A Weird Day.....!

I had this weird sensation when I woke up this morning. I don't exactly know what it was or how to describe it! Whether it was the remains of the mixture of dreams I was having the night before or just the stress from the past few weeks playing up, I can't really tell!... So many thoughts were fleeting through my head on such a wide spectrum of isolated topics, that I was going through philosophical extremes!... 

It started with a vagabond shouting and creating a ruckus at our doorstep, which had woken me up from my reverie in the first place. He had dressed a cow in some paint and covered it with holy rags, claiming to be a fortune teller of sorts. As I peered out of my window, covering my eyes from the sudden glare of the sun, I was told that he had already predicted our watchman's family facts correct to every small and insignificant detail, without having known him previously. But, having seen these gimmicks a million times over, the only reaction which came to my mind was "Whatever..."!

Then, as I sat down to have my morning tea, the dipped biscuit fell to the floor with a splat. I kept staring at that wet mass and somehow drifted away into a world of my own. I was thinking about the biscuit which I'd just wasted and the elaborate processing which might have gone into it to give it its unique shape, texture and flavor. I saw the letters of the company engraved on it with an intricate design. It made me remember the first time when we had been taught to write autobiographies in school, on inanimate objects.

My mother, out of the blue, shouted something at me and I was violently woken from the subconscious state of mind in which I had passed into. I was shocked to find that twenty minutes had already passed and my cup of tea was still filled to the brim. I finished the tea in one sip and decided to watch television.

I switched to one of my favorite channels, Ten Sports, and found the weekly episodic TV show, Monday Night Raw, being aired by the WWE. Since I'm quite a wrestling enthusiast myself I sat down to pass some time with it, and again fell into a sleepy, dreamy phase! I started wondering about all the challenges those superstars might have faced and all the problems they'd had to overcome to even get into the business, leave alone become a full fledged star. I began to compare their situations with those faced by regular people in their day-to-day lives. Just like them, we need a legitimate and interesting story line to become someone notable in life. At the end of the day, life can be visualized just as a game, in which we are the key players. Its our choice what kind of character we'd like to be and how we decide to play this game to the best of our talents and abilities. Some people just decide to sit it out and do nothing out of the ordinary, while others decide to fight it out and compete with others to become the winners of this game, who can be rightfully regarded as the 'Champions of Life'!...

Now as I write this article, I'm still getting an entourage of thoughts varying from our ongoing intern right to my attempt at writing fiction some time back, as one of my FB notes. As I try to put a bunch of weird and unrelated stuff together, which I'm hardly sure why I'm doing, I realize that sometimes we might go through so much even without stepping outside the limits of our house, that its mind boggling!...

From tomorrow, the same office routine starts again, and I wonder if I'll ever have such a mentally strange day again, when all the doubts accumulated in our minds for weeks at a time, come boiling over at the slightest hint of idleness!...

Life At KCTI......!

Just in case you're wondering what KCTI is; it stands for Kalyani Centre for Technology & Innovation. Its the place where my friend and I have been assigned our core project from Bharat Forge Ltd. Its a newly built campus full of greenery, on the outskirts of the city and has a charming feel to it. Its scarcely populated with just a handful of people in the three labs and the administrative office, making the place all the more peaceful!...

Now, how often is it that a summer trainee gets to do something which has never been done before, on a machine which has been imported fairly recently from the United States of America, which is still awaiting its first ever specimen to be tested? Whether it was our college name or something else, in either case we have become the only students this summer in BFL, who have been granted the privilege of developing the testing procedure for this brand new machine for creep testing. Thus, our project would not only benefit us, but would also help the company tap into the growing demands of this newly developing field. After our project is done, Bharat Forge will become one of the only companies in Western India to have successfully implemented a creep testing facility, which has already received standards and customer specifications from major companies in India including giants like BHEL!.....

The centrally air-conditioned building and the state of the art research library, which quite frankly looked more like an executive lounge, were a pleasant change compared to the heat treatment furnaces and the other challenging and physically exhausting work environments we'd visited in the company plant so far. The library had books, research papers and articles varying from the tiniest details of fracture mechanics right to recent developments made in aerospace engineering, automotive parts, etc.

The canteen was awesome too! Today was the first time away from home that we feasted on such quality rice as is only found in high standard hotels, which is the least expected from an office mess. Quality sure increases with decrease in quantity! With the number of people lunching there limited only to about twenty, we took several helpings of that delicious cereal and chatted for a long time over our luncheon.

If only KCTI wasn't located in so isolated a locality so far from our houses, it would have been the perfectly ideal work place for would-be engineers like us. In fact, the Research & Development Centre has been so recently developed that it did not even properly feature on our GPS devices. The rocky terrain which needs to be traversed every day to reach the place causes a back-breaking journey, but it pales in comparison to the excitement of our project ahead.

But all said and done, working here is a treat! Taking our time to understand the machine and getting familiarized with its working, with no signal in our mobiles to distract us; and with so much being expected from us by the company, that its even ready to provide us with vehicles for our transportation, its a whole new level of professional work experience.

So, I hope this wonderful and enlightening project of ours goes through without a hitch and meets with the best end possible, with us developing a tried and tested method for creep testing, that can be used with minor modifications in future tests as well. Wishing everyone all the very best for achieving all their future goals, until next time, take care!!!...

BE THE FORCE!!!...

Harnessing The Power!!!...

Life can sometimes change at the drop of a dime! A new professional workplace with new people from all over the country is the perfect medicine for revitalizing oneself. It's an exciting time with people from our college still getting used to being regarded as IITians!... In college we are just normal guys, competing with people who are at least as good as we are or are, many a times, better than us. But it's surprising to see the number of accolades we carry outside the IIT campus!

On the very first day of my intern, who would have thought that I'd end up meeting a senior, Himanshu Singla, from our own college, in so far a place? I had seen him on countless occasions before but this was the first time that we formally got acquainted with each other. There were also two other guys from NIT Raipur and some MBA final year students, one of whom was from IIT Roorkee. Not to brag but it pleases me to think that the first thing the HR officer, who conducted our introductory session at Bharat Forge, said was that she needn't give us the normal advises as the names of the colleges were already 'so big'!...

This was the first time I was getting a proper industrial exposure, and I must admit a sweet one at that. On top of this, in spite of being the junior most in the group, I was happy to have been given the responsibility of getting our training papers signed by the concerned people. It was an extremely minor thing but it gave me the first taste of holding some actual 'position' in an organisation.

We successfully finished our three day induction programme, which had left us battered having to walk more than ten kilometers every day to visit the various shop-floors situated at different ends of a widely spread out plant. We submitted our report and were again showered with compliments like 'well-compiled' and 'nicely done'!...

Today while returning from work, staring at those ever so familiar streets of Pune through the dark car windows, I had a flash back of the day when I'd first traveled those very streets almost two decades back, trying to get admission in the kinder garden of the Bishops' School. Man-o-man! Haven't we come a long way? Life's come a full circle; completing my schooling here, having to leave home after getting admission into IIT and then returning to my hometown as a Summer Trainee in Asia's largest forging company! Everything just seems to have passed in the blink of an eye!...

Now, Himanshu bhaiyya and I having been allocated the same department of MQC (Metallurgical Quality Control), are looking forward to our main project in BFL. But all this aside, I feel like something inside me has drastically changed this summer. Even my neighbors have noticed the topography of my face being much more relaxed than usual. It may be because in the past year, I've let out everything I had built up in my soul since a long time. I've done everything that I wanted to do and have tried to prove everything that I wanted to prove. I feel absolutely free, strong and focused on my future.

As usual there are a lot of mountains still left to climb including my preparation for the Common Admission Test (CAT), which is supposed to be one of the toughest exams in the world, and obviously improving my academic pointers, along with winning some extra-curricular activities! There is also the question of next year's intern, but that's a long time ahead. As far as CAT is concerned, I'd heard people say the same things about IIT-JEE being tough and nearly impossible to crack, but some of my friends and I did it and proved everyone wrong, didn't we?!!...

So, it's time to harness the power and the true potential of the human mind because now there's fortunately nothing holding me back, and I refuse to be judged on anything else other than my true credentials. So, when all of us meet up again at college this July, with the experience of various research centers and companies like BFL, SAIL, BARC, HINDALCO, HZL, etc. behind us, I'll ensure that I remain in the same state of mind as I am in right now, relaxed but confident. Signing off, I'd like to say my patented million dollar statement once again:-
                                                 

  BE THE FORCE!!!...

No Place Like Home!

You may enjoy hogging the limelight at your workplace or spending quality time with your friends in college, but at the end of the day, there's no other place as tranquil and soothing as those familiar walls between which you grew up!... As another grueling semester ended, I was on my way back home, tired and totally exhausted. But the closer I'd get to my destination, the lighter my feet would feel. It's amazing how the simple thought of returning home can cure those heavy eyelids, which had been caused by a countless number of sleepless nights before the end semester exams!...

I wished that our flight could land on the roof of our very house, troubled by the thought of having to spend another half a day to travel from the Santa Cruise Airport in Mumbai to my home in Pune. I was being accompanied by my father and nonetheless, we boarded a Shivneri Volvo bus bound for home. The joy I felt when the bus hit the Express Highway, was simply indescribable. That six lane road, which had been witness to so many great adventures we'd had in the past, flooded my mind with fond memories. It's distant curvature seemed to be welcoming us like how the Spartans used to be welcomed back after winning a fierce battle!... 

We finally made it home and what a great feeling it was to see our family greet us with their ever so serene but excited smiles!... That same old shoe rack, which I had pummeled with shoes for almost a decade, the same red and black carpet, on which I had spilled tea on countless occasions in the past, all the familiar paintings which adorned the walls, with some new additions, and most importantly my own room, with the same custom bed and study table, which still bore some of the pen marks I'd left on them a few months back; it all gave me a feeling of nostalgia like I had never had before! I just hugged my mother and granny, took a deep breath and sat down .....!

After ages, we had finally got the opportunity to sit around the same round table and have tea and snacks together, just like the good old days. My mother asked me if I was beginning to miss college already, but what she failed to realize was that all I'd been thinking for the past few days was about that very moment, when the whole family would be reunited!...

No matter what we do and where we're from, there is truly no place like home. At home, we live within the love and happiness of our family members, not having to obey the boring college and office timings. We make our own schedule and catch up on things we like to do. We get a little time of serenity and true peace, to regroup and recapitulate everything that has gone down in the recent past. We reflect on our past actions and decide what is to be done further ahead. But most of all, we get to eat all our favorite stuff, meet up with old friends from all over the country and get loads of sleep, which had been unkindly snatched away from us in college!...

Luckily, my summer intern is in my hometown itself, so that now I can look forward to spending the next two months with my family and friends, living at home! I'm happier than I've ever been, having handled all my business successfully and returning home with a clear mind. The last semester was the most eventful one for me yet, in which I had taken part in almost every fest, officially completed two extra-curricular projects, worked hard towards my academics, had my summer intern granted pretty early on, and it ended with an explosion of emotions with our institute finally being converted into an IIT, after a long and difficult political struggle, in which all the students and professors had played a pivotal role!... It couldn't have ended in a better way!... So, until the next academic year guys; happy holidays!!!...

A Brand New 'IIT'ian!!!...

  

Aahhh!... Let me think... In spite of more than five years having past since the day I had first dreamt about IIT, it's mere thought has kept my memories from being blurred! Every second of my life in these past few years has, quite literally, been burned into my brains permanently! But this epic odyssey has finally reached the best end possible!...

The very first article of this blog clearly portrays that it had all started with this very dream, or more appropriately 'mission', the achievement of which would lead to the opening of countless gateways in the future. It had been hanging in the balance despite of me having cracked IIT-JEE twice, and having gotten admission into one of the topmost colleges in the country IT-BHU, as it 'was' called until a few days back!

But now, all my internal demons have been put to rest as I, along with all the others from our institute, experience a level of happiness, peace, rightfulness, and most of all, pride to finally have that extra, illusive 'I' in our institute's name that we so richly deserve!... While many of my friends started out their careers by walking into the famed gateways of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), people from our institute have the unique pleasure of watching and experiencing the hallowed portals of IIT, being built all around us, while we sit in the very centre of it!... It makes me really happy to think that we'll be the only handful of students in the country who have had the privilege and the honour of being in one of the topmost universities in India, inheriting the legacy of the Banaras Hindu University; and are now also an integral part of the brand-name, that is, IIT (BHU) Varanasi!!!...

We don't have to carry the burden of being a 'pseudo'-IIT any more. It surprises me to think that after all that I've been through, with all my possible choices having fallen just a little short of their mark, when I was struggling to get into IIT a few years back and the only thing that I could have possibly had in a so-called core IIT being an Integrated Masters Degree in some science subject like Economics; instead I'm finally doing a Dual Degree (B.Tech + M.Tech) course in a core engineering branch from a core IIT!!!...

Everything amazingly fell into place and it's only now that I'm truly beginning to understand what Steve Jobs meant when he said that: "You can only connect the dots looking backwards!" So many other things could have happened just by making a slightly different choice at any of the countless junctures encountered in the past, but everything just seems to have fit in perfectly like a complicated jig-saw puzzle. These are the only times that even atheists might have the feeling of divine intervention!

So, after all the controversies and criticism that I've been through in the recent past, reality finally takes a sweet turn!... There have been so many times when I've felt like showing the finger to fate, but I'm truly grateful that things have finally taken a measurably fruitful shape. We have all tirelessly worked very hard for achieving our goals and I'm not sure if this is fate's way of rewarding us. So, in any case, if there is indeed such a thing, I'd like to thank 'fate' from the bottom of my heart for helping us get something which was so dear to us, that it modified and affected every step we took!...

I've waited for ages to witness this day and now that it's finally here, it's a wonderful parting gift that we got before this year's summer vacation. And, on a personal note, this truly is the beginning of a new era in my life, and I take a solemn oath not to waste this opportunity which has been given to me in the form of the highest graduating platform available in India today!... Right from this moment on, irrespective of the past, I'll only be working towards the future. I've always been kind of a 'rebel' in my ways of doing stuff, but now I can finally forgive, forget and move on, as a brand new "IITian"!!!... So, a very hearty congratulations and all the very best to all my fellow IITians for a bright future ahead! Good luck and take care!...