Chronicles of Gautam

My boarding passes from September 2010 to March 2011 I was just going through my photos folder and found the above photo tucked away in the 'photos from mobile phone' folder. I remembered why I had taken the photo earlier - it was because I was surprised how many times I had to travel by air within that span of a few months, and for reasons mostly not related to my work. Air travel in India has increased in leaps and bounds barring a few hiccups, which were triggered mainly by the recession. Being a consumer for this product, I can now easily see the value that it provides to people like me. It is fast, reliable and largely efficient service(ease of booking tickets) which is affordable. The major change in the last decade has been on the reliability and the affordability front. Entry to private players and the resulting competition ensured that services were more varied, networks more widespread and prices driven down. At the same time the income level...

IIM Express: Rickshaw sporting a jazzy sign It has been a hectic two and half months to say the least. As I again glanced over some survival pointers  that my brother and his friend gave me before I came here,  I realized how much sense they make.  176 Lectures of 75 minutes each, 15 exams, 20 company presentations, 30 quizzes and innumerable cases and assignments.  I never thought I could attend so many lectures on a trot. This place made me get up and do it.   Its a mad mad world out here.

The last fortnight went really quick and really slow at the same time. I had to give six interviews in the span of some ten days for admissions to b-schools across the country. Interestingly, I found out that the worst part about giving interviews is not the interview itself, but the wait outside the interview room! Hoping to get through some colleges :fingers crossed. Meanwhile, iPad 2 has been launched. Mototrola Xoom and RIM Playbook are to be here soon, I am crazily addicted to my berry, and to some extent my Thinkpad too. Current favorite song: Dil Ibadat from the movie Tum Mile. What a beautiful song!

Film Poster - Dhobi Ghat Another quick post on another movie I saw recently. Dhobi Ghat is a movie about four people who have come to Mumbai for different reasons, from different socio-economic backgrounds and are somehow linked to each other through their actions. Aamir Khan plays a brooding painter, who mostly keeps to himself and is inspired by seemingly mundane things. Then there is an NRI female, who is in Mumbai to spend her vacations, and ends up in a one night stand with Aamir. Consequently they part ways the next morning, with no hard feelings on either side. Prateik Babbar is a dhobi and a wannabe actor who serves both these individuals, and is another link between the two. Aamir moves into an apartment which was previously occupied by a newly wedded muslim lady. It turns out that she has videotaped parts of her life in Mumbai so that her brother can see it as a diary. These tapes are found by Aamir. The backdrop of the film is a very vivid and in-your-face Mumbai, wh...

First of all, let me wish all of you a very happy year ahead! I am back to Bangalore after an eventful week in Mumbai. Back to office, back to work. Quite some things changed in my life in the past week: some for the worse, some for the better. I hope in the long term I will be happy for the past 10 days. I must admit that the year didn't start of well, the shocker of a XAT being the first of several lows. Comments of the paper ranged from a simple 'It was the toughest paper ever..' to creative ones like 'XATack!', 'XATom Bomb!' and 'Even Rajnikanth would have struggled :O'. Really, with the extremely high level of paper that was set (with differential marking and an ambiguous marking scheme), and the resulting luck factor that inevitably creeps in, one tends to question the rationale behind such a paper. I respected the XAT for their impeccable papers and flawless conduction of the exam till now, but this year was a disappointment to say the leas...

As tradition has it, I am back in Mumbai for this year's Christmas - New year festive season. For the 6th year in a row, I am spending this time of the year in Mumbai. Four years of my college and two years of working, I was never at home during Diwali or Holi, or Ganesh Chaturthi for that matter, but I am always here during Christmas and New Year; simply because I have had holidays every single time. As I look back over the years, I realize how much I have changed. Christmas time gives me a fixed point, some sort of rigidity to the timeline of my life, where I can look back and recollect over my last year. At the same time last year, I was thinking vastly different things, my priorities were different. As I said in some earlier post and repeat it here, life changes. For the last three years now, all I was doing this vacation was preparing for the XAT, and I must do the same now this year too. Wish me luck! Two of my pics from Seoul below: Me at City Hall Subway Station, S...

   Seoul - Infinitely yours Recently I had been to South Korea, one of the four ' Asian tigers' . Specifically, I had been to the very live and bustling city of Seoul, the place where the Miracle on the Han river took place. This event refers to the phenomenal economic success of the Seoul city in particular, and South Korea in general in the last 3-4 decades.  It is a story of the epic rise of a country from being war-ravaged  in the 1950s to becoming an awe inspiring, sky touching, electronics producing giant. A GDP growth chart is suffice to astonish us with the sheer growth rate and consistency with which South Korea has recorded its economic growth. South Korea's GDP (PPP) Growth from 1911 to 2010 - Source Wikipedia I was in Seoul for almost one and a half months, working for a Korean customer mainly to initiate them about our product and set up their development environment. I lived in a hotel for the first week and then moved to a service apartment for...

While on the bus the other day, I passed a spot where an accident had taken place. Usually most people stand up and crane their neck to get a glimpse of the scene. I am not one of them. I am sensitive in this sense, preferring  to move on rather than have a disturbing image affixed in my brain. Probably some poor guy must be lying in a pool of blood with many parts of the body broken and writhing in pain, or worse, dead. One split second before the accident, all was well and then Bang! His life just changed forever. This just underscores how fickle life is. We fret and fiddle and plan and arrange, and then just out of the blue  everything changes. All that we think changes. All plans change. Life changes. This does not mean we should not think about our future - that would be plain stupid. I just want to say how, in particular cases, the best laid plan can go awry. In case you are wondering if I am smoking pot, be assured that I ain't doing no such thing. Its just that I saw...

Am I connected or not? One of the frustrating things about using Windows is, surprising as it may seem, having to deal with problems involving wi-fi. It would appear that using Windows would at least guarantee a pain-free, hassle free experience with wireless drivers. But Alas! It is not so. Nowadays I can safely declare that any Ubuntu (rather any Linux} box outperforms Windows with regards to just about everything - including driver support. And if just dealing with problems is not enough, there are those confounding messages that as Windows users one must inevitably encounter. Just the other day, I was having some problems connecting to a network, and above is a screenshot of the screen that I was presented with after fiddling around for some time. Now what in the world am I supposed to infer from this? Is some kind of cruel joke being played on my by some bored Microsoft programmer? Poor me (and the legions of other Windows users out there).

Now this is what I call a great MBA's marketing mind at work! This poster, seen at the Philips cafeteria near where I work, had me in splits the first time I saw it. I wonder if there is a tiny possibility that the person who coined this 'We squeeze to please' tagline really had no idea of its sexual connotations. And the 'Juices 'n' More ' doesn't help either. I am convinced that the guy had a stroke genius, or has a really sad life. To this day, I cannot keep a straight face as I say to the person at the counter,"Ondu water melon juice kodi". And add mentally, "freshly squeezed please!".

So I have finally become any engineer! Here goes: Gautam Chaudhari Bachelor of Engineering (Honors), Electrical and Electronics. Btw, I joined DSP group , the company interned with earlier, as a software engineer.

The past one month has been quite a blur. From Bangalore to Mumbai to Pilani. From Kannada all around to Marathi all around to Hindi all around. From get-up-in-the-morning-and-go-to-work to who-the-hell-cares-what-day-it-is to ghot-for-placements-even-if-no-company-is-coming. From colleagues to family to friends. From Bangalore to Home to Home.

So did I bell the CAT? Unfortunately, no. DI&LR pretty much sucked for me, where I am getting only 17/100 and the expected cut-off is 32-35 for 95%. Math was ok, getting 37/100, expected cut-off being 32 for 95%. And Eng was pretty good, getting 72/82/82 (CL,TIME,IMS) out of 160 which will be pretty close to 100% (expected cut off is 47-49 for 95%). So My total is 126/136/136 (CL/TIME/IMS). Which should be around 98-98.9% according to CL. But sadly, no calls :( It would have been good to get some experience in GD/PI had I got a call. And who knows, I might even have got admission in an IIM! Sigh.

Tomorrow I will be taking the CAT. For the uninitiated, the CAT is an acronym for the Common Entrance Test, clearing which might open a path leading to admissions in the coveted IIMs. Like lakhs of others, between 10:30 am to 1pm, I will be ploughing through excruciating passages in English, trying to comprehend the tangled and hidden meanings and inferences in them. I will be solving problems in Math like what is the remainder when 21^(21^21(..(21 times) is divided by 25. (BTW, the answer is 21) . And I will be trying to establish conclusively whose father is whose son and whose aunt is whose sister as an exercise in Logical reasoning. The CAT is not a test of what it seems to be at first. Nobody cares whether you can sucessfully find out the remainder when some x is divided by y. You have calculators to do that. I sincerely believe even the author of the passage will not be able to answer the questions that are asked on her work. Rather, the CAT is a test of how you prioritize you...

White and Brown Tigers. Majestic . Butterfly Park. Picturesq ue . Elephants. Cute . Zebra. Arrogant . I have some stupid problem in Firefox where I am unable to upload pics to blogger. So I had to use IE to create this post :( Current favourite track: "Paigham" from Lakeer.

The happening of the following sequence of events is why am I posting on blogger and not Wordpress: -I forgot my Wordpress password (quite rare, me forgetting passwords). -The 'forgot password' link on Wordpress mailed to my Bitsmail account. -I couldn't open my Bitsmail account on account of it being currently inaccessible from outsite BITS. BTW I am in Bangalore from 2nd July, and here are some curious details about the place I live in: 1) It is within a hundred meters from a railway line. 2) It is within a hundred meters from a National Highway. 3) It is about a kilometer from the nearest Indian Railway Station. 4) It is within a hundred meters from the nearest KSRTC bus stop. 5) It is within a hundred meters from a 5-storeyed Big Bazaar. 6) It is around 500 meters from a Cafe Coffee Day. 7) It is around 500 meters from a Food World outlet. 8) It is around 500 meters from a Reliance Fresh Outlet. 9) It is around 500 meters from a Subhiksha outlet. 10) It is within a kilo...

This post has come after a pretty long time without a change in the subject that the previous four posts pertain to,but considering what a lazy bumass(whatever that means!) I am,I can safely assume that the people reading this will excuse me.Actually I had initially thought that I would put the photos at one time but the IPC is so wonderful that it compels you to change your ideas.And thus the blog remained until today- unchanged,untouched(except for a comment or two by my dear sidey,and yes Neha too).So enjoy the animals.. Jackal..looks surprisingly like a dog,doesn't it? Don't know what these birds are,but they were very cute and they momentarily perched on our palms to take away the titbits which we offered them.No fear at all of humans! This is a nilgai for those who don't know(Its supposed to be blue or something but this was a female and hence isn't-thats what the guide said). Cute antelopes. And deers-chittals to be more precise..

Work of Art! Dinner at hotel just outside the sanctuary gates And We Finally enter the park(in open jeeps-its not allowed to step out of the jeeps).(Well,I must confess..we had to get out at one point of time due to unavoidable circumstances.)

These are some photos near the town of Alwar..where we had stoped to enjoy the view.There were lots of Bandar-log around(excluding us of course)and turtles in river.And the majestic Kingfisher too!!Unfortunately I cant upload all the FOUR HUNDRED snaps that we took on our trip.The rocks where we are all sitting are opposite the river with the road in between. Some of my friends Junta Yo kingfisher! The River

This weekend I had gone with my wingies to Sariska national park.For those of whom haven't heard of this place,its between two of its more famous cousins-Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary towards the north and Ranthambore Tiger reserve to the south.It was one of the most enjoyable weekends that I have spent after coming to BITS.A weekend to sac out(relax), and have gen fun with mainly wingies and pseudo wingies.They say that a picture is worth a thousand words and hence I am devoting the next few posts to photos only.Mind you,NONE of them are edited! On the way to Sariska... Tunnel in the mountains..Hurray!! There are a lot many more photos..Just wait and watch...