I'm now an engineer!

An Electronics and Telecommunication Engineer!
Officially and all.

And of course when something has to be done, it has to be done in style.
So, First Class with Distinction it is.

And the First Class with Distinction it is for one of my best friends Danny!!
Here's more about her - the cutest frog in froggy land *grin*
Congratulations Danny!!!!!!

And congratulations Kathak :D

Punny Time

American's as we all of us know, drive on the wrong side of the road.
Ironically, that's the right side of the road!

Vampires

I met blood sucking vampires today.
They sucked my blood.
Drop by drop by drop by drop they took the blood.
And then blood filled an entire syringe.
And now I'm so bloodless in life.

And the bad part was, the vampires weren't even pretty :(

The year that was!

16th August 2004 blogger gave me a really warm welcome. It's been a long journey from the Take One days when I wasn't even sure if I'd post any more than 3-4 posts in a lifetime! It's been a year now, over 100 posts, no less!

Yes, this post will be one of those links-to-all-I-can and getting sentimental over every-fly-that-sat-near-me while I was typing kind of a post, so those who need to, please exit(0);

For starters, its been nice to see my readership grow from what it used to be in those August days! Like Smitha once said, a sister, one college mate, a token nice guy and two anagrams! That was us, those were the days. At this juncture I should claim credit for getting the sister and the college mate to blogging! It's not like I have hundreds of readers yet, though I would love to believe I do, yet as the readers trickle in, it does feel nice, you know :)
This past year has seen it all! A budding love story, which many believe to have started over late night and late morning chats over the yahoo messenger actually had its roots in here, where Mr. Smith, first met Mrs. Smith!

September brought back memories of old jokes from the 8051 days, broken backs, some recycled old posts, a Mills-and-Boonish tale in Part I and II, a bad attempt at writing babies in C to be bettered by the code generator we all love, some fame and what have you!

October saw heroics on display, with Mr. Bond introduced to all of us here along and Agent R's attempt to save the world.

November had more bad jokes, a love story gone bad, and Danny becoming a Superstar!

December should have been a bleak month due to the 7th semester exams but I was surprisingly quite prolific with stories by the sea, realisation of the value of 40, finally managing to complete Cesium 133 which was started wayyy back in October and lost track along the way. There was also some post for the heck of posting, the start of *regional language*... errr... Hindi blogging and before the new year came, we even managed to stereotype the folks from down South!

January was low on posts with only Sandy the loner-now-turned-code-generator worth a mention. February saw more of my obsession with the sea and a rather cheap attention-grabbing stunt! What is the height of depravity? A cheap, and cheap because its not original, un-original attention-grabbing stunt!!!

March not only kick-started the new F1 season, but also a new obsession for stories on obsession. All my favourite people were doing them, so I figured, "why not me?" And we moved on from the seas and the rains to the fields and the balconies! And pin drop Silence.

April was weird, to be honest! First I have this company called Mathematics falling all over me, and then some freak sells off the PM's residence for 35 million rupees... and another freak actually buys it! Secrets exchanged, Life-hits-you-on-the-head kind of realities, a lady in red, a monologue. Phew!! That with the journals all piling up, the project not yet documented and term end knocking at my door!

May was that time of the year when I should have been studying. A direct result was some insanity... actually a lot of it (!!), Aloha's that nobody understood, Anti-Engineering sms's exchanged at a frequency that could put an IGBT to shame, a story of that girl next door; memories of a hot summer afternoon.

Along with June came a couple of viruses. There was the meme and then there was the Ammani virus that has been spreading through the blogosphere faster than SARS ever did in China. Followed by an acknowledgement and another one!!

July got me a job, some tales on the job, random trivia, nostalgia and another micro-story. Come August and you meet Mr. LightBulb, my 100th post and, this ode to my blog, and to all the wonderful people I have come across! Thank you all who made my blogging for a year possible. Thanks Danny, Mathi Boy, Charlie, Pearl and other lurkers out there! Love you all!!!!!!

Cheers,
Kathak!

Nostalgia #2

Alert: Esoteric post coming up!

For the first time in 4 years I'm going to miss,

The Good,
1. The fight over whether we're "my young soldeirs of MIT" or that "soldiers follow orders blindly you should not just be soldiers"!
2. Shailar mama. And his speeches (which were apparently the same since times immortal) which I never understood.
3. Prof. Rane's: "aaj mee marathith bolnar nahi, aaj mein marathi mein nahi bolunga (he does like tautology... lol) kyon ki mein jaanta hoon ki humare bahut se vidyarthi desh ke alag alag kono se aaye hain .... etc etc"! Does that remind anyone of Chupke Chupke and "hum hindi bolte vaqt angrezi shabdon ka prayog uchit nahi samajhte".
4. And the "yaad karo woh sarhad pe khade sipahi jo barish ki parwah nahi karte, dhoop ki parwah nahi karte, thand mein humari raksha karte hain, jinki vajah se aaj hum yeh din mana rahe hain".
Danny, Agent R and others please feel free to add any other Raneisms you can remember.

The Weird,
1. This lady from the MIT school who would speak hindi with an accent. The Angrez-chale-gaye-mujhe-chod-gaye types!
2. The *cultural* program but the kids that I have not yet been successful in seeing!
3. MIT school choir... Gawd if my school's choir trainer was to come across this, he'd suicide!

And the chaos in the parking lot-cribbing about either the rain or the sun (depending on whether its Aug 15th or Jan 26th)- Asking our HOD for a treat as Aug 15th is his birthday-the socialising in front of the E&TC porch and the list goes on!

And dear people, to keep up the spirit of the day, here's wishing you all a very happy Independence Day and the extended weekend!

P.S: For those of you wondering, I graduated/waiting for my results for officially graduating from a college called MIT Women Engineering College located in Kothrud, Pune.

Et Tu?

Dear people, since it is currently in fashion to write a post with a reference to Coffee in it, I had cold coffee in the evening, at 1930 IST.

Charlie, Danny, other August readership of the blog, you guys should do one next, a coffee post that is!

Laugh On!

Why People Laugh [Via Mind Hacks]

What makes me laugh? Uh oh... wrong person. Anything, and in fact nothing at all can make me laugh. Me, however, is an abberation on the face of this earth, so lets move on.

Why do people laugh at all? What is the point of it? Laughter is very contagious and this suggests that it may have become a part of human behaviour because it promotes social bonding. When a group of people laughs, the message seems to be “relax, you are among friends”.

Err... yes sure. But what when you burst into a fit of laughter during a DSP internal viva after coming up with an highly absurd answer totaly unbecoming of a student of DSP with the Vice Principal of the college conducting it? You're definitely not among friends in there. But, I guess we have to remember the abberation.

Indeed, another theory of why people laugh—the superiority theory—says that people laugh to assert that they are on a level equal to or higher than those around them. Research has shown that bosses tend to crack more jokes than do their employees. Women laugh much more in the presence of men, and men generally tell more jokes in the presence of women. Men have even been shown to laugh much more quietly around women, while laughing louder when in a group of men.

Err... I have my smart comments to this one also, however, let it pass... remember the abberation!!

bulb-illuminated-in-my-head #1

Teaching is a beautiful experience. Every should teach atleast once in their lifetime!