Gradually Graduated

So, finally the day has come upon which I can say , without using the "I hope" , that I am an Engineer. Now I am ready to be counted in the country's workforce. Lets hope the forces do some work this time. The four years at campus have passed like blink of the eye (Man it was difficult to keep the eyes from blinking all this while.) .

The first year, with those long journeys to lecture halls under the smirking-and-blazing-and-hot sun. The boring lectures, the day dreaming, the pathetic lunch... but everything was made bearable by the amazing company I was in. My irst year group, Bansa, Ulla, Sid, Aaki, dada, Bhandari the wonderful people who made the survival a lot more fun. The late night Bakars, the JRC( Jagte Raho Correspondent) fever, the exam fever, topo-sessions and what not. It was like a new hollywood teenage movie in reality every day. I tried my hands on almost everything from T.T. to Tabla but nothing got to my hands( the T.T. bat used to fly off on my surprise smashes). The biggest achievement in my life till date.. got a chaggi (GPA 6.67), which made me not-all-so-happy for a while, but I was onboard the Dhoom-Dhamaka wagon quite very soon. The next semester was chilled, for the first time I realized what winter actually is. Even the Attendence-suppli threat would'nt have pulled me out of the warm cozy blanket(my savior from the chilling cold). The classes started to loose track of me as much as I was loosing track of em. The electronics lectures ,very rarely been bothered by my drowsy presence, became a cause of concern with syllabus reaching higher than E&CE Tower. The bold zeros in the mid-terms made it indispensible for me to crack my butt off in clearing the end-sem. But then came the BhawanDay celebrations. I was so enthused about it that even a bollywood debutant would feel cold facing my josh. It really overtook every sense of mine. Bhawanday compeering was all the time in my mind, doing breakfast .... yaah! got a great line to introduce myself... In front of the course book...Naah! That dialogue is not effective.... In the class.... Wow! I think I should whisle too. Fortunately all that enthu made my day, my performance was the best of all times, I was appreciated a lot and a feeling of conquest filled me, that furthere delayed my tuning up for the End-sems. The end-sem went so bad that I can't disclose the "dark" shadows on my grade sheets( If I see someone evading a discussion on grades, I totally understand his state). Just to give you a clue I was here for the summers when all my other batch mates were enjoying their time at home by telling their family the kisse-kahani from all through the first year at IIT.

My second year at the campus was one of the most happening time so far. I was recruited into team IMG(Information Management Group, which manages insti website and intranet), a really josh filled group. The days (and mostly nights) in IMG were loaded like Schwasnagger's macine-gun heaps of tasks to be done and fun along. I got to meet a lot of talented people , a few of whom would always be on my "great buddy" list. A few names - fasih, Rajas, Chandan, shabbo, creed all of them have been great to work with. While great tihngs were happening in the after-class time slots, the in-class slolts were equally breathtaking. Seriously, with exciting subjects like DigiElectn, MicroProcessor, SystemSoftware.. I was feeling the transformation already( from me to Er. me). There were some great moments like white-water-rafting expedetion, that was one adventurous trip you never gonna forget. The exciting life on campus was fudged with relaxing vacations to home-sweet-home, a few times accompanied by friends
,coz on those trip I was forced to go out and tour my own city for a change( I still find it difficult to backtrace my way home when mom occasionally sends me fetch some grocery) The Second year Thomso was more exciting than the first one( the number of chiqs had shooted up). Along with litSec vetrans, Rajas and Archish the "chiq of the Town"" was organised.. the best prank i had ever been a part of. Best of the beauties lined up and performing in fromt of huge crowd , contesting for title.. which was as fake as 200ml free on Coke. We were lucky enough to get our asses out of the site and escape a beating from the crowd. The Cogni that year, was made uniquw by my sisters visit to the campus, and also the Mid-night programming contest..I toiled over the chemical- equation balance problem the whole night, just to find that the solution was there at the back of one of my course books, but still it was fun( I solved the problem and got the fifth pos). And then came the sem exams.. as usual the last moment preparation could'nt get me over a 7 that sem.

The third or the "Thud" year. I came to campus a month after the classes had begun, with a broken leg I was sleeping and contemplating on the miseries in life ( like buddha, but offcourse in sleeping posture) while the geeks in my class were pouring over lecture notes.

The Legend of the Leg (part I): I was all packed up to leave for Roorkee, after a long stay at home. Just a day before the date of journey it was my mom's birthday, so my bro and I decided to give her a book on vaastu shastra as gift. We were on our good-very-old Kinetic honda on a journey which I dind'nt know will make me devoid of Kinetic enery for one whole semester. So while we were heading for the bookstore, on one of the many unplanned crossroads of Jodhpur a girl ,out of no where to expect, came rushing into us and crashed her Scooty with our honda. Everybody was on the ground the Kinetic and scooty were on one another. My bro, the girl and I were lying on the road equidistant from each-other. Very soon the public appeared and they took me in their hands with a fellow following closely, holding my lower limb in a manner that made my leg appear boneless. There were multiple fractures... The docs put my leg in a cast and I was doomed to sleep for one whole month and a half.

The prolonged stay at my home was great after a long time I was available to all my relations, my cousins who had longed for sessions on JEE preps were all around me. Overall minus the pain-in-the-leg part was pure fun at home( all acrued to the delicious food and unlimited tv).

Ya.. back to campus life. The third year was pretty much the same each day. I was staying with my mom so all the movies-masti-bakar, the chaapos, nightouts and cherished "freedom" were extinct in my context. But that was one good time with mom always there with you to talk. It was just like home. Mom had aranged the small guest room into a home-like prototype with a small kitchen and a Mandir in the corner. I was happy staying with my mom... it was an awaited thing that made it possible for me to discover and connect with myself. As its kind of obvious, with mom with me I was the studious Lalit again, and that sem I really enjoyed my acads, though there was'nt a significant jump in my GPA, but knowlwgde wise there was. The transformation (me to Er.me) was in the crucial phases. After the 3rd year first sem, there was another Leg-breaking accident which caused the transformation to intensify.

The fourth and the final year. I had just come from my internship in bangalore. The sem being supposed to be a cool one, I was relaxed from the very start. I got to make some very interesting and great friends, to name them these are Bela, Subir, Ganu and Raghu. The last-but-one sem was a confusing period. I was split on to decide,if I wanted to give GRE or CAT. With a GPA as flashy as mine MS and GRE are a farther than pluto. But I was still hoping to push my grades to a decent and speakable position. That semester was I tried my hand on ImageProcessing to Robotics. Suddenly I was so much fascinated by tech that decided to takeup a new area to explore every week. This practice proved to be great, the computer center became my permanent residence. During all this, there was BTP going on in the background. We (Ganesh Agarwal, Raghu and I) had initially overestimated our own potential and grossly underestimated the challenges of hardware based projects. With none of us having even the slightest experience with micro-chips had taken up "Distributed Robotic Task Accomplishment using Intelligent Bluetooth Communication" as our B.Tech Project. Our guide's reaction just what was your. So amid all the final-year-masti crap, my confusion fits, Raghu's thomso and Ganesh's Applying ;the BTP didnt really get the deserved hardwork and attention, apart from the reconsiderations of the problem statement and repeated requirement analysis a few weeks before the mid-eval presentations.
After the 7th semester, the placement bonanza started. All of us pouring into books and project report to brush up the comcepts( honestly, for some of us, these days were the first time when the building of concepts took place). I was lucky and was picked by two of the early birds to the campus, Oracle and ManH.
I never thought getting a job would affect me the way it did. I used to be all puffed up with dicipline and "value time and knowledge" stuff, but from the day I got the offer I was as carefree and relaxed as a guy who has discovered a family link to queen Elizabeth and is getting a share of the wealth. But I got swayed by the fun and frolic going around me. I could'nt supress my techno-hunger for long :) and was back in the game but this time a bit relaxed, coz I did't wory much about the boring stuff (like comp Arch). During the semester I made a project called SunRadio, the project was given the due appreciation which gave me a lot of confidence. Also at the same tim eour BTP was on a crucial stage ie.. the start stage ... yes we had'nt started the heavy project till Feb. Ganesh was worried like a guy standing on the rly platform, waiting for a friend who is having the ticket for his journey and the train is about to leave. So, looking into the possiblities (rather the immpossiblities) of the project completion, we decide to change a topic. We mulled our head for the whole night to come up with a topic which is not very diverse from our initial choice but is doable in two months. After spending the whole night on deciding a new topic (with a few sessions to canteen and a discussion ,enrouting sex ,career etc.. till Indo-pak relations, in between) a sudden spark in my mind gave me an idea to go for VoAdCA. that was Voice on Adhoc networks fo Campus, this was exactly what we were looking for. Convincing the guide was not a problem. Infact the guide also took a sigh of relief. So we began the projec Voadca. With considerable help from the internet, the project accelerated towards completion and with 240 man-hrs in the final ten days, the project was done. We were able to set up a voice chat between two chaps sitting with laptops anywhere insisde the campus. Yessssss!

Now, I am all alone with one friend leaving the campus each day. Its hard see people, who have been with you for 4 yrs, go. I would be the last one to leave from my group. I am all senti right now. These years have been amazingly great. I wish life remains full of excitement and friends at all times. Goodbye Roorkee..

Graduated.