My trip to Roopkund

The adventurers … Anant, Chaitanya, Imran, Navin, Raman, Rajukumar, Srinivas (Vasu), Tushar and Virag

We were in all 9 people … Two of them were gonna come from Bangalore and they were destined to join us at Hazrat Nizammudin station at Delhi … and they indeed reached well before we did. 7 of us boarded the train from Pune a day earlier than our Bangalore crew.

The race to catch the train .. and the journey begins ..

We had a booking from Pune to Delhi in Karnataka Sampark Kranti Express. The train was scheduled to depart from pune station at 3:10 pm. But we all were in Magarpatta city till 2:30 and my, anant’s and navin’s luggage was at our home, which is on the way to station. So we all were in a panic mode. We somehow managed to reach the station on time and catch the train.

On the way out of Pune, we saw the BHEL project, Magarpatta city, town of Loni and so on. There were a lot of sugarcane farms on the way and we had some fun discussions on these farms . Then we did our usual timepass by playing cards and singing random songs. Our train was designated to stop at a few stations on the way – Bhusawal, Bhopal, Jhansi. However, it did stop at a lot of stations due to signal clearance problems. On the first day, we all slept somewhere after Manmad. Next morning, Vatsalya’s dad was gonna come at Bhopal and collect the parcel that we were carrying to be dropped at Bhopal. In return, we were expecting a lot of grub. And we were overwhelmed by the delicious sweets and namkeens that vatsalya’s father had given us. After doing usual timepass on the way we reached Jhansi, where Navin’s mom was gonna come. But for some reason we weren’t able to meet her. Navin’s health was bad and he was likely to drop the plans and go home. But he did survive that temptation for good. Then the train did not stop at Agra and it did not stop at Mathura, so we were deprived of famous pedas and pethas. Finally we reached Hazrat Nizammudin station at around 5:15 pm. We joined forces with Raman and Vasu from Bangalore. This was the first time I met Vasu and I thought that he was a very silent kind of guy … and even worse than Raman with respect to communicating in Hindi ;). We lingered in the waiting room with our very heavy luggage for sometime thinking what to do next. We were supposed to catch a train to Haldwani at 11:00pm, so we had roughly around 5 hours to grasp as much of Delhi as we can.

To be continued later .........

House husbands

With the recent experiences that I had with some career-oriented, new-generation, at-par-with-men kind of females, I thought of a new term – House husbands. If this term is not already patented, I would like to file one for it. Not that I am being sexist or mocking the so-called “aaj ki nari”. I feel that it is very essential that society starts accepting this idea. In today’s scenario, the most affected are the children, who do not get proper attention from either of their parents.

So far, men were considered to be responsible for earning money and upbringing of the children. But when mothers also tend to become career-oriented and run after their professional achievements, upbringing of children gets adversely affected. Also, one can read a number of articles on loss of fertility in career-oriented women. This is quite natural, the women who bear the burden of lot of stress and tensions of office work, cannot cope up with added responsibility of having babies. It has so happened that the most basic responsibility of woman has now become an extra-curricular activity. Though I might sound a bit more critical towards women who give more importance to their work than their personal life, but this should roughly depict the problem that we are facing. If this trend continues then in a long run, I see western culture invading our cultural values. For example, children are asked to leave home as soon as they are 18 or 20 years.

Instead, I have got a better idea. In couples, where the female partners are more capable as compared to their husbands, husbands should assume the role of house-husbands. There is no harm in doing this. In essence, children should be getting proper care from either of their parents. Nowadays, anyways house chores are done by maids and cooks. So men will just have to be home managers. The only hurdle is the social acceptance and the traditional saying “Men are superior to women”. However, I still feel that this would work out fine. Especially, if successful women start having such a criteria while selecting an appropriate groom. I am sure they would find someone suiting their requirements.

Mood Indigo 2006

Had been to Mood Indigo 2006. I was always in awe of this social fest, one of the best in India. I have been attending this event regularly since 4 years.

Even after 2 years of passing out of IIT Bombay, I had quite a few friends here ... Roshan, Sobhan, Hemant, Aniruddha, Biswarup, Appu, Manshri, ..... mostly research scholars :). Sobhan was awarded a highly coveted PHd award. Here are the deatils.

Sobhan Babu (Research Scholar, CSE Department) has been selected for the $2,500 IBM Outstanding Ph.D. award for 2006, given by IBM India Research Lab, New Delhi. His thesis is on "Degree Conditions for Subgraphs". Congratulations, Sobhan.

Met Sobhan at his room Hostel-1 Room No. 234. This room has an interesting lineage of its occupants. Bharat Adsul, who did his BTech, MTech and PhD from IIT Bombay was staying in that room for almost an eternity. He was a student at IIT Bombay for about 10 years. Bharat had also received this highly acclaimed 'outstanding PhD award'. After he finished his PhD, that room was occupied by Mr. Virag Shah, who stayed there for close to about 5 months. After Virag (that's me) moved to Hostel 12 for the luxuries of this material world, sage-like Sobhan Babu got that divine room. So, in a way, because I made way for Sobhan to move to this holy room, he was able to achieve this success. Hence, I have a significant contribution to Sobhan's award. After submitting the thesis, Sobhan is planning to take a 4 month tour of India, where he will be going from Kanyakumari to Kashmir. He is not bothered about his placement or what he wants to do after his PhD. Even Bharat is joining as Associate Professor at IIT Bombay, Mathematics Department for a very nominal salary that would be less than any of the Software Engineers working for Multinational companies. Hats off to this young minds, who are really instrumental in shaping India's future.

Now, let us move on to the fun part. I attended the Fusion and Sufi Night. Fusion night was boring for the initial part were they were trying to mix various instruments like table, guitar, sitar, etc. But when the performers started playing Hindi film song music with their traditional instruments, the crowd was in complete awe of their artistical genius. Especially, playing the string instruments using only one hand and creating high quality music was an awesome display of their acumen.

After this, we had the Kailash Kher with his group 'Kailasa' on stage. Kailash Kher started with a few of his famous songs like, 'Mangal Mangal', 'Diwani', etc. But the crew was too much bothered about the sound quality and lights and other chores. Soon they lost the hold on crowd and we left the show in between. Then Sobhan treated me with braed butter and bournvita at the H1 canteen. After that I rejoined Tejal and Roshan for the Shadow show. The shadow show at the convocation hall was amazing. After that someone played piano for the audience and soon crowd started to leave the hall, because the combination of slow piano music with tabla in the background was not very appealing, nor it was entertaining.

When I reached Hostel 12, Hemant was there at the gate. Not to welcome me ... we met by chance. Then we went to the H12 canteen and I had a plain dosa with a non-jain chatni. Then, Hemant took me to his cozy room and we had a great time ... just kidding. Hemant was quite excited about the whole MBA thing. He had a lot of things to talk about since I could relate to the campus life at IIT Bombay. Everything about hostel, sleeping during lectures, placements, problems due to 10pm deadline of visiting girls in Hostel, etc. I also briefly relived my campus life during that conversation.

Then Roshan came back and we both went to his room. Hemant had antakshari finals the other day, so we all slept at 3am. In the morning, I went to Convo Hall to cheer Hemant. The whole event was ridiculously techy and lengthy, but that is what one can expect out of IITB geeks. Hemant tried very hard to overcome the opponents, but managed to get the second place. The event took more than 1hr 30 minutes. I was late to reach home and got good scolding from mother :).

To conclude, I had a great time at Mood Indigo 2006. One advice to all the people, if you are in Mumbai during 25-29 Dec, then make sure to attend Mood Indigo. If you have a partner, then make sure you get them along with you. I guarantee you a quality time or else your money back ....