What was his name?

mum
yeah
mo'ommm
yeah I am liS-Ning
Who is your best friend?
You are my best friend...
No, not like that. Like nitin is my best friend. Who was yours?
I had many
Not best friendS. Best FRIEND.
Hmm.. there was this guy at college... very funny guy...What was his name?

A happy dream

One more dream. One more battlefield. This time it is a fight between the north and the south. What is the north and what is the south? The dream did not tell me. But it was a bloody battle. I fought for the south. We were losing. But we kept on fighting, for we knew that giving up is death. 'They' kept no prisoners. I should have been fighting for many days. I was tired. But I was always alert and conscious of the impending danger. It rained hard all the time. But the rain did not bother anyone. Everyone slept in the slush. It was not a time to make comfortable beds. We ate what we found. Some we burnt before we ate and some we ate as it was. I was covered with dirt. I have been killing soldier after soldier just to keep myself alive. One after the other everyone from my troop is dead. But I have no time to mourn. I kill people. I don't derive any pleasure from killing them; I feel no sorrow as well. I live.

I feel a thud at the top of my neck. It a bullet. And then another one just below the first. And another one, making it look like three dots in a straight line. My legs go weak and I fall flat on my back. The enemy has no time to find out who I am. But I have all the time. I see him moving for his next kill. It is atul. How can he? The grey sky turns black. I feel another bout of bullets pumped into my chest. It is again one after the other. Someone is killing a dead man. It is a professor from college I did not like. But I liked the course he taught. How can he do this to me?

I wake up in civilisation to realise that the battle has ended. Our land is not occupied. Nor did we occupy theirs. But I need to go to the enemy's land to find something. What is it? I do not know. But I need to travel. I travel by many means. I am used to the rigours of hard life. So the travel does not make me sick. But my destiny does. I reach 'there' to find the Japanese chieftain declare: We have lost many men in a battle that did not yield us anything. So we pick soldiers names from the enemy's camp at random and kill them. The names will be printed alphabetically. I request the chieftain to allow me to retire to my land. But he will not until he has seen that my name is not 0n the list. Someone comes in to declare my name is not on the list. As I hurry back, the someone comes beside me and says 'Look, the list I showed has names printed till PO and your name starts with a PR. So you never know if your name is on the list or not. So you better run.' I run, I cross lands and rivers until I finally am in a bus. It is raining heavily. I realise that I will have to live the rest of my life with the fear of someone coming to kill me. But I live. Now. End Of Dream

ps: Atul's comment on the dream: wow awesome.. i got to shoot u... chah i never hav happy dreams like those

MSc (Honours) Physics

I am also a physics major. But that is the end of the story. The year I did my physics was a disaster. But the disaster made men out of us boys. It taught us the art of putting up a bright face in moments of despair. We learnt to make jokes of those desperate moments. We learnt resilience and shamelessness instead of celestial body movements or atomic behavior.

Ok, that was a little too much. We got #$%^ed everywhere, all the time, but we still had fun. I swear.

Our names in red with a bold D (mid & end semester grades) beside them in department notice boards only evoked a sense of pride. We did what no other batch of students had done before.

In the quantum mechanics classes (which we attended only to collect our test papers), we were the only group of guys who giggled when the professor said bra; even at the end of the semester. Apparently there is a bra and a ket which makes a bracket.

We photocopied studious guys' class notes for open book exams. But the agony of not being able to match answers in the work books to the questions asked just because the moron who gave us the notes didn't write down the questions in class is inexplicable.

There was another course we did and I do not want to name it. Because, if you asked me anything other than its name, I wouldn't know. The course was for 100 marks and the final exam (alternate name: compre) contributed 40 marks to it. We did not know if we would fall into an E or a D. We wanted that D desperately. So we went to up the professor in a hope for a pullup (you get pulled to a higher grade if the professor recognised your face).

One of us: Sir, pullup

Prof: Definitely. How much did you make?

Another one of us: Sir, 25

Prof: 25 in compre. That is fantastic.

The other one of us: No sir. In total.

The look on the instructor's face said it all.

Prof: 25 in total deserves a D.

I think he intended to figuratively spit on our faces for ours marks. But we did it again! We got our Ds!

On the first day of campus interviews, I was shortlisted by the two companies selecting candidates that day. #$% was one of them. I cleared three gruelling rounds of interviews before I met the big man, the final hurdle. I believe he was a book worm once. He started of with questions from my chemical engineering. I stood unnerved for twenty minutes. He looked lost and the battle seemed to be won, until he said: What did you read in electro magnetic theory?

me: We read about the effects of electricity on magnetic properties.

My raised left eyebrow gave it all. I was shown the door. I made it at the other company!

Even today a lot of people ask me: You are a chemical engineer. But why physics? You must really like physics!

me: You bet I do!

* we, us - Balan, Kampa & myself

Rewind

How did you feel the first time you learnt how to draw a cube?