Prized Memories

It is with a heavy heart that I’m writing this blog post. My heart feels heavy because I’m soon going bid farewell to my college, which has been my second-abode for the past four years. I’ve become very attached to my college, the environment and most of all to my friends, and the very thought of leaving it all soon, brings tears to my eyes.

I remember the first time I stepped into the college; I was awe-struck at the size and beauty of the campus! The very first year of engineering was spent getting used to the long-distance travel and the very-new environment and thinking about how to escape the seniors. I must say I’m happy that I’ve never had to face any uncomfortable situations, I was only asked by a few seniors to tell my ‘BD’ and wish them whenever I see them. I did make a few friends in the first year, but they were just friends with whom you sit in the class and listen to the lecturers. That had always been my definition of friends. What I enjoyed the most in the 1st year were the labs-seriously!

Come 2nd year and it introduced me to some of the most fascinating inventions of man- Orkut, yahoo messenger and google talk! They made communication much more easy, made me feel that my friends were always within reach. I made many more friends in the 2nd and 3rd years, life went on like a dream, so pleasant, so happy, I enjoyed each and every day and looked forward to going to college. I enjoyed the subjects too, as studying computer science had always been my goal and was not an obligation.

During the course of these 2 years, I changed a lot. My grumpiness gave way to humour, I learnt to be more cool and speak from my heart, to be myself and enjoy each moment in life, in fact I learnt a lot about my own self. Most importantly, my friends became an inseparable part of my life.

Working for Qubit-’08 as the event coordinator of the Online Treasure Hunt and again for Qubitrix as the designer of the souvenir (and I designed some banners too for the event) taught me many things and simultaneously instilled confidence in me.

4th year has been even more enlightening for me. It made me stronger, increased my confidence levels drastically and I’ve done things which pleasantly surprise me when I look back.

With only a few days of college life left, I feel happy as I know that life has a lot in store for me, but moving on is not going to be a piece of cake as I also know that I will never get such wonderful days back again.

Something Amiss

I’m a huge fan of online games. I recently found a genre of games that was new to me- “point and click games” and instantly took to liking them. These games usually involve escaping from a particular room or situation and the games proceed by clicking at various places in the scene, finding various objects and how to use them together to escape. Some involve even mini-puzzles that should be solved to move further.

I came across one particular series of point and click games- the “Something Amiss” series, which I found to be very intriguing. The series has 3 parts- Chapters 1,2,3 which are interlinked. This game has a story and is actually a kind of mystery, which gets unraveled slowly as you play the three chapters. You have to pick up various items and use them to perform a task or escape from a place and the usage of objects in this game is quite logical most of the time, unlike many other point and click games I’ve played.

The graphics in the game are quite good, and the scenes are designed with detail. I played all three chapters and thoroughly enjoyed it. It does consume a considerable amount of time, given the length of the game. But, I recommend that you do play the game; I feel it’s worth the time.

Here’s the link:

http://www.somethingamiss.com/

2..2..5

Weird title huh? Well, I think so!

2 blog entries in August, 2 in September and 5 in the first half of October…what does it mean? It means that I’m wasting more of my time in October! Somehow every other thing seems to be more appealing than studying, especially before exams.

Remember the funny pictures blog entry? The other day I was searching for funny images on the Internet with a view of releasing a ‘Funny Images-2’ blog entry (kinda sounds like The Mummy-2 or Spiderman-2!), but most of the good images were copyrighted.

I found this picture though:

Initially, I found it to be quite funny, but as I looked at it a second time, it reminded me of…………exams!!!! Hence I quietly closed the preview of the image, dismissed the whole thing as a bad idea and thought of another topic to write a blog on.

Then came the marvelous idea of writing ( and at the same time boasting) about the novels I read. But then I just couldn’t get the flow (I’ll do that sometime or the other though).

Suddenly I want to write so much in my blog! I still dint decide as to what to post in my blog- whether to write my day-to-day experiences and use it as an online diary or choose a topic and write my views on it, Well, I guess I’ll do both and use the blog for many other things too.

The reason for this particular post is to tell myself ‘No more blog entries for a month from now'. Hope at least this will make me open my books sometime in the coming days.

But, who knows, you MIGHT find a new entry within a month, or in fact tomorrow itself, well, that’s me!

A reason to ponder

The earth is a wonderful place to live in, the green cover, the deep blue oceans, and the richness of species in each region, very picturesque indeed! The earth is said to have 2 to 50 million species, which include many magnificent creatures and plants. The ecological system and how everything works in it is awe-inspiring. No wonder many great poets chose nature as their theme.

But today the earth is in a very sorry state thanks to a single species with a ‘highly developed brain’ called humans. This one species was enough to burn thousands of acres of forestland, dump seas and oceans with tons of muck, pollute the atmosphere and drive the fellow-species to extinction; all in the name of development.

I don’t say development is bad, but it need not cause harm to our earth and the millions of creatures that live on it. After all, this is the only planet we have!

In the present day, ask anyone as to where animals are supposed to live, “In the zoo”, pat comes the reply. Trees and plants, which were to cover the whole of the land on earth, are now limited to patches of forestland, a few parks, roadsides and flowerpots. Animals which were to freely roam the vast grasslands and jungles are now limited to zoos. The problem is, most people think that that’s the way it should be!

Hundreds of beautiful animals have become extinct and many more are on the verge of extinction. If the carelessness continues, there is a risk of animals being completely wiped out from our planet and all that will remain is their pictures in our books.

Everyone must’ve heard of this or read this somewhere hundreds of times, but have we really understood the seriousness of the issue? We even have a subject called ‘Environmental Studies’ in engineering, covering all these issues. But I bet everyone ‘learnt’ the topics, regurgitated them on the answer paper and left it at that, without a sense of realization and remorse about what we have done to our planet.

The earth was designed to support the entire flora and fauna, provided the ecological balance was maintained, but cannot sustain our greed, as we are exploiting the resources beyond its limits.

If something goes wrong with our house, maybe a small leak or a crack, wouldn’t we take immediate steps to repair it? Yet, a hole in the ozone layer or the disruption of the climate due to deforestation and pollution is a trivial issue and something not worth thinking about!

If we go on like this, what will be left of our planet in a few more decades? We will all have to face the wrath of the affects of our deeds sooner or later. And when we do face them, they will be devastating.

Another blog

I created another blog just for posting recipes. I didn't want to mix up the recipes with the other topics.
Here's the link:

http://scrumptious-subjis.blogspot.com/

Recipe - Aloo Bonda

Cooking is one of my hobbies and whatever I cook is edible for sure (in fact they're yummy 90% of the time)

Today I made Aloo bondas as an evening snack. Here’s the recipe:

Ingredients:

(for making 12 bondas)

Potatoes-3
Carrot-1
Peas-quarter cup
Gram flour (Besan)- Half cup
Corn flour- 2tsps
Turmeric Powder
Chilli Powder
Salt
Oil- For deep fry

For the seasoning:

Oil-1 tsp
Mustard seeds- half spoon
Urad dal- half spoon
Curry leaves – a few


Method:

Peel and chop the potatoes and carrot. Add the required amount of salt and turmeric powder and boil till they are soft . Boil peas too.
Mash the boiled potatoes and carrot and add the peas.
Heat 1 tsp oil in a pan and add the ingredients for seasoning and fry. Now add the seasoning to the above mixture, mix them well and roll them into medium-sized balls.
Now, add corn flour, salt and chilli powder to the gram flour and mix with water.
Dip each ball into the gram flour paste, so that it is evenly coated and deep fry till golden brown. Serve hot with tomato sauce.




The aloo bondas came out very well. Actually I should’ve taken pictures of them while cooking and after they were ready to be served. While cooking, my hands were all grubby with all the ingredients on my hands. After they were done, they looked so tempting that I immediately served them. I realized that I wanted to take pictures of the bondas only after everyone polished them off the plates. What do I do? I don’t know when I’ll make them again. So, I took this picture :D

NTLDR is missing

As soon as I saw this message on the PC screen, my heart sank. I had switched on the PC and the Operating System did not boot. Instead I found this message on the screen. ‘NTLDR is missing'-that’s it. My mind raced through the various files that I had created not only on this PC, but also on the previous Pentium-3 and Pentium-1 PCs as well. 10 years of work (though ‘junk’ would be a more apt word, I prefer to call it that way because at least 20% is real work) would just vanish into thin air. The files ranged from artwork in Paint to C and Java programs. I then realized that all the work, all the files are ‘virtual’ and not real. I suddenly felt sick at the thought that I spent so much time on something that didn’t even have a physical existence.

I read last year in ‘The Autobiography of a Yogi’, that this whole world is only an illusion and that we have to overcome the illusion to get true wisdom. So, it implies that I spent all that time on something which is virtual in a virtual world! What’s real and what’s virtual? My mind raced through these thoughts in a fraction of a second when I saw that message on the blank screen.

I had a backup of all the important files, in a 4GB pen-drive. Good huh?
But, just two days back I had erased all its contents and given it to my friend to load songs in it. Probably that’s what is called tough luck!

I soon recuperated from those thoughts and installed Windows-XP. Luckily, nothing happened to my files in the D and E drives. But my favorite videos and images in the C drive and some of my power point presentations were wiped out. Nevertheless I started to install all the softwares again, real player, gtalk, photoshop and so on.

Do you think I learnt my lesson and stopped spending so many hours at the PC? No way! I was creating junk and non-junk right from the next day in full swing! Well, virtual in virtual or not, that’s what I like to do!