Your honor

Last week, for the first time in my life I stood in the courtroom before CJ of family court. (I filed my petition for divorce there) Unlike my expectations and imagination about legal profession the environment over there was really sick. It will really give major attack of nervousness if anybody spends a week in atmosphere like that. I was fascinated by this profession since I was working with Spectrum (Once I even thought of studying law).
The three years at Spectrum were some of the great days in my life. My career was just kicking off then. My earlier job was in Oracle/D2K. I always dreamt my career in C++, so when the opportunity to work with Spectrum came I just grabbed it without a second thought. For the first few days I was just wondering why my boss was bombarding me every now and then with every small-big tasks when there were 20 other experienced programmers around. A week later I realized, I with a just passed-out were the only programmers there and the other guys were either data entry operators or Lawyers.
So I started with Spectrum as junior programmer. It was fairly easy for me, as my boss and his bosses really showed trust in me (It might be that they didn’t had much choice either) to climb up the ladder of promotions as the team gradually grew up. We used to work for days and nights dreaming that one day Jurix will become major share holder in legal information retrieval market. We used to have long and brainstorming discussion about search and retrieval algorithms, database design and so on. Most of us were fresher or less than one year experienced, so everybody was trying to put things together which he/she learnt during academics. We never had any formal training about any language/technology, but we were so full of enthusiasm and energy that we managed some Herculean tasks without knowing what we were upto. (My first COM server was sheer product of my understanding of pure virtual functions, the words like interface, inproc server etc were not even in my dictionary then) The side effect was that we were never contented with the end product as by the time we were close to deliver it, somebody or the other used to discover much better technique to do so.
One of my bosses used to call us bunch of masons, who never had any plan, schedule or even an idea about the deliverable. He used to blame us that we start putting bricks and cement if somebody asked us to build home, without even understanding how many rooms there should be. Today when I can see myself surrounded by so many smart architects, I wonder if anybody of them has ever built a single room out of his knowledge. Most of these smart architects do the maintenance of old houses or put extra storey to the building which probably was product of some enthusiastic masonry. :)

Simplex Method

Sometimes I wonder how I managed to fail so many times during my graduation. A moment back I was looking for my LPP and transportation model notes. (BTW I am pursuing PG diploma in ORM). I managed to get those from my best kept secret treasure. (Well, my parents don’t think so… and they even offered a helping hand towards dust bin. For my mother it’s not even worth than 5 Rs/Kg from raddiwala :-(
Anyway these notes are really good and helped a lot to learn transportation in just ten minutes for which I was struggling for whole of the Sunday at Vaibhav’s place. (He may term my ‘whole of Sunday’ as 30 min including a nap) But the point here is, even after doing so much of hard work I never cleared a semester in one shot until seventh. I heard a rumor that since the University was falling short of funds they found this innovative way to raise it up, other wise who else will fail in a single subject for seven times, paying Rs 450 for each attempt.
No, I am not joking. There are quite a few evidences to prove this theory. This incident took place in my third unsuccessful attempt to start Elec. m/c III. Ten minutes after distributing the question paper Shailendra (he is my best pal and accompanied till sixth attempt) looked at me shaking his head in disgrace. I signaled him to wait for another 15 minutes, so that I could help my friend in need. But the poor guy was so nervous that he left the examination room in just 30 minutes. I fought back and survived there for next two and half hours. On the result day Shailendra came all the way smiling towards me, not because of his 13/100 on scoreboard, but 9/100 against mine. Can you guys believe this? But our University could make you believe on such nasty things terming them as controversial as NASA’s expedition on moon.
BTW even today sometimes I wake up dripped in sweat with the nightmare, a clerk found out that my convocation of bachelor's degree is not valid as I am yet to clear Electrical m/c III.

ischool ke tem pe aana

JEOPARDY

The title is derived from one of my friend’s story (visit http://jaaramaaz.wordpress.com/category/saurabh/). It seems the virus of writing spread rapidly in air over last few months. Many of my friends got infected by it and got cured soon but I am not yet, so here is a new post. I don’t know if this makes any sense but it gives me real pleasure. Anyway that is not the subject of the post; I am going to post more and more as long as I am enjoying the stuff.
Last week I have been to ‘Torana’ fort. This is really nice trek. Shailendra and Sandy accompanied and both are just hopeless, they can’t even walk one KM in a stretch. Every 200 meters I had to show them some carrot like bread and eggs carried with me to walk next few more meters. The weather was just awesome and while on fort we were in real clouds and couldn’t even see beyond two meters. We had almost walked ninety percent of the distance but were not sure where we had reached. The fort was curved in clouds and we couldn’t see the walls. But the last ten percent were really tough for me.
I am always afraid of the height. My limbs start trembling and I can’t stop myself thinking of falling down. (I remember my younger days, during summer holidays we used to play on the building terrace, while others walked smartly and without showing any notion of fear, I used to literally creep. The fear of crumble down was so filled in my mind that I never enjoyed those games on terrace.) I think this fear of height will accompany me throughout my life. It’s not just about the ridge; it also applies to relationship, friendship and career.
I am always hesitant about crossing the boundaries and exploring the new horizons. But these new horizons are really attractive and I suppose it’s worth betting your achievements to reach over there. Over a period I realized the height may kill, but it really thrills. I would have never enjoyed the ‘Torana’ trek, if I couldn’t overcome my fear and climbed that 200 meters difficult pass. And ofcourse the other two musketeers were always there to push me and make me reach the top. Friends are for that only, aren’t they? (Even though they demand a Chicken Tandoor for doing so ;))