Blah stuff ...

I have run out of things to write about. It’s the margazhi month . That can mean only two things, blaring katcheris in the auditorium right opposite my house and the plethora of weddings im compelled to attend.

January has just come and gone,but it seems like 10 years of my life . First my aunt got married( she’s just a few years older than me but in some twisted family tree angle became my aunty). Then my cousin got engaged. In between all this, a classmate got married, another got engaged and now a senior is getting married.

So all am doing right now is wearing great-looking ,4 kg weighing clothes that look fantabulous but makeclimbing the stairs living hell , dodging the insufferable gold necklaces that look hideous on me no matter how gorgeous they look on those models on TV and gorging on lip-smacking biryanis.

 If I could go to a wedding in just casuals , that would be LEGEN...wait for it……...DARY.

In my community, weddings are a 3-day affair. It starts off with the haldi rasam , which entails everyone wearing yellow/orange/red dresses.The girl is is made to undergo various rituals and baths for the purpose of turning her into a princess within a day(fat chance of that happening).

 The next day’s event is my favourite. Mehendi rasam begins with decorating the girl’s hands with mehendi.  Everyone else can get themselves a little mehendi too, so it works out for me. The boys’ side comes over and does yet another set of rituals with the girl. After that ,the girls’ party goes over to the boys’ side. The saali (bride's sister) gifts him a watch and a ring. She holds on to the ring and his finger for dear life until he gives her a significant amount of money or an airline ticket to goa for instance. It’s raining money. J

The next day comes the actual shaadi(wedding).This is the day that the groom has to protect his shoes…. You heard me right, Shoes. The girl’s party makes attempts to steal it and it’s the duty of the boy’s family to protect it. Somehow after massive planning by hook or crook, the shoes are confiscated . The groom then has to shell out wads of bills to get them back.Its all about money,honey.
Coming to the actual wedding,the Qazi saab asks the girl for her consent. She agrees and signs in the register. Then the boy is asked the same. He recites some verses from the Quran and Lo and Behold! We have a married couple for you. Mubarak aap ko bhi.

The day after the wedding or later comes the Valima which is performed by the boy's side. More food, so no'ones complaining.

These events are a nightmare. Imagine having to say “Assalam-alaikum "to every other person older than you in the room. First the Salaam-initiater needs to establish eye contact with the salaam-receiver, then bring the hand near the head as a form of greeting and at the same time yell out to catch the attention of the salaam-receiver. If the salaam-receiver is too far away, the salaam-initiator has to make do with the gesture, while just mouthing out the greeting.At times, the salaam goes unnoticed, so the salaam-initiator ends up feeling like a moron.

If I don’t do the salaam, my mom will chide me for being an ill-mannered girl. And everyone I forgot to greet would remember that I omitted wishing them and title me as the obnoxious type.

Think Muslim and the burqa is not far behind. France banned the burqa because it cutailed the freedom of women. Personally i feel that its none of their business.What you follow is personal. Each to his own.For now i'll leave that topic for another post.

Watching a burqa-clad woman eat is the funniest thing ever. She flips up the veil, hurriedly puts food in her mouth, and then clamps down the veil again. This she repeats a hundred times.Her hand gets exhausted faster than her hunger. Invariably she goes home wishing she could pack a little food and eat it without the wretched veil.

                                                                   courtesy:wn.com

This picture is a decent version of eating while wearing the burqa. Sadly,google failed me. Fact is watching them eat like this fades everything else into oblivion.Hence the lack of pictures.

But all this endurance is not for nothing. The food that gets prepared is worth the effort and the money put in.

 As they say, a picture is definitely worth a thousand words.

Mera Phone ka balatkar

I have a problem with phones. Sometimes I want to flush it down the toilet. Sometimes I want to leave it at home. Sometimes I even put it on flight mode. Why? Because its constantly following me, i have to answer when it rings, reply when it beeps and keep checking whether its been flicked from me on the public bus.One day I left it behind . It felt like freedom. The next day, I got lost.

I miss those days. Those days when only one out of 100 people had a mobile phone. It resembled a large box-like phone with a long antenna. People who used these were either businessmen or real rich guys. We all used to ogle at the advanced technology.

Ask anyone a list of things that they cannot live without, invariably 90 percent would mention the mobile phone. However, the mobile phone has long outrun what it was actually built for – making calls. All of you owning ancient models which don’t have cameras, wifi and internet settings must have endured enough looks of disdain from the smartphone owners(No, radio does not mean yours is a smartphone)

Coming back to the point, making calls is the least used feature in the phone.  You browse the news, send an email or text a friend. Why waste money on a call when everything can be done without a hint of human contact. Just like Sibal condemned Free speech and the court accused Facebook and Google of not filtering its content, the Govt went ahead with another god-forsaken idea of having a limit on the number of SMSes one can send in a day.

I cursed and cursed. Not that it matters to me. I don’t even text a lot. But now I don’t get to know that a class is going on until half an hour into the session. That, my friends ,is the point of no return. No teacher is going to let you in and neither will he/she believe a ridiculous thing that you weren’t informed about it because your rep( student leader)  exhausted her last sms for the day.

In some ways this regulation is like a knight in shining armour.

Before TRAI, I used to get a minimum of 5 “Good morning “ texts in a variety of styles. Do they send this CWOT( Clear Waste of Time) texts to everyone in their contacts or just me? I think it’s the former rather than the latter so its not going to be the end of the world if I don’t respond likewise. 

Btw, Im a horrid conversationalist.  I cannot prolong a conversation with a cute guy even if you begged me to. I will send the occasional “Hey” and “Whazzzups “ but that’s as far as I can go. If I don’t continue the conversation, its more likely because I DON’T know what else to say. That does not allow you to bombard me with “What else? “ and “What did you have for dinner?” because frankly I know you really don’t care whether I had squid,chicken or a whole cow .

After “Whatever” and “What else?”  the most annoying texts that one can receive is the letter “K”. I would have taken the pains to detail out a beautiful plan for the weekend ,where to eat ,what to wear,how much cash to bring and most importantly who else is coming. And you reply with a single letter K  as though you are Aamir Khan and doing me a huge favour by even replying. Save the act,mister.

Whoever created smileys would never have known that one day the entire SMSing generation will be misusing it right,left and bang on. He should have patented it, could have been a rich man by now.

If you didn’t think smileys made much of a difference ,think again.

Have you ever sent a msg without a smiley that got misunderstood for something else just because you forgot that one smiley?

Like this.

“Shut up and never talk to me again !!!” could be the starting of a big fight

                whereas
“Shut up and never talk to me again !!!” could save your life

What I learnt – If you are kidding about anything, put atleast 1 smiley and a LOL ,ROFL or LMAO ( they’ve lost their true meaning ages ago. Just fillers for conversations “What are you doing?” “Lol reading a book”. Whats so funny about reading a book? ) just to make the point clear. Not many understand sarcasm or jokes in texts. So might as well make it spell it out for them so that you don’t spend your next 10 minutes explaining that your previous message wasn't an insult.

Im not an old woman with the phone around my neck in a pouch. Neither am I continuously staring at my phone waiting for your reply.  So if I don’t reply ,it’s because I am a)BUSY b) BUSY c)BUSY.  Okay I’m not at that level of busy-ness but if I could reply, I would.

I don’t know if this kinda texting is regional but whats with the “Hmmmmmmmmmmm”. Do I reply with another “Hmmmmmmmmmmm” with more m’s. Or are you are humming a tune?
 No ,wait. You don’t know what else to use as filler? Send an OK  or rather, don’t reply . That would do.

Keeping with the fact that texting is just words on a screen, its pretty hard to figure out if the person on the other end is serious, sincere,joking or playing a prank on you with a bunch of jobless friends (been there,done that), my advice is to do all the serious talk by making a call or even better , a face-to-face conversation.

This smsing is a talent I just don’t understand. 

JKL

An essential guide to completing engineering

Tomorrow is my review. 

First things first, if you aren't an engineer or aren't studying in an engineering college,you aren't going to understand the intricacies of that word.

A review is like a trickle of sweat on a chilly day, like the sinking feeling in your tummy when you see a question paper you don’t recognize, like a “fuck you” directly from the heavens…. All that and more

Let me explain.

We have 8 semesters. For the first 7 semesters we get the unimaginable delight of exposing our undeveloped intellect to the world of engineering and technology.Six subjects every sem totals to forty-two subjects till date plus a few labs !

The 8th semester however is a different ball-game altogether- the icing on the engineering cake:

" The Final Year Project"                                                 

After all that learning, the project allows us to do something innovative and present it to get a decent grade.

Now a final year project (henceforth referred to as FYP) ain’t your “creative What-an-idea website that could bring ebay down”. Oh no!

To do an FYP

1)      You need a guide.

Pay heed . This guide is THE single source of happiness for the next 4 months.If he/she likes you, then congragulations, you’ve passed the first test. Otherwise, anything and everything you do is going down the drain. Being a little quick and reserving a nice guide before someone else does is very essential.

2)      An IEEE paper.

Wiki calls IEEE as “The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE, read I-Triple-E) is a non-profit professional association headquartered in New York City that is dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence”.

The people who write IEEE papers are sophisticated PhDs ,MS, BS and research scientists who are born geniuses and been reading one single subject for the last 10 years. What an FYP entails is selecting an IEEE paper, assuming you understand its title ( bet you they deliberately complicate names )  theres even lesser chance of understanding what they are trying to explain.

Presuming you understand and like this paper, it forms the crux of your FYP. We selected a paper by the number of pages it had but do not repeat that mistake. Fewer pages are dangerous. These authors make references to 20 other IEEE papers that will in turn refer to 20 more papers each !

3)     An idea sirjee.

After crushing the paper a few times and cursing yourself for selecting the paper, you might have understood the concept of the paper. But that’s not all. I only said the paper forms the crux of your FYP.What you are going to have to do is understand the drawbacks of what this great genius scientist author suggests and come out with a solution to that. Being a lowly qualified 12^th pass from State Board has no significance. Elementary my dear Watson!

4)     Implementation

Coming up with an idea is no big deal. When we’ve found a 100 different ways to cheat in an exam , thinking of a solution to an IEEE paper  is a piece of cake.

You can come up with all the creative,mind-boggling ideas .But you’ll have to implement and show it.

For example if you propose a flying bicycle taking energy from the sun rays, you might as well be ready to build one.

Brilliant way to keep you grounded!

5)     Review

It’s the scary situation when all the most senior, intelligent staff in your department tears apart all that hard work that you’ve attempted to do on the FYP. It all boils down to this event. They ask all the right questions and make you wonder why you picked such a stupid idea in the first place. Presentations, printouts and some compulsory golmaals are an essential for getting through this without a panic attack.

Take backup. Take backup. Take backup.

My team lost all the documents that we had to present at a review just 30 seconds before it started. What are the odds!

These reviews are unpredictable. Prepare well and go, the panel rips you apart and when you least expect it, they give a pat on the back( never happened to me yet)

Only piece of advice: Work hard,learn and soak in the creative world of technology .Get yourself published in an IEEE journal.

 Haha!

Chill. My real advice: Grit your teeth and get through it. Aint no other option unless you want to spend a couple of thousands and buy the FYP outside ( No chance of that working in my college)