Soft Skills

The usual Indian parentage forces and obsessive compulsive disorder in a kid's mind to be the first in class. Its true that admissions, scholarships are given to the top runners, but in the long run is it correct to strive hard to be the first in class?

I was one of them, actually not that much. i did have a competition, a cold war with a cousin, but i dont think my dad forced me that much. 12th std, i wrote atleast 7 entrance exams and actually flunked all of them, had a good score, BITS Pilani, pretty ok life. but that was because i was second in school... but... BUT... there is a good chance i missed out a lot of important things on the way. I did feel the force of having to "achieve".

Soft skills, the things that take u past that final HR interview, the team integration effort, the way people talk, the way people behave, the way people express, the politics... ive come to know... matter... they matter a lot. that makes the difference between an engineer and a manager. how long can u just stay an engineer?

"Knowledge is rendered useless by google and wikipedia" says a Wharton professor. i would not totally agree, but eventually it will turn true.

So what should u be doing?

Twitching of the left eye

Apparently it brings great luck. So i choose to believe in superstition once again . so whats happening. im putting in an entry after half a year. the last half year saw me cribbing for something to happen in life and eventually too many things happening and now im back to phase 0 where i relax and get back to blogging.

And what got me started again was a friend who started reading the junk which i wrote 2 years back and started questioning me. You should start blogging! it gives u mukthi when u realise how ur thought process has changed over years.

so whats been happening? : been to India for 3 weeks : Snaps here : Mom and sister came over here : friends came a week later : enrolled for an MS : Started the MSc part time in NUS : moved to a new house.

Now getting back to the great luck charm : no i didnt meet a figure in the last 3 days, nor has my bank account gone up 300% in the last 3 days. but i did come across 2 things im growing in love with... 1> Ubuntu : a free distribution on Linux and 2> Python : a scripting language both prove how intelligent humans can be. im using Ubuntu right now and python to post this blog post, notice that there the < > have replaced the parantheses cause i dont know how use escape characters in python!

The Media

3 year old Ananth was kidnapped Monday. thankfully hes safe and is back into Noida and now Adobe will mostly be thinking of investing anything more in India. And the media made huge money out of it, amplifying all the trauma the family had. ofcourse there was competition in who published the news first, who covered more tears. ofcourse Indians love to share grief, the very reason the million mega serials run for a million days.
but what is the media upto and whats its power? as long as there are stupid people (Dilbert's princile : men are stupid 70% of the time, they sleep the other 30, women are always stupid), the media can play with minds to make money. an example was the panic created for bird flu. Discovery channel says 1.5 million children under 5 die every year cause of diarrhea just because there are not enuf toilets. Bird flu claimed 178 lives so far.
Think!

Happy Deepawali!

One of the many reasons im now in Singapore is i wanted to go home atleast this deepawali. like all my other wishes, it didnt happen. and this post is based on a colleagues words "as far as managers go, we engineers are only resources". true. so i think again... is that all? is there any use whatsoever making x times what you make in India? at the end of the day i can not even spend deepawali at home. should i be Chandler Bing, resign my job and get back? or do the usual: look at people in Somalia and stay happy? (why go to Somalia? there are so many people in the US who have not been to home for months together :D ) or our dude investment bankers, who dont get to go home everyday.

i think i know the answer... its called the pygmalion effect. (wikipedia for a better explaination), its cause of the pressure from the society. Deepawali is just 1 day, but my mom keeps telling people that im a BITS product and work abroad everyday and seem to derive pleasure out of it. and afterall thats my "wish" as well. somehow i dont want to do what the others do : smile for the community, wait for an idiot to fall for it, marry his daughter. still cant figure out tho, how i can be different...

think!

Maruthi Zen

there comes another post after a long time... latest
updates, more friends migrating to the wonderland**
(married-OPM*/studing BLB*)
lets come straight to the stuff that gets lots of
opposition... its again about the fairer sex (if a guy gets
hit on in Europe he is either too rich or dark, so i dont
care) most my friends who are girls are married, and
there is this one very close friend of mine, i was talking
to., she is not working presently but she had a brilliant
job in Chennai... got her parents a car before she got
married, no money carried on... girls are now like limited
liability high returns (yeah ive been looking into stocks
recently). no dowry concept is perfectly agreed, but the
reverse seems to be happening now, whatever the guy saves
is gone... gone... mummy! :(( gone! -- looking at a few others i know who are single, they enjoy life.

i took a 2 day break here...

and continuing : lets think again, that fact is correct, after all the girl saves 4 lakhs before marriage, translates to a pathetic 8700USD, which i guess is afterall 2 months sal for the guy, might as well get that dream car for her parents. you win!
now for other stuff : work in India : i do have a few friends who are absolute genius (ofcourse only guys), they go to the US as well, they have a reason. its true that the Indian mentality lets us do crap work, keep cribbing about it (which we anyway do) and not revolt. and the guys from the wonderland use it : how is that their fault? get out guys, go to the US, get your dream jobs, get you life settled and ofcourse anything you get from India after that will be Export Quality.
quitting now and getting back to my RS Coding...
* - BLB : Bank Loan Beggars - atleast they give it back... - OPM : Other People's Money
** - well i call it the wonderland because a) there is no
ChickunGuinya which puts you off for like a week, and all
that you have to do to escape a bullet is to give the huge
guy $10.

The Indian Adventure

Am i an NRI? Technically yes. actually NO!

This trip to India i just understood one new thing : Indians cirb.

Politicians who apparently do nothing... nonsence, many of my friends read this blog from in India. so shut up.

one crazy thing i noticed, i remember telling people the first time i landed in Munich about the "honour system" in trains, the way they come bang on time... the day i came back from Bangalore, i saw this board on the Park station, had times like 4:57 and yup the train was bang on time, that too that early in the morning... that doesnt happen in Munich! and yes, no one checked the tickets either, it is the honour system here as well, just that its so damn convinent, no one even realises it, and its just a 42.53 times cheaper.

Final realisation : India has everything, but will take another 50 years to develop, i cant wait. the country is still with the 60s generation, girls still listen to their parents :)

r

Raghu Reports... on the Daily show

NDTV News : June 22nd 2006 :

Article 1: Beans prices soar in Chennai
(And we need to pay 250USD to watch an article on this!)

"I've bought beet root, carrot and turnip. I didn't buy beans," said Keerthika, a housewife.
How many Kilos each? comon, these guys dont report NEWS properly...

"Share prices are coming down. Vegetable prices are coming down," said Murugan, a vegetable seller.
Well said Mr Murugan, Air Deccan shares are going down, Beans is part of their cargo, i see the connection...

Article 2: Chicken makes a comeback in Hyderabad
(Chickens can, Ganguly cant, aah thats life!)

"I have come here from Delhi. Just ate the famous Hyderabadi biryani. I am also going to carry the biryani to Delhi," said a chicken lover.
Im sorry we cant say what "chicken lover"'s actual name his, hes on a visit to his chinna veedu/keep in Hyd, but hes very loyal, hes taking the same biryani to Delhi to his wife.

"I missed eating chicken for so many months. But now I am back with it," said another visitor.
another visitor?! pretty lucrative lady!

Article 3: Rising vegetable prices hit common man

"Peas used to be Rs 25 per kilo now it has become Rs 25 rupees for half kilo," said Sunil Kumar, a shopper.

"Our budget and planning have gone haywire," said a Nisha Modi, another consumer.
Half kilo peas vangara daugslam conzumeran! God save India!

What do you get from these article (taken from Thalaivar's Arunachalam) : eat beda/junk food... but...

Article 4: Chennai schools crackdown on junk food

The move comes in the wake of a government circular, which says colas, fries, chips and chocolates should be taken off the school canteens.

Drop out!

Inspired by The Daily Show on Comedy Central!

my big doubt!

Its a pretty common belief that women tend to use the left and more emotional side of the brain and men their right and more logical side of the brain... but is it really that cut and dry? it seems that when it comes to the fares of the heart, theres a battle between what we know and what we feel.

So what do you do when you find yourself in a situation that leaps back and forth between the left and the right side? when it comes to relationships is it smarter to follow your heart or your head?

There is 1 religion in Germany and its called Football...

a statium of 59416 obviously cant accomodate the world. With 1 million flying into Munich for the opening match, and a lager mad Munich crowd, screens are setup all over the place, the biggest in Olympia park. When we went it was 3:40 and we managed to fight in through 6 rounds of security by 5:30, after loading ourselves, found a 10cmX10cm place were we could rest our toes. and goal 1... 1:1 ooohs, 2:1 heys, 3:1, 3:2 and 4:2, i was tried, torn but still with full enthu. forturnately for me (i got lost), i met a cute woman who teaches Indian religion, was talking to her for quite sometime inbetween, having fun. later in the day, when i switched on CNN, i realised that there were more people in the pubs in Muncher Freiheit, im going to get killed there for the next Germany match!

and i kept refreshing

A friend from our Singapore office says i should ask them 20% more time to complete an assignment to compensate the time i spend refreshing my orkut/gmail/yahoo windows. and today i find myself refreshing my blog as well, looking out for comments. its cause of the post below, if i were in India i think i would have had a wonderful verbal.

thanks to the internet my vetti times are even more vetti. now theyve basically boiled down to 6-10 sites of tabbed browsing, orkut, mails, deals2buy and i also keep looking at the rbi conversion rate (its 60 today and im not happy cause i have -(minus) 500EUR in my bank), ndtv/hindu. and its boring, news takes time to develop, i have too much of it. so ive jumped into thinking.

too much thinking these days has been replaced by Sex and the City, marital advices to a lot of people (basically mama velai), hoping for a return someday ;) and searching about a girl. studying in a rowdy school actually helps, 15 min after i told my friend i found a very cute female on Orkut, i knew where her dad was working, and unfortunately as ever for me where her fiancee was working as well. its all in the game.

and with my header checksum working fine, waiting for a call from Singapore, waiting for the rains to stop and waiting for my headache to stop im waiting for a break...

Reservations!

Whats wrong? why are there so many protests? claims that AIIMS student died cause of hunger (thank God, he was not yet a doctor!, he doesnot even know he has to eat to live)... whats wrong?

its the lack of Beer in India, people just want have fun. Every country has its own way of having fun, Beer in Germany, moking their own president in USofA, suicide bombings in Iraq, fighting in Srilanka and having sex in France.

Whats wrong? theres nothing wrong, its just expressions of 2 sides which differ. now comes the dude debate of which side to take... and im sure the people reading this are Indians who are either sitting outside India/planning to go in the very near future, contributing nothing but just joining the crap argument raising voices, why? cause there is no beer in India.

And with that general Indian mentality to believe what they hear first is true, its ture that NDTV first came up with the anti reservation news first, bingo that has to be the true picture. no its not. its just a bunch of people who think their "magic" brilliance will be lost to competition unfairly... lets see, the top notch, the most brilliant get into the IITs, how can a ST whos scored only 70% get it? what crap?! the crap is that our dude guy has had 2 years of rigorous coaching, thanks to his dad whos told him from when he was in LKG that IIT is the dude college and thanks to the fact that his father was the all rich guy, basically thanks to the fact that his "high class" dad got laid by the his "high class" mom.

Its all the cause of resistance to change... Chapter 9 in our Principles of Management book...

its simple, THINK. Indians have proven to be the best when you think, clear logic comes out. just that the though process is corrupted, influenced by mega serials, NDTV and ezhuthaveetu maami's ideas (ideas' of neighbours).

THINK!

Steve Jobs

My profile in orkut quotes steve jobs. i kind of always like this guy cause he was different.

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505

is an article which has the dude's speech welcoming the Stan grads this year. hes stolen the words from my mouth, im moved, and i feel fit.

http://baysics.googlepages.com/smorgasbord has a audio version of the speech, ive read it before, but it can actually make you cry when you listen to it.

Why the US mappilai?

Dormant for a long time. been quite busy...

Why the US? well, 1 friend of mine says, only then he will get a good wife. unfortunately thats true! whats happening around? Arranged marriage a long misunderstood fact, combined with ignorance it is.

What exactly was arranged marriage? 3 generations ago, this is what it meant... parents of the figure and maplai knew each other for 14 years before the marriage happened (99% relatives)and the 2 kids were tuned to each other, no doubt all of it worked. but now "21 yearsku what is right what is wrongnu advice pannavangalukku 21 yearla whos rightnu theriyum" what ultimate crap! till 21 you cannot decide, when you can, you dont! the present stage : 2 idiots meet, tune unto each other (this is exactly what arranged marriage aimed at earlier!!!) and tell their parents and by default they are supposed to say No, cause then they have lost their job.

Now why the US? one of my friends who is going to get married put it right: my mom wants me to live in a place with a better "quality of living" than the present. perfect agreed... but no mom looks for a maplai in Honolulu, the highest ranked city in the US (25th!). I live in Germany now, know what exactly quality of living means, given that Munich is ranked 7th overall... and 3 cities of the top 10 are in Germany, i know what exactly it means... so why still the US? IGNORANCE! http://www.finfacts.com/qualityoflife.htm

well lets stop the argument here ie., till we get any replies!

Kana has quoted this blog in the latest edition of sandpaper @ http://www.bitsaa.org/sandpaperspring2006/pdf/Sandpaper%20Spring%202006.pdf Copywrite violation, will settle accounts with him when i get back to Bangalore.

Back to Germany

when that monday came, 9th of Jan, i was too sad, no mood to get back to Germany, get back to the place where time stands still. but ofcourse, thanks to Nikhil's dad, i got a free Business Class upgrade on a Lufthansa, the flight was wow. a button to lift ur legrest, another to open ur footrest (which adjusts to ur leg length), back rest, shoulder rest, what a seat, another button on the left will get u a TV out. but thats just the 9 1/2hours, what about the 6 months? the first announcement onboard killed the smallest spirits in me... landing temperature at Frankfurt : 3 Degrees, shit, Munich is always 6 degrees less than Frankfurt. and so it happened. it was fun getting into a country with a "flip it open, flip it close" residence permit (yes im officially an NRI!)
the very day, i came to Infineon, a new office, a very cool one indeed. and my worst fears came true, all my friends are gone, the last 24 hours, ive spoken only 6 sentences, 2 in Germaish, 4 in Gult. what i call FATE. and yeah, i forgot to tell u, the only figure i was sightadichufying last 4 months happens to be a Paki. Why God Why?

Whats so special about India?

"At Home" - is it just a feeling or is there something actualy to it? Days just pass by and at the end of six months, i took my return flight to Chennai. The first thing i saw there... a total confusion at the immigration. THe start of me having fun. to what i have seen, life exists only in India. A day ago, i would have taken the 6:38 bus looked at the same figure who sits 2 seats before, taken the same U2... listened to the same "che che che che che che" people in G are robots! With that small fight in the immigration i sprang to life.

There is nothing much to do when u are on vacation. NDTV 24X7 was 24X7.meeting people. hadly wud have met 20% of all those i wanted to meet. "busy" they call themselves. New year was fun, the 5 bottles of liquor in Pondicherry sank us all and relived us of all the sins and worries of 2005! :) So ist das!

And the return flight... no mood to go, why cant they build a underground system in Chennai that sticks to time, a superb looking campus for Infi where just machines work and people earn? Yeah, India is poor, u dont pay 75Rs for a small can of coke...

Thankfully i got a business class upgrade in Lufthansa. wow, what a flight...

Trips planned for the next six months : Ibiza, Spain ; London ++ ; and thats about everything.

Great work

Finally, after 3 months of gathering know hows, bugging debuggings, the memory module worked. At times you are too happy that the happiness does not come out. so is my state. When i happened to show Mario a demo, i had generally put "Ive been cursed to this curse to just curse" and my output on RS 232... he immediately pulled out his PDA, translated it and asked me where i got it from. (its from Eminem's the way i am) some crap talk after that and leave requests for Italy, it was all set and done. A crapumentation to be submitted monday morning, i think i need to go to the Munich public library. boring!

Yesterday was my roommate's nakshatram, we went to Taj as usual, but what was not usual is that we went at 11. why? in this country u clean (that means white things look white) everything before vacating a room, damn &#$%ing tireing stuff... for 2 hours.

I have realised that my posts are like marmadesam, they start with the present and there is always a link to the past... so for this one, i just stumbled across a very old page that Niki created a year and a half ago, 32bits... http://32bits.tripod.com/ and http://32bits.tripod.com/p599.htm is my page! the best ones in this are Vasanth's "(p)cool dude" answers.

winding up.

and for all those vetti souls out there, here a puzzle :
5 guys go to an Angolan restaurant, they dont read/speak african, and there are 9 dishes on the menu. they decide to go there 3 times, order 1 dish a person and find out (associate) these 9 dishes. The waiter does not point out what is what.

Now fill in this block (with 1 to 9) such that they uniquely identify each of the 9 dishes at the end of 3 days.

My favourite lines

"guess this is the part and parcel of life.we dont get what we want and there is no clear answer why.we learn from our mistakes and we move on.life is so beautiful because of its uncertainty.lets try to accept that and hope for the best .we have a lifetime before us .this is not the end." -- One of my best friends. This had quite a bit of an influence on me.

"aval azagai paada oru mozhi illayae, alandhu parkka pala vizhi illayae, yenna irundhupodhum aval yennadillayae, marandhupoo yen manamae"- the song ive most often listened to since Minnalae was released.

"vunnodu naan konda bandham, mannodu mazai konda sondham, kaaindhallum adi eeram enjum" - fav 1 line in a song (kaneerae from Uyire if u are wondering which song)

"Eera odhattula soodu parappi esthiri podendi..." from Andangakka kondakarri, Anniyan bags the best pondi lyric ever written.
"Love may be chemistry but sex is definitely Physics" - Albert Einstein
(Note :I am MSc (Hons) Physics)

lines which make me forget myself end in
"sharanam sharanam sanmugaa sharanam ummmm"

"katta katta katta katta naatu katta... nattu katta", Room No. 2201, on 14th May 2002, night 2AM... with Avi uppamani, the one thing i never will forget in BITSian life. He made a sac A, me screwed up the Chem II compre next day to make a B.

I.R = V (Iyers are Vegitarians!) Lalitha's(my school phy teacher) way of making us remember things.

"Studies is the only thing you have to be selfish" - Gauri Raghuraman, my mam, my best friend in school.

"Its all in the game, idhellam vazkaila sagajamappa..." not the words but the way he tells it, Magesh.

"Naan oru daravae sonna..." - Thalaivar (T capital)

And the biles fly off...

3 balls... (cricket balls i mean) 1. the psd expects what they call a report, the most irritating job in the whole world next to reading "The time has come" on Suudhan's blog. 2. Adam suddenly asks me what he calls "expert advice" on some programmer crap. 3. was worser than Wasim Akram's yorker, Mario gives me a superb assignment, very interesting but takes too much mental work. all have the same deadline. next friday... and what am i doing? thats right, blogging!

Enthu, time and resources are like the 3 axes... when they intersect, its all zeros.

Well, now that ive left my mp3 player in Anil's, its primarily philosophy thinking/recollecting the process known as saponification (soap making). ive found one major mistake with me... i cant talk! for the first time, i always expect the other guy (girl) to come to me and start a conversation... i just dont understand how to start a conv with no topic at all. yup, i saw that very girl again in the UBahn again today, but still i didnot talk... fatsch. I have 6 people in my room... i doubt if three of them even know my name... and it hurts, badly! HELP... i need to start talking atleast to these people, and the first conv is toooo late (4.5 months!) so it has to look natural, pew, ive given this too much thought, no use at all...

Avi now has the password for this blog, i hope he starts bloggin here too, so u will see a signature from now on...

Raghu.

On second thoughts

Ive always got my second choise... Second in school, second best institute possible, second best group possible (B5A3 :) ), why even my PS1 and PS2 were second choises. and if the trend continues, i must be doing my PS next sem very close to my birth town, in a place called Nagapattinam, helping people come out of the trauma and submit my report titled "BITSunami, need i say any more". My third choise was worser, Birla Museum Pilani. I hate to miss these rare opportunities to show off (thaddi) .

No work, a new movie site from which i can download 1980s movies, planning a trip to Italy, 4 calling cards, 4 Euros each, in 4 days, yesterday's nightout in Anantha's house after 1 AM at -3 Degrees are the major changes in life so far.

At times even i turn philosophical, i realised this when giving advice to 2 jus in BITS Pilani and Goa, and when you type out things, u actually get an opportunity to revisit and reaffirm ur thoughts. Hence is the purpose of this blog as well. When i look at the posts a year ago, those beautiful days in BITS... ummm...

I think i am a masochist (ignore meaning 1, 2 of dictionary.com), i actually like thinking about the past and a few things that hurt me badly. Damn the harmones. These lines, i quote from a friends email, have been ringing thru my mind like a thenju pona cassette...
"guess this is the part and parcel of life.we dont get what we want and there is no clear answer why.we learn from our mistakes and we move on.life is so beautiful because of its uncertainty.lets try to accept that and hope for the best .we have a lifetime before us .this is not the end."

Satya Sai Zentrum, Muenchen!

Anil is quite different... He took me to this center in Aidenbachstrasse, i was expecting at max 5-6 people. But it was slightly different, there were 50-60 people. with the temperature outside being 0- and with my infinite layers of winter wear, lots of thoughts running parallely only Dual processor hyper threaded brain (company spinoff, CAT on the 20th!, first time at a full German gathering, expected snow in 3 hours), i was autistic at first. Germans are very friendly! After 15 min of "Om Satya sai", 10 min of meditation, 1 hour of bajans (in German, English, Sanskrit and Anil tells me also Hebrew), there was a movie on Sai's childhood days. a quite fully translation from i guess Kannada to English. People who know me cud easily guess what was going on in my brains as one man was potrayed as God. At the end we had veebudhi, prasadam, its not sundal/pongal it was a superb chocolate cake. I think its a great idea to implement this in India, i project a 45% increase the number of people who visit temples.

I pray for just one thing... "World Peace" Brahmaa...

At 10 in the night, we just ran to U3, and went back to Studentenstadt, the moment i stepped out of the UBahn station, kutti pieces of ice were falling on my face. Ive never seen snow before but i was expecting it, there were predictions a week ago that this thursday wud be snowing, and there were people wondering how that could go wrong... but still the first feel was amazing. i guess it must have continued ove the night, in the morning when i came out of my room, all that i could see was white. i miss being with a figure to enjoy this... HELP!