exhausted already, I mean there are just 2 genders, and so total possibilities that arise are 3 right….there cant be any more I guess…what a discussion we are having !!! this should be recorded (they dunno tht I am recording it, mentally)
Me – U never know, there may come a day when all homos who support arranged homosexual marriages will form a group….say the arra-homo group( in tamil arra means half btw) and say all people supporting it must sport Yellow !!! There u go, Yellow goes out of our clothes colour dictionary then, doesn’t it !
Tarak – So many of the top German people were gay, Hitler, wagner (a musician..mozart types) ….The ‘swastika’ – or the Mother cult which hitler started has its roots in homosexuality. The strength and will they get from male to male attraction is what they use to make their race superior, is what the swastika group is all about.
Sri – Don’t know anything bey, tomorrow we may become gay ourselves, if we don’t find good gals now.
Me –arey its better to be nono–sexual than homo-sexual baap, seriously.
Tarak – Just over heard a guy telling his girl, “why do u want that one, it’s so expensive ! ” to which she says “all my friends have it so I want it , that’s it !”
Me – demanding gals, ever ready to give guys….that is the story of an Indian pair 
Sri – antha ledu, have seen girls take the lead and pay the money in many cases.
Me – This is news, not happened to me till date ;)
Tarak – as if u have a girl…we are all the “not looked at” crowd dude. We are a part of the GGTP group (Good guys but Too polite) Good guys who are too polite and non-interfering types, so cant approach and talk to girls!
Me – And simple funda, as long as we don’t talk to them, they wont know we are interested, so they wont talk…..giving rise to the ever increasing phenomenon of “one side Love OSL”.
Sri- the movie “arya’ tries to give a good color to this OSL, but in reality it’s really the most frustrating and ‘cant do anything’ type condition really.

IF u liked this conversation, I will update it further, with more interesting stuff. The auto can go on and on u know, with us discussing stuff inside….plz keep my auto running.

6. Confession

The wise men say,it is always better to tell the truth. When you are hiding a certain something from a person (can be for various reasons) , it is said that telling the Truth will unburden you , give you peace of mind. The very reason you may be hiding a secret ( a bad phrase ! ) is because of the feeling of uneasiness and the uncertainty with which the other person would respond upon revealing the secret. Mind you, I reiterate that the reasons behind keeping a secret are best known only to you, so you are the best judge of the situation and no one is in a better position than you to take the decision. Doesn’t matter what the wise men say, you need to have the power to keep or reveal a secret after weighing the pros and cons of it and also primarily after you have evaluated whether the other person will be able to handle it or not.

As Jack Nicholson says in the courtroom during the movie “A few Good men” - “You want the Truth, You cant HANDLE the Truth !!!” Now here is a big time issue, how can you make a decision for someone else ? Is it alright to decide for another person without letting him/her know ? One may say that it depends on the kind of secret , the circumstances and the current situation. That is precisely the point right !! Taking all these factors into account (or a few of ‘em , whichever is relevant ) , it is you who get to do what feels right. There may be a cloud of uncertainty around, getting it cleared will be a major task. Talking to people whom you confide in helps, but it’s only through retrospection that you can have a satisfying answer. Think, re-think about it till a rational conclusion is arrived at.

Some secrets are taken to the grave. WHY ? If people always confessed and told their secrets out loud , the world would not be the way it is today. If Bush says “ I want a lot of OIL, those Iraqi bastards aint givin it to me , so I’ll fuck them and yank every drop of OIL outta their balls !” , think of what will happen……I cant even imagine . But this is an open secret. There are secrets which remain in the back of our heads, they do come to the fore front once in a while, we think it out, give our heads a little strain and decide its best it remains a secret and push it back to where it came from.

Actually me calling it secret is in itself not doing justice to the topic I am writing about. It would be better if I would call it “Concealment of Impactable Knowledge” . Because the word “secret” gives you a pre conceived notion which is already in our heads c/o films and TV…..It has a certain negativity, an element of unpleasantness attached to it.

5. Free Style

Does the almighty stop the rotation of the earth for a while ? Or is it just me...Why is it that the one hour CA (comp. Algorithms) class seems to last until eternity!!!!

Just before an exam, we scamper around learning this and that and how we wish that we had that extra minute or two. We always think of the wonders culd hav done with those minutes.....:)
The thing we need to note is, that the lack of attention towards the activity we are pursuing gives a notion of an increased time span. We feel there's more time at hand when we dont do the work witha level of concentration and dedication. After having read millions of logically derived mathematical propositions, you can have a chuckle at this axiom that i am gonna propose.

{Attentivity + Purposefulness + Dedication }
proportional to
{ 1 / (Time left to pursue the purpose}

The classic example I'd like to give is what my friend used to say when we got bored during the drab lectures " Paanch(5) minute se watch dekhroon, Do(2) minute hi hua kya rey bhai ".........

There will always be exceptions to this seemingly weird statement,but try to think why an exception becomes one and the truth comes out, the law applies even there, in an indirect fashion :P