It
was a usual lazy afternoon. We girls were as usual loitering about in the
department. One fine moment, Gaayathri asked if I was interested in a paper
presentation in IIT Kanpur’s annual tech fest, Techkriti. After a lot of
initial surprise and subsequent excitement, it was decided that we two would
join Pradeeba and Shanmuga Priya for the event whose name i totally forgot now,
after a year;) A sumptuous lunch at Pradu’s, finalizing an IEEE paper on RFID
technology for vehicle parking, hours of brainstorming with our God-sent-tool
‘Thesaurus’, employing all the grammar we had learnt in high school, a touch of
professional editing thrown in and we were ready with our OWN paper. It would
appear as if the impossible had indeed happened, that our paper was selected
for the final round. But no, thankfully it wasn’t, for God knew what we would
have done for the poster :P Yeah we had discovered midway through our
preparation that it was actually a poster presentation event, not just paper
presentation.
Kanpur
came true for me and Pradu through a totally different but connected happening.
Nachiappan and Arun Nishant, who were involved in I2 Challenge, a
high prize money event in Techkriti, had this weird thought of participating in
Xilinx FPGA Design Contest; weird because Nishant wasn’t even in DSD class and
Nachi, being in DSD class would have learnt that we DSD people knew nothing
useful about FPGA design. Now I have to add that Nishant was spectacular in not
only learning design stuff but also coming up with the concept of multiplexers
the day when our abstract was due! If you knew basic Electronics yourself, you
are probably wondering now what the hell is innovative in thinking of a
multiplexer. But trust me, it was a major breakthrough for us. I am sure Pradu
n Nachi will stand testimony to this fact.
And
as you would have guessed by now, I and Pradeeba had become victims of that wild recklessness and were then seriously involved in ‘designing circuits’. It meant
more days at her home, long evenings in the dept and the stone bench in front
of canteen. Then the miracle occurred. Somehow the guys at Kanpur selected our abstract;
after countless tests and exams between the four of us, we were excellent at
presenting what little we knew as hi fi stuff, this had now left us facing the
impossible prospect of completing our “design and implementation of Black
Scholes’ Algorithm by Monte Carlo Simulation Method”. We had slightly
progressed from knowing nothing about FPGA Design to understanding the three
types of architecture and achieving breakthroughs like using a mux :P Pradu n
Nachi had even progressed to the level of asking doubts about some linking
stuff.
Days
flew past fast and it was the day of our trip!! Me and my fellow travellers,
Aashish, Aishwarya, Arun Nishnant, Manoj, Nachiappan, Pradeeba, Ramesh
Krishnan, Sangeetha, Saranya 45, Sivakumar, Vanathi, Vasanth embarked the
journey on old Rapti Sagar Express on 9th Feb 2010. A pleasant
journey, mainly because of the loads of eatables the concerned day scholar
parents had bestowed upon us. I remember recounting old school tales, totally
exasperating Pradu n Sangeetha who had heard them a million times earlier. The
only new person to be exasperated was Nachi, who a few weeks back gave me this
wonderful task of writing a travelogue of our trip to Kanpur, citing my good
memory. If you are by now thinking, “What? Is this a travelogue I am
reading?!?” ; I’m sorry. I basically have no idea of what it is. I just reckoned he
was probably asking an account of it all and here I go.. So you now know who to
blame :P
Getting
back to our project, it was in a very bad shape. We had some 200 odd lines of
VHDL which did not cover a tenth of what we were supposed to code. We tried
hard to salvage it in the train, me taking up VHDL Primer and glancing over not
taking in a word and the other three working on something with Vasanth’s
laptop. We soon happily gave up the pretention and started playing cards. Soon,
getting bored of cards, someone thankfully suggested that we play Dumb-C which
turned out to be the best thing on the trip. Some excerpts:
- Aish trying to act ‘rum’ – Nishant and
Vanathi, those kids mentioning every fluid on earth from milk and juice to
potable water, finally Nish cracking it.
- Nish having to act Hasili Fisili; his
kung fu actions in an attempt to bring out ‘Bruce Lee’.. how could you,
Nishant :D
- Me having to act a song – Ari gori
bonsayi samba nellaleyyyy… wtf is there even a song like that :O
- Aashish asking Pradu to act Aaromale; and she resorting to use coffee and aroma :O Ash even gave Pradu’s teammate Nachi a clue that it was his previous caller tune :P Well, that’s my batchmate for you, I’m proud to say J
The
next morning having run out of home-made food, we managed with samosas with
chilli, the first indication of North India and along with it, Kanpur. We
managed to spend a real lot of time at the Kanpur railway station with each
group searching the other, and finally were off to the IIT. On the road trip,
watching the drivers horrifically ignoring the traffic rules, I had this sudden
doubt. What was the capital of UP? Was it Lucknow or Kanpur? A jump back to my
high school geography; there were two equally ridiculous things that came to
the fore.
- A question to distinguish between
transport and communication :O :@
- The teacher marking Guindy in Andhra
Pradesh while working on a map, drawing a loud expletive from a guy.
Once
again, I was wondering how bad those teachers and question framers could get...
The ridiculousness aside, I had absolutely no clue of which the capital city
was... Coming out of my reverie, I saw the gates of IIT Kanpur looming ahead.
There we were, at last. We had a long wait for registration; Pradu and Nachi
taking responsibility (yeah yeah, who else will? :P) Nishant and Nachi checking
out the girls and we girls sadly finding none to our liking, wondering why was
it that there were hot girls at every turn but only nerdy guys, however hard we
triedL
All
formalities done, we proceeded to occupy our room at the hall of residence
crossing a super big hall which appeared to have no floor! But it was actually
hidden under an enormous collection of beds and quilts and pillows, suitcases
and shoes between them, and girls resting somewhere in the middle of it all.
There was a long queue near the sockets for mobile chargers and a longer one in
front of the solitary mirror. 45 seemed to have found her competitors at last!
So happy was I that we didn’t have to stay in this room. But the happiness
turned out to be short lived, it in fact lasted a few yards long, for our room
was an exact replica of the very room that had shocked us a couple of minutes
back. In we strutted, finding a way past all that crap, found a few empty beds,
dumped all our stuff thereby claiming those beds and turned toward each other
hoping to share looks of exhaustion, which we did get. It soon changed into
exasperation when Vanathi was talking so excitedly about this new place that
she totally loved being in! The rest of us comforted ourselves with just raised
eyebrows.
After
all settling in (!!!) that night, we started again on our project. Needless to
say, it was still pathetic. We reached the department of bio medicine and
something, found a table with some cozy chairs.. I was damn tired; rested my
head on the table.. It felt wonderfully cool and blissful and the next moment I was fast
asleep, while Pradu, Nish and Nachi were toiling hard. After they too realized
the uselessness of their attempt, we started back at half past midnight. It was
drizzling and really cold. Nish found himself above such petty jackets and
sweaters and strolled around in sleeveless tees, only because there were two
girls following us:P But bad luck, he just ended up shivering.
The
next morning came bringing with it, our presentation. It was decided that Pradu
would present, as if there was ever any chance of anyone else doing that. I was
damn embarrassed looking at the works of the other teams and was trying to persuade
Nachi to just get out of the room and be done with it. But he managed to
convince that it wasn’t right on our part to desert a team mate on stage in
this critical situation! Nishant, was his usual optimistic cheerful self,
advising Pradu on Do’s and Do not’s on stage. The only time I spoke on stage
was to explain our team name – Exorxianz; Thanks to my class guys who spent
entire lunch breaks and intervals proposing different names, delving into their
roots and semantics, debating on the merits of each and finally voting for this
final one. Thankfully the profs quickly realized that we didn’t really know
much about FPGA design and left us alone without further humiliation in the
name of questioning. With an extra hearty sigh I escaped out to look into
Sangeetha’s Telekino. Their state of affairs, I sadly discovered, was no better
than ours.
A
few words on Telekino: it was a product of Aish and Sangeetha’s steely
determination, brainstorming with 45, Vanathi and Vasu sir, soldering at
Digitron, that guy delivering the kit on our way to the railway station, the
kit failing to work, another participant debugging that a capacitor was missing
(they even offered one of their own, but these girls didn’t know where to
connect it). They ended up with a consolation prize J Not just that, there were some cute guys
from Allahabad, the 4 girls shared a few snaps with them… In the ensuing
excitement they forgot to take their kit back. This was their story in short –
not only did they lose their prize winning kit, they still owe Digitron three
grand according to his insane calculations.
The
third day of Techkriti witnessed a fabulous presentation by Siva kumar in their
I2 Challenge; Special mention to Aayirathil oruvan music by Ash. He,
Manoj and Vasanth disappeared to the railway station to get tickets and arrived
back three hours after their presentation, and yeah were part of their well
deserved prize. (The ‘Ek Panch Cypher’ happened meanwhile! There would be no
use in recounting it for the humour of that incident would not be appreciated
by the uninitiated. This is one of those situations which none but the people
involved would find funny).
The
highlight of the night was ‘smoke’; with the guys’ Hookah and Aish’s breath in
the near freezing temperature after a wonderful Laser Man show.. Aish eventually resorted to a cup of steaming
sweetcorn to recover her voice. After three fine days which also included a
broken boomerang and a second round showing at Brainwaves, suddenly it was time
to leave.. It was all too good to last, I should have realized.. Hours of
waiting for taxis and the train followed and finally we were on our way back to
Coimbatore; to lectures and labs and other routine stuff. The return journey was
nowhere as eventful as the previous one but it did have its fair share of fun,
especially with 45 explaining her well, different view of her kind of guy. And
before we knew it the dream trip came to an end, leaving us behind with a lot
of great memories which I will cherish forever J Great times…
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