Journey to my first phone

Not long ago, I used to daydream seeing others, who used to sport swanky Nokia handsets, talk to their near and dear ones or just mere showoff by keeping ringtone alert loud; I used to feel terribly jealous and question myself "When I will pose like those people?" That was six years back ! :)

I used to walk a km from my hostel to Avenue Road along with my friends, every alternate day after tasteless mess dinner to call my home and apprise my mom the regular stuffs at a tiny yellow-coloured call-booth. After the call, we never missed to sip a cup of tea at a small shop owned by one good-looking aunty, whom all my group of girlfriend-starved friends stared and go over top imagining everything they would. Even I fell to their trap, not that I was sadhu before ! Anyways back to where I was, if you are confused whether this crazy guy used to walk so long to call home or see that aunt, that too in Silicon City of India. Well, the answer can be YES to both, but my mother’s order to call her every other day overshadowed any damn reason. Although the motives were many, I used to go there only to call my parents and siblings located 650 Kms away from Bangalore by dropping never-ending stream of one rupee coins in the yellow-box and the reason was I didn’t possess the gadget called Mobile Phone or Cell Phone! Even I could not even imagine gadget like Tata DOCOMO OneTouch Net Phone back then .

Although we used to find solace being part of a breed called engineering students where a saying goes “Life takes backseat when you join engineering, in terms of girls “. If you are wondering when Baba Ranchodddas  said this, well author of this post believes so, and my engg brotherhood supports this claim. Sorry, I don’t consider outliers.
I used to visit home once every three months. Although I never used to insist my parents to buy one cellphone fore me, but they could sense my urgency to grab one, especially when some mama buys new phone and along my cousins, we go awe with it and in no time, test every single feature [can’t help, born to be engineers].

It was December winter of 2006 and I happened to visit my family during preparation holidays of my third semester exam. The atmosphere at home, my irritating bro and sis and constant pampering of my mom by serving dishes of my choice made me forget that I had come home to prepare for my third semester exam with loads of books in my bag. After a week stay, I boarded Udhyan Express – Departure Time, 8.10 pm, Wadi, Seat No. 21 AC 3 tier. I always preferred traveling in Sleeper compartment, but my dad insisted me to book this time in AC.From my past experiences, I knew  AC coaches were filled with boring travelers who were on their own for whole 24 hours. Get a life, guys!
To my dad's guideline, I said to myself  -Why not? It was free for me then, because I was still a proud dependent of an Indian Railway Servant, not anymore as I slog now to have a title called Software Engineer. Although I reluctantly agreed, I opted AC 3 tier rather than my dad’s initial guideline to book my seat only in 2A. I boarded my train in time with two heavy bags, piercing through people standing at the door to get my seat. Someone had already occupied my seat, and since the passenger was quite elder, I decided to sit at the side berths out of due respect to his age. I saw a girl occupying the lower side berth and obviously, she had booked. She had wrapped herself in a shawl covering her from neck to toe, wearing spectacles and cursing me from within as I trespassed her seat for which she was owner for next 12 hours. After seeing each other’s face for next half hour, I decided to start the conversation with her.I noticed she was reading some fat novel. I asked which book she was reading! She said something and I didn’t give a damn about that. I recall the author was Danielle Steele, and that was the first time, I was hearing this name. And later I found out that she was an ardent fan of this romantic novelist. We were lost in continuous chat and stopped until some old uncle reminded us that it was 11.30 pm and asked us to switch off the single light which helped us to gaze into each other's eyes. I still prefer an Upper berth in trains and it was same that day too.Reason: I love sleep and can’t tolerate if someone wakes me up early, especially in train. I believe many people who are fond of sleep and travelled in trains agree with me. But that night was different. Although we exchanged goodbye-and-it-nice-meeting-u pleasantries, nothing much had progressed and I didn’t want it to end here. I just wanted to wake up early let whatever happens. I had no gadget to give alarm, but I had up my mind to talk with her again next morning.

Next day, I checked my watch immediately when I woke up. Without any alarm or anyone waking me up, I got up on my own for first time in train at 6.30 am and I was relieved. I didn’t want her to see myself as a very desperate guy. So I behaved normally and went to do my daily chorus. We still had good two hours left and it was Hindupur I believe. I bought two cups of tea for both of us and continued our chat. Bangalore Cannt came, and she had to get down. I used to get down usually at Majestic, but this time, responded to the situation. I got some weird sense of feeling that something good was going to happen; and without thinking twice, I just got down and helped her with luggage. For those, who are thinking it’s just out of JAB-WE-MET, in fact, we both were pleasantly surprised and astonished later to see how similar it was to our life. Please note: this happened in Dec ’06, way before JWM released.

To my surprise; she shared her phone no. even without asking. I knew it made no sense asking number from her, when I myself didn’t possess one. But I knew “mera number aayega” but when, I was not sure! She insisted to give a miscall. To avoid getting trapped, I told her my cell is switched off and I kept it deep under my luggage. She later figured out that I lied then :) To my bad luck, I didn’t kept a pen to note down her no. Neither did she had. I promised her I will call back her once I reach hostel and just recited her no. on the way back. The moment I reached hostel, I messaged her using my friend’s mobile. This continued until I consumed those 100 sms of my friend, and it was getting really weird because he was one big flirt with girls , and he wanted those free sms badly. I decided to buy a sim. May be I am the first person on earth to buy a SIM before buying a handset. But yes, I did ! I used to remove his sim and chat with this girl until we really decided to meet again. It was exam time so I postponed the meeting and stopped chatting for a while. I went to home for 3 week long vacation after exams.To my surprise, my father gifted one nice cool phone to me. And there began the journey! I had my first-ever mobile phone before my first-ever date!

                                                
Today I own the phone in the image above after changing so many phones en-route, still I can never forget the journey to my first phone ! :)

Wish my laptop had this cool feature :-)

After leaving orphan to my blog , I am back again with some selfish motives . But as you know, I can't achieve what I want without my dear blog. The reason for popping here : One cool feature just striked my head and here I am , to pen down my thoughts in a distilled manner before it evaporates . Yes, ton of things keep squandering in my small head and I have leased hell lot of stuff for my laptop to store and remind me whenever I am about to miss any deadline , keep me focussed on my day-to-day job and explore the world using fingertips .But one things I expect my computer , the device which you are using to read this blog ,
to make me smile when I am sad and motivate me when I am down . 
I can list ton of feature additions here but to start with, I want this to be included asap !

Let me brief about how it can make me smile and happy first .
I spend majority of my day in front of PC and so do many of you . Atleast some moment of the day after cracking some puzzle or some external event , you are very happy . For instance, assume you  came home from the trip few days back and your friend calls you saying the trip photos are uploaded in Facebook/Orkut. You would be excited to check your own photos and feel happy . At this juncture , the computer can take snapshot of the screen which made you happy , or rather it can take your photo through camera which is available on most of the laptops nowadays . Even on your PC, it can do send webcam the signal to capture your smiling face.
Later whenever your are bored or sad, it just needs to pop up the screen captured or one of the photos from archive where u were smiling. Howzzat ! :)

Now, in similar lines, our very own computer can motivate us . Here there's a catch .
You can feed your computer with some videos ,anecdotes, stories or quotes which you believe can motivate you in any bad condition. Now,computer can recognize your mood and show/play up one of the files in the
archive. Here, we go ! You will never be bored when you sit in front of PC .
Looks like my creative juices are flooding here but you would be saying how can this be possible. Well, even I understand and have the same question.

Challenge here is to understand the person's mood . It can be determined by facial curves, eye movements and ... With technology advancing at the rate , where few years back we could not imagine touch phone, today every one possess it with dirt cheap rates, why not this can't be possible ?  :-) Now, I am very motivated and smiles are back . Do vote me if this triggered some juices flow in your mind, crazy thoughts ellipsing in your head and made you smile .


P.S : I have used PC, laptop, computer here . All refer same damn device which u love/hate but can't avoid !

A tryst with my priorities in near-future

First of all, lots been going on in my life but I can't use them as the excuse to be away from here for so long and come back here for the same reasons ! I am really sorry , but well, I am focussing lot of my energy on three priority things at the moment :

1. Work @ Office
2 .Alma-mater Reunion preparation activities
3. MBA preparation

The order of the points listed above are by no means differentiating them with the priority I give to each of them . The above three spheres have their own place in my life and I wish to offer complete justice to the attention each one deserve, to my full strength .
It's been a lovely journey so far the way I do my work or infact a day-job to win my bread and butter . I can't imagine I am on the verge to complete 1 year 10 months in my first job this month-end and wow , what a journey it has been ! Lot of new people, lot of gyan , lot of exposure , lot of office jargon ,lot of office politics I witnessed ( or the things which I claim it to be part of office - politics with my limited understanding ) .In the process, I garnered lots of support from my peers, seniors and ofcourse my manager .It's been a real joyride with lot of learning . I was amazed when I came across all the nitty-gritty things which I learnt as I came to this point and directly related to the vague notion which I had before joining the job . I boast sometimes and tell myself that what I knew is so true ( althought not completely :-) ). I love my job but well, you know , this is just a start for me and I wish to pick lot many milestones as I go along this awesome journey of life .

Well, I always believed and been a strong advocate of the idea that "Your day-job is just one part of life and not everything to rely upon to make your life happy ( or to some people, a reason to become moron , sad and lose interest in life) " . It's our life and we need to play it in our own way , the way we wish to lead it , in our own terms ! But to those who feel this is directly picked up from some bollywood movie ,I guess I need to add a disclaimer at the end of the post that any such resemblances are mere coincidence and nothing else ;) . Coming back to the point of leading life , it will become a totally different ball-game when we play our life led by external terms and accept the defeat that such terms are stronger and believe that we have no control on them . Anyways, just my 2 cents though from the life-skills I learnt from innumerable resources surrounding me .

Coming to the second point , my alma-mater UVCE will be witnessing a MegaReunion coming December,2010 . And the preparations are in full swing but need to be stepped up in terms of awareness about the same in the complete UVCE fraternity and outside. Also, it requires huge response from the attendees, volunteers at this moment like never before, just like the events organised on such large-scale basis . We need lot more think-tanks to take initiatives to build the strong network of their batches and club them together to form a huge well-connected web where every UVCEian belongs to the such a strong network . Infact, we came up with this website VisionUVCE to achieve that dream and it's been a tremendous success so far . If any UVCEian who is reading this now and hasn't registered on visionuvce.in , I kindly request you to click the link above and register yourself right away ! You might ask why I need to register . The benefits are immense and it can only be left to your imagination how you can get benefitted from the same . Short term benefits which I can recall are you will not miss any single update about the event MegaReunion which I am sure, you wish to attend at any cost ! Right ?:P Apart from that, there are some cool features lined up for the website . To give a glimpse of that , soon there will be online list of all your classmates grouped according to their batch and branch who have registered on the site . This will help you to track your long-lost classmate and then , we will be more than happy to facilitate the contact details of the person you were looking for , after minor verification to keep entire process safe and secure .
I am delighted to receive comments on what can be the long-term benefits and how we can achieve that ! So I invite every UVCEian to come for volunteer meetings happening every Saturday in Alumni Hall, UVCE City campus , 3 pm to get acquainted with the plans and share their thoughts . We would be more than happy to get few helping hands to make this event a mega-success . Just leave a comment below to know more about the event and meetings . I will touchbase with you so that we can take it forward . And if you are twitter-freak, you will not miss any updates @uvcealumni .

Coming back to my third point , I have a dream to do my MBA and willing to apply next fall i.e Fall 2011 . My preparations are going at snail-pace but wish to speed it up pretty soon . I would love to share the details with you all but for that I created a new blog just now titled "Ride to my MBA" and will be posting MBA updates I get from various sources which interest me and may benefit you as well as keep track of my progress to achieve that coveted MBA seat . Please pour in your suggestions / comments / topics which you really aspire to read from my posts in this regard or in any matter overall , so that this blog just doesn't become a place where I vent out all my feelings and thought-process going on in my non-stop mind , but a platform to serve you all in the stuffs you want it to .

Time to crash into my bed ! Thanks for reading this lengthy post :P . If you really read this till now , I am sure you will post a comment , right ?

A meeting of UVCEians seperated by dates

First of all, I wish to tell you all " Meeting planned by Mr. KNC in UVCE made my day ".
Let me recount the minutes before I start my Work @ Office because I don't wish anyone to be deprived of those moments just because you couldn't make it .

Srini & I had planned to come college together. He picked me up from my home sharply at 8.20 am . We reached college at 8.50 , gave a ring to Mr. KNC and stepped in UVCE college quadrangle .

Just 2 min later, Mr. KNC arrived . Along with him, his friends Mr. M L Ashok 1975 EEE UVCE and Mr. RSN Murthy 1974 Civl UVCE joined us and I was overwhelmed to find three esteemed alumni than expected one.

A stroll across campus quickly transported them to their college days and memories of their pranks, classmates , lecturers and identifying classrooms,benches , library, labs and nicknames too :) Apart from some cosmetic changes, the heritage is still carried over through years and decades .

Mr. KNC took his cam and took the snaps of the college nook and corner.He also pointed me out the current seminar hall which was the place where he won the BU Chess ChampionShip and a UVCE Boys hostel alumni just like me . Mr. Ashok recalled about his good old days at TT games,labs and classes . Defintely, I agree KNC Sir's comment - "We were among studious guys during those days." :) Mr. RSN Murthy added his points about his '74 batch reunion and shared the in and out of all the events happened nearby. Why not ? He is been close to college working in KPC and will be Special Point of Contact for spreading message and sharing tips like event venue and other event nuances along with KNC Sir.

After a quick photo session in college, we went to Kamat Cafe and continue discussion over a cup of coffee and ofcourse tea. Varied tastes as expected but it was a confluence of like minds having a dream of making MegaReunion a splashing event and make UVCE get it's deserved staus of IIT or a Deemed University atleast.

The discussion included the Rotary Club events to which KNC Sir and Ashok Sir are active members doing credible and noble work in Govt. schools . Progession of life in terms of technology like, hearing live cricket commentary thru radio , emergence of Tvs and DD , mobiles and lot of jokes over it . And in all these stuff, it finally zeroed always on UVCE recalling the people who have made a mark in their own fields.On a lighter note ,introduction class of google docs used for collaboration by KNC Sir to Srini can't be missed here.
All out there who said, our seniors may not be much tech-savvy, they are way ahead of us !

Two names which I can recall are R.Chakrapani, Radio presenter in Melbourne and , Pradeep Padukone, brother of Prakash Padukone among many stalwarts.Do share us their contacts too .Mano Murthy, music director and retired Software entrepreneur and Ramesh Aravind , actor-cum-director , Kannada movies.

We came back to college . I introduced Prof. V SatyanagaKumar( VSNK ) , Chairman , EEE to all the alumni . It was just a co-incident that he arrived while we were departing . Srini was happy to meet his teacher who taught him EEE subjects during his college days . Prof. VSNK also shared his vision of having a reunion of EEE alumni, although it didnt took off , the mega-reunion movement is infact merged his plan to achieve the larger vision of alumni . Definitely, this is going to be a real booster as he offered us complete support from whatever he can.
Although this was the first time I interacted him , with the discussion we had , I am excited to take it forward. Lomesh , Satish and Harsha already in touch with him will help us leverage the support .
They also checked out the UVCE map placed at the entrance, It was a pleasant surprise to them when they learnt that it is entirely created by Students . :-)

Finally , a very warm see-off with the promise that MegaReunion will bring back the the memories of all the good old days to everyone just as it did to KNC, Ashok, RSN Murthy , Srini . Overall, the happiness they got has inspired to really meet and if possible, surpass their expectations.To achieve that, everyone of UVCE alumni must come together .

Megareunion tasks focus :

1..I promised to add all three of them gathered that I will share the existing Batch Coordinators google docs . I already added ur mail ids and granted you access. KNC Sir has promised that he will liase with anyone and spread the word in full zeal as he is doing now .

2. A free event management site which will help us track the volunteers, tasks, meeting timings, updates .
The idea by KNC Sir which he found it very useful when he planned for an event last year .

3. Budget preparations : Although chalked out at the facevalue , Murthy Sir's input really helped me realise that we can infact reduce all the costs if we contact the right person . He is already aware of few UVCE alumni who can help us book the Kanteerava Stadium at a reasonable rate.
@Satish and others : What you say about this ? Do go ahead with your budget planning work but doors are always open to streamline such costs.

4. KNC Sir and Murthy Sir have promised to share their collection of photos for our SAMPADA and then , we can use them to our MR photo exhibition event . @SAMPADA editors : How does it sounds ? :-)

All have promised to attend the event along with their family, infact , Ashok Sir's father is 1949 UVCE passout . Sounds amazing right !
Note : All attendees were coming after their college graduation for first time . It means 35 years for KNC, Ashok and RSN Murthy Sir .
And 9 years for Srini.

Gosh ! I finished it finally .And still have a weird sense of feeling that " Hope I have not missed any minutes !" If so, I request the meeting attendees to please fill the gaps with comments here.

My blog also was left orphan for months waiting for a refreshing post but I have found one today ! :) [The dates in the title refers to the different years when all of us graduated ]

KNC Sir uploaded all the snaps on picassa the next day. I hope the it can be viewed publicly. Do check the photos .

Ending on a very positive note , catch you soon again !