Night Life

"Bangalore lacks night life!! Mumbai is so much better."

I have heard people cribbing like this so very often. Prod them a little more about what exactly is that they are looking for and most draw a blank face. Some throw the old complaint - we can't go to any place after 11.
"So where exactly do you wanna go?"
"Shopping, clubbing...."
"Why do you wanna shop in the middle of the night?"
"I might wanna just walk around the road"
"So who's stopping you from doing that?"
"I might wanna have fun with friends."
"Do that at your home? Why do you have to create a ruckus and disturb the people around?"

So far I haven't come across a logical rationale of wanting a night life. People don't live through the day and suddenly realise late at night they missed out on life.


PS: Paris has a great night life!! If you define night by clock that is. In summer, there is sunlight till 10:30 PM (I dozed off after that!). So it's rather long day revelry. In winter, everything is closed by 9 apart from the bars!

Truth about New Bangalore International Airport (BIAL)

There have been reports about new BIAL airport - some good, some bad. Good is understandable. Bad is surprising - either these people have never been to this airport or are cynics by nature who can never see anything good in this world. I have listed down the common complaints and my observation on the same.

• It's cramped - Not by any stretch of imagination. Unless, of course, one intends to play football with 22 players on the ground. Everything is beautifully laid out and movement is without any obstruction. There are enough chairs laid out at the boarding gate. So you can sit and relax after you are tired of window shopping in the retail outlets.
  
• Number of counters is less - 4-5 check-in counters per airline is not less considering the number of people travelling out of Bangalore. It's at par with Mumbai and much better than Delhi. However, BIAL could do with some self-check-in kiosks.
• There's not enough eateries - On the ground floor that is. But once you cross the security gate, you have 3-4 eateries to choose from.
  

Day light cheating

I was shell shocked when the gas station attendant presented me a bill for 43 litres of petrol!! He was wrong on many counts.
- Honda city has a tank capacity of 42 litres!! There's no way you can fill up more than that.
- I drove the car to the station - so obviously it wasn't empty. Actually it wasn't even running in reserve petrol which is a capacity of 7 litres - but just for the sake of argument.

Thankfully I had asked for a bill or else I would never know about this daylight robbery. And luckily he had made a bill for 43 litres - else I couldn't even argue. As it is, we trust the attendant and don't monitor the meter - sometimes because of our laziness, sometimes because the car is positioned so ahead of the meter that you can't actually see it. However, I have learnt my lessons now.

This happened at the Devidas gas station near Mount Carmel college and I would suggest anyone reading this blog to avoid the same.

Go Live - What a show!!

Go live events can be magnum opus!! My previous post about Go live gives a glimpse of what is to come. In its silent way, it paints some bright colors on a grand canvas which can turn into a visual delight. It promises of thrilling roadblocks and the adventure of overcoming them all. Stories of countless sleepless nights. Visions of bleary eyed geeks continuously churning out code at the speed of characters dropping in rain making hot fixes and patches. Noises of people talking over phone sounding alerts, dissipating anxiety and clamouring to make the delivery on time. Possibility of overshooting deadline and last minute chances of a rollback. It's not for no reason that people have a plan B ready for an exigency. One never knows what might go wrong!

Alas, nothing of that sort happened!!!

Sorry readers, but my first Go live event as an onsite co-ordinator is hardly an interesting story. We have always been conservative in our estimates - sometimes knowingly, sometimes unknowingly (are we fortunate??). Not quite surprising given that we are working with a French client.

Nostalgia

It was triggered by my friend's blog who wrote about his trip to goa sometime back. It reminded me of such a similarly memorable and adventurous trip to Shimla. I remembered that once I had captured that in an email and had shared with my friends. That's where it started. I was looking at my past mails and I realized I was a pretty good writer (atleast compared to what I'm now!!). Do let me know what you think of the pieces I've written.


A Friend (On Friendship day)
------------------------------
We are distant
yet so near
Thanks for showing
all that care

In things that we do
and don't share
You have always been
more than fair

Your generous gesture
in time of need
Raise my spirits
it certainly did!!

Friends like you are
hard to come by
Thanks for being that
friend of mine.

Next is a mail to my friend that I wrote in my college days. Can't believe how lonely was I back then!!! Looking back, I'm more amused than sorry about this - the reason I'm reproducing it here.

Here are few questions I'd like answered about the optimizing problem.

a. What is the exact problem definition? Am I given a set of hydrofoils
and I have to select the best one among them? Or is it that the program
starts with few shapes and learns to generate a (the best???) hydro foil?

b...

Well I'm not fine. I'm very upset. Save you, I've been receiving mails
from my friends only far and in between. It's making me sick. You know the
feeling when you are just not able to express what's happening in your
life and with you. You are just not able to talk. There is this friend (my
best friend) who talks to me only when we meet!! The rest of the year
when he is in college, he literally vanishes in the air. And he remains
out of touch. Then there is another who writes to me only when he needs
me. And there is this one who became my friend only recently. As long as
we were together, I thought he needed me only as badly as I needed
him. But now I realise that it's not true. He doesn't have time (I don't
know what he's busy in) to write me a line! And the rest are similar.

For the past few days, I'm experiencing a low. Even movies don't excite or
amuse. I watched 5 movies in 3 days; but it's of no help. I can't
concentrate on studies. May be because I've stopped working on the things
that interest me ( eg the GA problem or the computers). But what to do? I
wanted to get immersed into books to run away from all these. But I can't
borrow books from CL because they have lost my library card!!

Don't know whether to laugh or cry over all these. I'd to give vent to my
feelings. That's why I'm telling all these to you. I'm feeling lost and
lonely....

Can't write more. Bye.

Go Live

Finally the week has arrived - the week of go-live. If we don't encounter any other roadblocks, we would be going live on tuesday. What is in store for me? Only time will tell.

Attachment

I see you - that's a Hindi movie which I would never watch given a choice... i.e. if I'm in India. Can you believe it I'm watching that now in Paris (2M Monde)!! In a place far from home, anything that reminds of home becomes bearable... as much to the extent that it turns interesting!!! (FYI, I prefer reading newspaper to watching television. The only things I watch on TV ,if anything , are music channels, finance news or technology review magazines. But here even English newspapers are exotic commodities.) What else can I do? In a place where you don't know anybody, where you don't know the language, even venturing out doesn't seem too tempting. After all, how long can you keep visiting the same place? (I visited the tourist places in my last visit. I think I should have kept something for my next visit. But who knew then that I would come here again?)

Which brings me to a very philosophical question - is achievement really as great a virtue as it's made out to be? If one's has achieved everything, what would keep one going?


PS: If you like whacky comedy, do watch Wayne's world and Wayne's World 2 - Mike Myers at his best!