11 exams in 13 days – beat that
am so waiting for the 20th 
and also the 14th (or before) – whenever my gift arrives
song on my playlist : tribute (long long favourite inspirational song courtesy di )
“this sem was – to say the least – carefree and fun “
funny how the above line was supposed to be my happy mood after the endsems ended on 25th evening… after 2 days and 3 hours – i’m totally gloomy… my hair are awry and i just woke up from sleep from having spent the entire day working on a biodiesel plant meeting and then the meeting itself… i wake up at 9 30 just to head for dinner and get a message that the thermo grades are out – i got a 9… theek hai… i’m neutral about it – no happiness was gained from knowing that fact – and missed dinner in the process…
apart from that – bombay is under terrorist attack… after 24 hours, the encounter is still on – the deccan mujahideen claiming responsibility… quite a few friends of mine came back half an hour before the CST firing occurred… a taxi went up in flames near another friend’s place…
i’m almost crying i’m so scared… the whole world up in flames… why god why? give us a justification or even a hint of it… i wonder if even insti is safe… over and above this underlying fear is the looming 60 research papers to be read for my UROP completion… a daunting in itself…
we did manage to kaato awesome lukkha though… roomie, saggi baby, bubbly, AD and me… watched the grudge, went for dinner at happy singh’s – dessert at CCD after 
, music lukkha, kung fu panda and the sameer hill climb accomplised mission of watching sunrise from the summit despite guards warning us against panthers … we’re dumbly brave
i don’t know how to react after all this happened in 2 days… i feel numb…
its better and with themes and different stars and right side chat and auto hiding status msg options and google calendar on the gmail page itself its totally awesome ( thanks to heretic hero for the initiation )
btw, my theme is graffiti thought i’d save a bit of energy by choosing a darker one given that the gmail page stays open most of the time on my lappie…
among other news, the math endsem yesterday was sweet ( never thought i’d use that adjective to describe how i fared in an endsem, and more so for a math one ), had cornetto after a million years after the exam at staff c ( jhonny treated chandrika, deepika and me ofcourse ) and went off to watch the russian cultural programme in the LT … kaatoed infi lukkha… watched 4 episodes of scrubs – after 7 seasons i’m finally at par with the television chronologically
and now its saturday morning with back to back exams on mon and tues – so just last four days of studying in the entire sem and painfully, 3rd sem is over 
the paper was horrible… and sir’s already mailed the endsem solutions… i have barely got 3 out 6 questions correct… this was one subject i was hoping i’d fare well in… i’m feeling so scared …
ps : monster generated avatars activated enjoy!
and the endsems are here – just a mere week away and bringing with it the inevitable blogomania – excessive blog checking, dashboard clicks, stats, comments, surfer, everything… anything that brings any activity in cyber space to the eyes! this stage is also accompanied by excessive ‘ping not please’ status messages and futile efforts to study… let’s see how these endsems go…
PS we’re seriously ageing too fast… i’m already 19 years and 3.5 months old… god! how time flies during the sem!
our abstract made it to the top 20 entries in the ‘Save the World’ event of Mindspark 08, the techfest of College of Engineering, Pune. Will be going to Pune on 3rd with my roomie (who has her masi there ) new city – but the catch is that there’s a MA quiz on 4th abhi mugna padega
the gbm yesterday went decently though we were the last to be grilled and i went to sleep at 3am
started watching ‘chiriyakhana’ – satyajit ray’s adaptation of saradindu bandopadhyay’s book i’m loving it – my first uttam kumar movie… and they’re all classics…
quit camp – i can’t even walk properly, turn sides while sleeping, it hurts to laugh and i wish i never had to sneeze again… clarification : did not GIVE UP – it’s not physically possible for a ‘non sporty’ person ( equals a person who has not even engaged in even one hour of any kind of sport, even running, with the past year ) to go from zilch to 4 hours of swimming in a day…not being a wuss… but given one month, i would’ve been up to it… the main reason i went for it is because i like to swim but i’ve never done any kind of competitive sports… i’m quitting camp, not swimming… i definitely want to give it a shot next year with full and gradual prep for the camp… ma said i could hurt myself if i continued stressing my muscles like this – sure i can swim atleast for an hour for a day before i graduate to 2 and then 3… but not like this 0 to 4…
anyway, now that swimming is off the cards, have a few things i hope to qualify for… and lots of fight on acads… seriously need to study… cleared out a few things – cleared out a bit of my conscience…
western vocals classes, well – let’s hope the coming ones are better… wanted to sing for Unplugged… let’s see – better luck next time… and yes – i’m going for the zubin mehta concert (fingers crossed) with nithya if no other one
got a 7… i’ve never been so on the borderline : my total on 50 was 23 – i got 7; a friend’s total was 23.5 – she got 8… i’ve never felt so bad over grade by knowing i missed it with just one mark… life can be cruel but i’m not cribbing – makes me realise the importance of every test and every quiz… need to really put in a lot now that i’ve got 7 in one 4 credit course…
camp started today – drained me out… man these people have stamina and speed… but i’m willing to work on it – i’m not giving up. feels like all there is in the entire day is swimming, classes and sleeping… wonder how i’ll prepare for the math quiz there is wednesday, not to mention other quizzes and assignments to be submitted…
but on the bright side, its 15 days of vigorous training and i’ll be the happiest person if i do get to go to madras for the inter iit meet.
PS : got selected for biodiesel plant project – ‘Biosynth’
finally the mother of all exams – MA 205 complex analysis is over… the paper was itself SO complex… the first question – bouncer… second question googly… felt like i was facing brett lee with all the balls whizzing past me before i could figure out the ‘length’… flipping through the entire 32 pages of the booklet i wondered how at the end of two hours, those white pages would have my scribblings all over them…
it was a horrible paper – which went horribly… even the grading’s gonna be absolute… means out of 50, you have to get 20 to pass… out of which i’m sure of 3 marks… means i have to get 35 atleast to pass out of 80 (the exam was for 80)… i don’t know what the hell is gonna happen… i just hope i manage to scrape a 6 atleast…
still two more left – tomorrow and day after… and then its the weekend i’ve waited an eternity for… my desktop’s crowded with the notes of what to do when and where after the exams… not during it – funny, that… its like you’ve planned everything to do after the exams and just hope the exam week flies past somehow amidst the night outs, burning eyes, sleepy talks, no music and no face wash… its weird – how careless you become during exam time… even bathing takes a back seat cuz it doesn’t feature anywhere near to time devoted to mug and on friday – its freedom
i wonder why i’m even bothering to give these exams… every question i attempt at solving involves some mistake or the other… i forget to square, or take root, divide by two, mess up units, interchange signs… just everything… why bother? i feel like giving up…
yes i’m blogging because i’m bugged. my midsems are from tomorrow – transport phenomena at 2 30 pm. for now transport phenomena == fluid mechanics and i simply luurrrv flumech. i stayed up till 4 30am that night to complete the assignment to find that (a) at 7 30am, there are 8 people in my room copying from it and (b) yesterday, sir announced that that assignment was gonna be returned to us to redo and complete it. me was hopelessly mad. ditch it.
i’m going through a phase where i cannot manage to score in the exam. i misunderstand the question, i miss out one of the parameters,etc,etc – there are always excuses – but the bottomline remains, i’m not scoring. but i’m gonna keep working hard because i (‘ve been made to) believe that God’s accumulating all this work right now and is gonna give something awesome in the end of it. so i’m gonna fight and i’m not gonna give up. marks are not gonna bog me down – concepts are gonna carry me through.
the mess has been giving a lot of trouble lately but i think i’m dealing with it ok. except for these set of people who seem to crib no matter what. but its ok. i don’t mind.
have a doubt discussion class for the flumech midsem in 45 mins and i’m blogging – i think i’m gonna do ok. i love flumech
(not in any specific order)
acads = complex analysis, transport phenomena, chemical engg thermodynamics, solid mechanics, probabilty and statistics
project = coding in matlab – simulation of synthesis of nanoparticles
biodiesel plant project = plus minus
german classes = plus (if they start)
speakers’ club meets
mood indigo design
InsIghT artis
lit/fa/music events
mess secy-giri
swimming
lose weight
phone-time!!!
going home tomorrow… its been a wonderful two and a half weeks… today is our last day together… i don’t know what to think… whether to be happy that we made such beautiful memories… or to be sad that our time together, for now, is coming to an end…
the project i’d stayed back to work on is anything but tending to completion… coding is such a thing that you cannot anticipate where a ’segmentation fault’ will creep up and turn your night’s sleep into a jumble of contemplations of loops and assignment statements… to add insult to injury, the department computer room – medusa – is being used as the venue for the mtech interviews… so we can work from only 1pm today… i wonder if we’ll be able to get the program running by 5pm…
all the seniors say that if you stay back for a project, more often than not, you’ll give up and go home… and when your prof doesn’t care a damn about whether you’re working or not, you really feel no incentive to put up a fight… i mean, if he doesn’t ask you by himself how the work is going or whether you’ll be able to complete it before the deadline, and the only interaction you have with him is when you go and ask him your doubts and even then he doesn’t have some concrete solutions – its frustrating… sure i’m enjoying what i’m doing, but it would be so much better if sir cared i was doing something…
my math prof – gks, is one of the most engaging teachers i’ve ever come across… despite our lectures being in LT (lecture theater) which is air conditioned, cushioned seats and dimmed light, which induce sleep in ‘acchon se acche’ ( ‘cuz even our insti diro (director) slept off in the first row during a cultural ‘gandhi jayanti’ function for a good half hour), gks can manage to keep people successfully awake throughout a period of one hour… it is quite an achievement, let me tell you that… especially when the math is the first lecture on two days – at 8:30 am… and you can’t expect junta who sleep at 4 am to even bother about the first lecture ( apart from the die hard maggus )… even then, there is quite a turn out by 9 am…
anyway, coming back to the title of this post, our current course is about differential equations and we have just started laplace transforms… we were learning about the laplace transforms of sinωt, cosωt and i was astonished when he pointed out that though the sine and cos function vanish as different function as s tends to infinity… it was really weird – we always treat sine and cosine as just graphs shifted by π/2 and even then, their laplace transforms decay differently…
and then we started talking about the smoothness of functions at zero and the way their laplace transforms decay… only, there was a very feeble relationship between that… a naive assumption that says if a function is twice differentiable, it will decay as s-3 can never ever be made…
he went further and said that these were deep problems in wave propagation… and hence, the gamma function was introduced to make fractional order differentiation valid… he said that fractional order differentiation is not introduced into math just like that… infact, we are compelled to introduce it to deal with the wave propagation problems… come to think of it, i’d never wondered that there could be even fractional order differentiation when i learnt to differentiate in 11th… and for the first time in a few weeks, i was marveling at the applications of math…
i was seriously staring open mouthed and wide eyed at him…
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