Thinking Nothing

Finally, I have got out of my place and breaking the sad daily schedule of college-home-college after a long time. And probably this would be my first experience of writing a blog on a train.

Sadly, Rupi and Rohil have sat on a separate two seater and are chatting there ass off like a happily married couple, and I have got bored after listening to radio, playing games on my cell phone and probably looking out of the window too.And also I am sitting with this fat guy who is busy looking out, sleeping and talking on his phone.


So, finally I thought why not lets write a blogpost, and here I am back to torcher people with my thoughts. Well coming to thoughts, I have been lately thinking that how can one "think nothing". Well first of all according to me thinking nothing means, to reach a state of mind in which there are no computations going on. Probably this is very difficult stage to reach for any brain.

The first time I practiced thinking nothing ,I ended up thinking a lot about how to think nothing, which led me to think about a lot of things. So, effectively in a quest to think nothing, which could have been considered partially successful if I would have decreased the number of computations going on in my brain, I ended up increasing the number of computations in my brain. So, this can be considered as a total disaster.

The learning which I learnt from the above exercise was that one can never think nothing, by thinking that he will think nothing. So, the immediate consequence which comes to the mind is that probably one can think nothing, if he forgets about thinking nothing and lives his normal life and wait for such a moment to come when he is thinking nothing. But sadly there is a bug with this scheme too. Firstly, this state of thinking nothing is too unlikely to happen. Secondly, even if we suppose that this scenario occurs and your mind goes into a state in which it is thinking nothing, there would be no way in which it can register an event somewhere so that it can recall that at some time it was thinking nothing. Neither you would be able to know that you are thinking nothing because to come to know about this state of your mind you would be required to think, but you are thinking nothing. Thirdly, one also can't take help from a friend to record the instance when you would be thinking nothing, as he can never know that whether you are thinking something or not.

So probably this bring us to a point where we can safely assume that you can never "think nothing".

Any comments about your theories and experiments of thinking nothing are most welcome.

The tale of two Minds

Finally my blog has waken up after a long long night. Now, as I am writing after a long time, I thought I should write about my experience during that time.

During these two months I went on a trip to Hyderabad, for an internship. And yeah, it was another great experience in my life. I wouldn't like to talk about all the pleasures that they provided to us, instead I should be talking about all the things that I learnt from this experience of mine.

I would first start with the positives or say apparently the positives. Well, Its been two days in Delhi. And now I feel that we have been living " A perfect life in a perfect world" in Hyderabad. Almost everything that one could take tension about was being handle by them. Our almost only tension was to code and complete our work. Well these were the thoughts of a lazy and greedy Mohit Taneja inside me.

There was another idealistic and perfectionist Mohit Taneja inside me and sadly his thoughts were totally different. According to him all these luxuries and benefits which made one believe that he is living a perfect life, were there just to distract him from the fact that one is working on things which any guy with a graduation in computer science can do. The luxuries were there to make the geeks so used to them that they never leave the company, and start doing something more useful, which could be potentially competitive to company.

Then there was a nature loving Mohit Taneja, who was always busy enjoying the weather in Hyderabad, and the well maintained pahaadi of company. And yeah how can we forget the innumerable visits to the sarowar. Well in any case this Mohit didn't gave a damn about the rest of the things concerning the above two Mohit's so no point discussing his thoughts.

Now coming back to the present situation with these two Mohit Taneja's ,(The idealistic one and the greedy one), they are now creating two different threads of thought in my mind. The idealistic says that forget about all the comforts that company provided (or say would be providing) and try and realize your own potential, go on for something like a masters degree from some amazing university or say go on to start your own startup. On the other hand the greedy boy says, just get a job in some good company, pataofy a nice girl, wouldn't be too tough (I guess) after getting a job in a great company. Settle down nicely and enjoy your life with the awesome income that the great company is gonna give you. And not to forget the luxuries which makes one's life almost perfect.

And as usual, I am spending time writing this post and thinking about who of these two are correct.

[Guest Blog] Reddy goes on.....

Taneja....Tanu...Thats his name...
The first time i met him was at bhangra practice for the cultural event at MS.....
N thats the last thing he shud be doing on earth....DANCE!!!! It looks as if he's fighting with some1.....
Par haan....He's the pretty much similar to me..Happy Go Lucky sorts...Though he's more hawabaaz than me.......
We connected pretty well since day1 and came up with a back up plan if we forget steps on stage...The frog jump....That was awesome...I miss all those bhangra practice sessions.....

Coming to kind of guy(gay) he is.....Friendly,Hawabaaz,Fun to be with......
Though I have been with him jus for 3-4 weeks,I can say he's a very nice guy and a true friend....
The kind of friend u'll need during ur bad times....Always there to support u...
But ya...That support has an expiry date(as happened with rathi)..then he'll start pulling ur leg...

So this is Taneja from my perspective......
So tanu...Hamesha aise hi rehna....Friendly,Hawabaaz,down to earth....
Will miss u.....
Hope we get to meet again...
Keep in touch....

Reddy

[Guest Post] Mr. Neta describes his chela

This is a guest-post by the all too famous "Neta" writing about the author of this blog. In my humble opinion, the author of this blog is a very diligent, hard-working and intelligent person. He also knows how to maintain a work-fun balance and can be ascribed to have a good sense of humor. Ahmm... too diplomatic.

Well, you know what, Mohit has been a great friend all these times. Although, I was supposed to mentor him, I have myself been taught a lot in the past 15 months or so. We have bickered, quarreled and had fun for a long time. Let us start with the work relationship, coz that was how we got to know each other. The first time I got to know Mohit was when he came in as a volunteer to work for AI Challenge while he was in his second year. I was impressed with his intelligence at that time, and he went on to spend a lot of time on the event along with others. The event was ahmm kindda ok.. we fluked at many places.. all thanks to my amateur leadership and our combined relative in-experience. Afterwards, I approached him to work with me on FoodForce2. He joined in coz he had nothing better to do with his time. I offloaded all the work to him to go intern in Hyderabad, while Mohit was left juggling between FoodForce2 and girlfriend :). Regarding work, we used to have no half measures, even now! You can see that even in the quality of the beta release of Foodforce2 project. If I ever ask Mohit to work on a deadline, he will make sure that the deadline comes through even if it means spending nights working on it. He has this amazing knack of learning new things at breath-taking pace. He can hack around stuff, be patient with things and has the strength to work in difficult circumstances(remember your sucky computer and long hours of power outages). He has got a good way of talking with people and knows how to do masti in life.

I have been writing a lot of good things. You must be thinking, is there nothing bad about this guy? Well the bashing starts now! First of all his coding really sucked when he started out, its not the case now though. His writing is not too good either, but he is working on it. He is either too confident sometimes or is too weak to take decisions at other times. He has the moments when he really deserves praise, which I make sure I never give to him :P. Although, I know I am evil, but I have always believed that with Mohit, too much praise can sometimes go to his head.

All in all, although we started as a senior-junior coming together to work for mutual benefit. Now, its kindda different (Ahh!! how I long for those days when he used to hang onto every single word of mine, however stupid it used to be...) I like it better this way though. Wishing you all the best for your internship and for the wonderful life ahead of you.

My Visit to St. Stephens

The wheel of memories revolves back to those golden days of holidays after class XII. I had managed to get quite a decent marks (93% , at that time they sounded like 'awesome dude'). Although I knew that I was meant for doing an engineering, but still my cousin (he was in Khalsa College at that time) compelled me to fill the application form for St. Stephens and asked me to come for the interview.

I still remember that day. I was totally unprepared, early morning I was rushing to get photocopies of my certificates. It was a hot day in the summers of '06. I finally reached St. Stephens from my house (which in itself was a big enough task for me). My cousin had came there to accompany me or maybe enjoy the pleasure of encountering the selection process of St. Stephens( As the college was presented in such a way to me, he and his friends considered me 'lucky chap'). Anyways, we went into the institution, which was supposedly good ( I felt so when I searched the pic displayed above, lol..). We entered the room where the people who had came for the interview were to report. I got a spooky feeling in that room. Even on a hot summer afternoon, I was feeling the need for more light over there.

The person in charge asked us to fill a form about personal details, credentials and marks and all (which I had already filled in the form submitted earlier). And then it was the time to submit the photocopy of the documents and get them attested by also showing the originals. Then was the time when things started going wrong, I had the photocopy of my character certificate but the original was missing (most probably I had left that on the photocopy shop). Well in any case he somehow allowed us to sit for the interview after writing "Original Character not there" on the form that I had just filled. And that form was handed back to me , for referrence purposes to be used by the interviewers. I was just wondering that whether the interviewers sitting in there would be checking my credentials (which according to me were very limited) or enjoy the shit created by this guy.

Soon we joined a group of people who were waiting for giving an interview to get admission into physics honors. Almost all of them were like going through some book of physics or reading from some register or looking out for some advice from the students of the college. Well there were also those who were just relaxing to get over the tension in their mind regarding the interview. Well my cousin and I were among the ones who could be noticed from almost a mile that they are either trespassers or they are here just for having fun with the interviewers. We both were discussing topics like " Are you know NFS most wanted has been released, I got a pirated cd yesterday". And he was busy telling me tales of Khalsa college. Soon we had attracted everybody's attention towards ourself. I guess our talks were also helpful to them in releiving tension.

Soon it was time, my name was called for the next student to get into the danger room. I stood up with full confidence, my cousin wished me luck and I was all geared up to enter the game. As I entered the room, the dullness in the environment overcame the confidence inside me. They first started to complaining about some discrepancies in the compilation in my result, the marks in the form filled by me and those in the list compiled by them were not the same. Well this thing got me confident as it was the mistake of those idiots who were given the task of compiling the list for them. Then came the question "What are your favorite topics of interest in physics?". Well since I was quite beefed up with the confidence inside me, I came up with an answer "You know, I like physics as a subject, you can ask me anything." Just after finishing my sentence I could hear the warning bells ringing loud in my head. They were dazzled at first but as I was sitting in north campus and not some engineering college, I was asked the question "Okay, tell us something about the thermocouple?". Now this was the most unimportant topic in the whole damn syllabus of physics. And they were interested in its theory, but still I was able to give them an answer which was like okay. I guess they were expecting me to vomit out the whole one page of the CBSE book.

Than after knowing quite well about my screwed up knowledge of the subject they came to the topic of "Why haven't I applied for hostel?". The answer was simple "Because I am not serious about getting admission in here". But I thought it wouldn't be good to be outright blatant. I tried to fool around by saying that there is a cousin of mine who travels from Gurgaon everyday. Just after that they were on "Which course is he doing?" well I wasn't that good at lying but still I replied fast enough to keep them away from guessing that I was bluffing , "Eco Honors". The next one was a tricky one "Which college??". Well I wasn't aware of much of the colleges in North Campus at that time. So... I named a college which didn't had Eco honors as a trade (I don't remember its name as of now). Well I guess they had evaluated enough out of me by that time. I came out happily and before I had even closed the door, my cousin asked "Hey, how was it??" and well even I was more interested in replying to him that according to me my first interview went great, I replied "Mast". I got so engaged in replying to him that my leg got stuck into the door and I almost tripped. And yeah my voice was loud enough to be heard by all the people waiting outside and even the interviewers inside. And as soon I got the balance in my body, I realized a big noise of the door banging against the wall. Well I was expected to close the door by my hand as the spring attached to it was quite tight which made it banged against the other one. After that I got a feeling that, maybe those creepy rooms were so because they were meant to be.

Anyways, I had machaofied at one of the premier institutes in Delhi University. and even after that I was walking proudly in the lawns of the institute. I guess NSIT was written in my destiny...