The recent murder of a call centre employee who did night shifts, yes – the one that “shook the BPO city”, seems to be taking a new turn. Could there have been a conspiracy? Can’t wait to watch today’s Crime Story on E TV Kannada at 10 PM.
Update: Family suspects foul play
You may remember the dance teacher Mridula who used to come to Interwoven to teach us latin dance. Well, she came here again friday. She invited some of us to the Christmas Dance Night that she had planned to have the next day at her dance studio.
My colleague Kusuma was supposed to accompany me. But as is increasingly the trend, she too ditched me at the last moment. Nevertheless I went by myself. 
Mridula initially set me up with another rookie. But soon I moved on to a lady who was quite a pro at dancing, but then she had taken quite a long break. She taught me quite a few new moves. Also Mridula taught us a few basic steps of Samba.
Overall it was great fun. All the salsa-ing has taken its toll, and I have muscle pain now.
The timings written on the invitation must surely have been inconspicuous. I admit that people in my college are not the most punctual men to have walked this planet, but this was ridiculous. Having expected a much smaller delay, I went late by about half an hour myself. I was half expecting to walk into a filled seminar hall, interrupting someone’s speech. Imagine my surprise when I saw just four to five people slackly walking around. (Many thanks to everyone who repeatedly reminded me that IST stands for Indian Stretchable Time.)
Most of them were my classmates – Achyuth, Vishnu (both of whom had come a few hours early), Soumya (of Orkut fame) and a few others.
The college building now appears finished. Work has started on the second block. The lift still carries a ‘STAFF ONLY’ board, but understandably so.
I gave up hope after waiting for a while, and proceeded to the first floor. Using the stairs, of course. And whom did I see there, but the one and only Vijayanand with his trademark cheshire cat smile. There he was sitting with a register asking everyone in sight to fill up personal details. Gurudatt had a similar scheme, and we ended up filling up the same information at three different places.
The seminar hall at the first floor wasn’t hard to describe in one word. EMPTY. Don’t get me wrong, I was talking about the people. The hall is well furnished and all that. It was good to see even a projector hanging from the ceiling. No longer is the LCD projector an IEM monopoly!
The new Information Science department HOD, Swarnajyothi ushered the CS and IS guys into a near by room and gave us some pointers on how we can help:
As time passed, more and more people came in and half of the hall was taken. The Placement Officer, Gurudatt sir and the E&C HOD, Prof. Aravamudhan sat on the stage. Gurudatt then invited Soumya and Chetan – the oldest students who had arrived as yet to take the stage with them.
Although the invitation did mention a “Cultural programme” item, there really was nothing. The rest of the show was run by the students themselves. No juniors were invited, so that was just us. A surprising number of people came up to the dais and spoke, albeit a little. The PO later on shamed them for their poor communication and soft skills, being the software engineers that they were. (Of course there were people from all branches, but such is the way of the world.) Aravamudhan was polite and unintrusive as usual.
The PO also set up a small committee of people who will do all the work and take all the blame. It includes Achyuth, Amith Shivpuja and others (cant recall). The next year on, we might have elections.
Towards the end, the whole of the hall was taken. It was great to catch up with many of the seniors, although I could not recall many of their names. Big deal, since they didn’t either. So we reintroduced ourselves. Dinner was good, and the weather was great with a light drizzle, thanks to Fanoos.
Thanks to Venktesh, I went to Bangalore Habba at Palace grounds with a bunch of my classmates using VVIP passes. We saw Strings and Indian Ocean perform. It was not bad.
To summarise, the meet was great, but not too great. There was a lot of optimism about how the event is going to be better next year. Also there was a lot of stress on action: “Don’t just stand there, DO SOMETHING!”
Folks from JSS: The alumni meet is tomorrow. Hope to see many of you there!
What’s up with me? We’re past the half day mark, and I haven’t written a single byte of code yet.
Here is my Orkut “Today’s Fortune”.
Stop searching forever, happiness is just next to you
Yeah, right it is. Abhilash Pillai is my misery.
But it’s true that my life is mostly about him. That’s right. About him, about his car, about his flirting on the telephone 24×7 with multiple girlfriends, about his Lotus Notes, about his identifier naming style, about him deflowering somebody. GOD! I need to get a life of my OWN. For MYSELF.
And there’s a lot of hope of that happening. I mean look at me. Its 7:30 in the evening on a friday night. And here I am at my cubicle cribbing about Abhilash to web crawlers from Yahoo! and Google. I need therapy.
Wondering about why the plan of hitting the pub with college friends hasn’t materialized yet. That’s the only hope as of now.
Imagine my surprise when I got this letter by post yesterday. I am really pleased to get such a polite note from my college, although they got my name and my address a little wrong. They also want us to RSVP. Makes me wonder what’s in store.
Dear Sir/Madam,
Sub: Alumni meet – 2005
We on behalf of JSSATE Alumni Association are overwhelmed to inform you that we have planned an evening where you can recall and refresh the old cherished memories of your college days with your old buddies. The scheduled event is as follows:
PROGRAMME:
| Date: | 10th December, Saturday |
| Time: | 4:00 PM to 9:00 PM |
| Venue: | JSSATE Campus, Mylasandra, Uttarahalli-Kengeri Main Road, Bangalore 560060 |
| Phone No. | 29603425, 28603702 |
This get-together of alumni will be incomplete without you. Kindly accept this invitation and confirm your presence to make this evening a grand success.
V. Aravamudhan
President,
JSSATE Alumni Association
Mr. S. V. Gurudatt
Secreatary,
JSSATE Alumni Association
PS: Please confirm the presence by acknowledging on below.
Email: jss_svg(at)yahoo(dot)com.
Dear Sirs,
I am overwhelmed too. Will I make it to the meet? You can bet money on it.
Adarsh Bhat
Tomorrow is Abhilash Pillai’s birthday. After having conspired against his conspiracy to take tomorrow off from work, I managed to get him to treat a bunch of us at Mainland China for lunch today.
It is strange how you get to like food that you never liked before. For a long time I was a vegetarian. Not out of choice. I was born into it.
But when I went out with my friends, there were always people who ate chicken. They were always very enthusiastic about it. I couldn’t look down upon the food they ordered without looking down upon them. Of course if my mother was around, we would probably have moved to another table. Or may be just looked away. Like that would have changed anything. But I’m pretty sure that stuff smells much worse when she’s around.
But that’s only until you’ve tried it the first time. I found that I had no reason to hate chicken – I didn’t absolutely love it, but it was good sometimes. But I don’t like it when you mix pieces of chicken into everything – like noodles. For what it’s worth, I like noodles. I don’t think having little pieces of chicken in it makes it any better. But then there are chicken dishes that taste great. It’s just the context that matters. Do I like chicken? Can’t say. Do I like that dish (that’s made of chicken)? Now I can tell you.
Even after that, I thought fish stinked. Until today, when I found it was normal.
It’s like beer. Initially I thought it tasted like cat piss. (I thought that about Kinley bottled water too.) But then you get used to it. I think the right term is, “it grows over you.â€
Coming to think of it, there’s lot of vegetarian food I hate. The worst being ganji – what do you call it – rice porridge? Or starch? Don’t know. Any way the point is that I hate it. It makes me so full. It’s like liquid shit. My parents used to make us eat it when they didn’t have the energy to beat us.
Crossing over didn’t mean anything at all to me. I wonder why. I don’t think I care. I like what my mother told me about this. “Eat whatever you want outside the house, but don’t come home and tell me that you did.†Fair enough.
So when Abhilash asked me today whether I want to go for vegetarian food or non vegetarian, I said non-veg. I really didn’t think hard before I said that. It just came to me.
Should I be feeling guilty about it?
It’s just food! You take the good, you take the bad.