Are you sure.

A water tank, that was my first sight of the IIM Indore campus. On that bright shiny day t he gates of the campus looked as grand as that of a palace. The winding road took me, my parents and my three bags past the academic block and to the hostel block. I got a room untouched by anyone, that obviously excludes the workers who built it. E-207 was a nea t room, sufficient for me and had a marvelous green door. I was among the lucky few who got rooms at the newly built E-block. My father and mother did most of the unpacking and arranged my stuff neatly. They insisted on doing that, as I was bad at that. Me and mother went to the mess to do so some food survey. Caterers at IIM Indore are very sma rt people, after all they were at IIM too. They knew when parents flock the campus, so the food tasted like ...like ....food. My mother is a very observant lady. More than that Dr.Rashmi Paul is a bit too frank for my comfort. While having our lunch in the mess, she noticed that the girl across t...

Rang De Basanti. 70 rupees per ticket. 4th row from back. I was with Avantika, Vivek, Kartikeya, Ravish, Neeraj, Rupali and Gaurav. The characters in the movie were becoming mature. They were waking up to life. We were in our final days of college life. We were sharing our last laughs together. The characters in the movie were well known to us. They were us. Everyone of us had dry mouths in the end of the movie and a thought in the back of our mind. Three months before the movie 'hit' us, we were all sitting nicely in the winter sun, chatting. The practical examinations were going on, the college fest was 4 days away. Ravish pops in a 'masala' news item to us. A lecturer had asked students obscene questions in the practical examinations. We are all angry to hear what had happened. Furious but immobile. I don't know what happened to me, but I did not say anything to anyone. I just got up and started walking furiously towards the laboratories to find the 'culprit...

On 5th August 2002, while listening to the Orientation Lecture in the library I kept cursing my fate....870 rank in CEE and I still can't get into DCE...what the ....A simple sardarjee whom I met in the couselling, Simarjeet Singh, gave me company and asked me how I liked that girl there with the short one. I didn't pay attention, that girl was Charu Sharma and you know who is the little one, Rupali ,of course. Simranjeet strongly felt that she had too much make up, maybe she could share some with us. Outside me, our sikh friend and Apoorv were greeted with seniors , who tried to rag us but they were not trained properly. Simranjeet tried to scare them away by saying " I AM SIMRANJEET SINGH KHALSA". Khalsa ? Where did that come from. Nice tactic, I would say. Then I got to know some goofy people like Mr.Divya Kr. Gupta, stung by the DCE bug. I got friendly with this fellow patient. And we got chatting. Then came the trio of Mansi, Avantika and Vivek Garg. Mansi , I th...

ETME-110 - Mechanics - Marks Obtained=47 - Credits Earned =0, that’s how the second year started. That Bee Gees song was a perfect fit for the moment - Tragedy. GGSIPU had a nice way of telling me that I shouldn’t give IIT mains a day before your mechanics semester exam. Point noted. For those who still don’t get it , I had managed to earn a backlog or if I simpy put it I had failed. But that is just OK. I knew what I’m capable of and moved on. We had come of age. All of us in the group were now in possession of the teenage toy - the mobile phone. We people are Information Technology students. We need a mobile phone. Mobile phone provides 'information' and it is the latest 'technology'. Hence Proved, that we all rightly needed mobile phones. Maybe that was not the right reason. Everyone in my gang, or the group if you like, were now in a relationship. They were in ‘el oh vee ee’. I say they, because I used to apply an anti-cupid cream. I was spared. Lucky me. So to keep...

I had entered the finest time of my life. The third year of MSIT, is something I will never forget in my life. I had just completed summer training which made me a confident chap. The subjects this time were very well clubbed together. Each subject complemented the other and I got to know how a computer really works. One fine day Alok called and asked me if I was willing to work on a freelance project. I said yes and didn’t ask about the monetary benefits. I Guess money did not matter to me. It was a Parking Manager software that we had to develop for the parking lots in Connaught Place. It was quite a task to understand what our client wanted. Eventually we never understood what he wanted. Anyway, I worked days and weeks to get that thing working perfectly. All that integration with a web cam, the low power PC it had to run on and with the dot matrix printer was a big ask. We did it; we got only Rs.2000 per head for it. We tried to sell the software to local mall as well, but the mall...

The emotions were high after the first MSIT batch passed out. The MSIT Hub needed a new moderator. Pratosh, the man behind the hub, gave me the privilege of being the one. So I went about showing off my heavenly powers over the group. Email posts from a mysterious email address caught my attention. Someone with a signature – “keep smiling” was posting emails very regularly. I thought I could send a funky reply to this person and assert my authority just a wee bit. So began a series of mails between us. Mail No.1, Me to Keep Smiling Through the Hub: Hi! I've always wondered who this "keep smiling" is. So who is this? You better reveal yourself to me. You better pay heed to my words. Because I’m the moderator of the hub and I can, you know, wield my powers on you. Don’t ask me to keep guessing! Anyway, yeah already replied to Morpheus (Pratosh) met the Oracle (you) and I realize that I am the chosen one. But I'm no Neo, I'm just plain old' me. Yeah the HUB is gr...