Code Name Shatru

CHAPTERT I : The Presentation

It was a usual sleepy day. Same old, nothing much to look forward to. As we entered the college we saw auditorium was pepped up. An event or something, maybe. Ah! Perfect excuse to cut the first hour. We changed out course, walked into audi.

It looked like an inauguration of a youth club. All were second years’, fresh faces, seemingly enthusiastic about this venture. It was nice to see them come out and take charge. Good.

“no! no! I dint ask you to do it this way.” A guy was shouting. He was tall, fairly good looking, lanky, bespectacled guy with week old stubble. Must be the brain behind all this, we realized. “Its really frustrating when I have got to be the lone one who have to manage everything” he was telling his mates.

Quite an interesting character, we thought. We had already typecast him.

CLOCKWORK ORANG

“We don’t deserve to live” said Aniyettan sitting on his haunches and taking a deep puff from the ‘Gold’ he had in his pockets since yesterday. It was Ayinoonu night, Marriage was next day. The whole family was downstairs gossiping after the dinner when the guys decided to take a break on the terrace. That’s when Aniyettan said this. He was unusually senti and no one knew why. Nothing was wrong with him till evening, they had observed.

Fuzz: More Random Thoughts

Marking the instrument on P&ID and making Inspection Test plans on the excel sheets. He sat there wondering if this is it.

“Concentrate” his boss had told him the other day “do not expect anything technical, this is what you have to do now”.

He got Goosebumps.  He looked around… A room filled with A4 sheets, Xerox copies, big files, markers, computers with open excel sheets and PDFs, a cup of tea every two hours and occasional trips to the water cooler.

No, this can’t be it. This should not be it. At least that was not the plan.

Irresponsibly Yours...

“You are such an irresponsible ass” shouted my roommate Yosee. Wait! Who? me? Of all the words I have expected myself to be called, that word was not one of them. “Oh! Yes… Irresponsible” sang the rest of my mates in unison.

Well… maybe then. So during the one and half hour bus journey from college to Thrichur, I switched myself into Self Analysis Mode. And know what? I have given everyone all the reason for them to call me that.

To be brief, I have in my four years of college life lost… two wallets with around seven hundred bucks, two drafters which is an important engineering instrument, seven pen drives of which three of them were not mine, i.e around 20GB of important data. (I even got death threats from one of the guys from whom I borrowed one of the lost pen drives), two calculators, another very important instrument, and again both of them which weren’t mine. Four headsets (all of them mine), wasted a phone by jumping into water completely forgetting about its presence in my pockets, Never ever had proper studying materials during the exam seasons, became an editor of a magazine which never saw light. Huh! What a loser. And now, Yosee’s lab record which is one whole semester’s hard work.

... Of Mothers / Managers

Having a classical dance teacher as your mother is a pretty tough condition. You know, for one, you’ll be waking upto those monotonous classical songs every day, you’ll be subjected to thunderous ‘tha-thayyams’ during the class hours, you’ll have young girls running around your house yelling at each other, you’ll have their mothers gossiping in the drawing room till the classes get over everyday ( that means putting up fake smile to hide the irritation for not being able to watch T.V for at least four hours) and worst the only subject your mother happen to speak will be about ‘adavus’, ‘mudras’, ‘thillanas’, and the various artists in the field…. which all comes across as Na’vi to me. But that’s irrelevant; the topic I am writing is actually about the mothers/managers of the students.

Who wants to be the Good Guy?!?

“Don’t worry… You are the Good Guy” said my friend to cheer me up when I was complaining to her about life’s unfairness. “Remember, good guys get the girl in the end” she suffixed.

Ya, right. Thought I. Get the girl in the end. In the end?? Ha! So senseless. You see, this guy goes through all the trouble throughout, loses everything he has and is in a complete state of perdition during the whole first half. He spends the most of second half planning revenge with a girl who helps him out of pity. His lone friend is killed or loses a leg to villain’s tyranny. He is sad, dejected, disappointed and angry unless until the last ten minutes.

The bad guy on the other hand is suave and cool. He has all the fun. He gets to beat up the good guy in the beginning, has loads of money to do every sort of stuffs, gets to sing an item song while shaking legs with a hot girl, have cool dialogues accompanied by a weird laugh throughout, except for the last ten minutes when he is shot in head at point blank by the good guy after a short chase.

So, when everything starts looking bright for the good guy, the movie ends. Now!! Who the f*k wants to be the good guy??

WHEN WE DECIDED TO BUILD OUR OWN AVATAR!!

It is not really Star-Trek teleportation, but being transplanted to another place as a robot is really cool. So did we found out. It all started with an article in IEEE Spectrum (09/10) by EricoGuizzo (When my avatar went to work) explaining the nuances of a telepresence robot, that really hooked us. In it, he explained how his creation QB, lets remote workers collaborate with others in ways that a wall mounted monitor in a conference room could never permit.