MORE ON THE STOMACH ACHE
well after the 7 hrs that i spent in a pvt hospital in adyar , it seems i have developed appendicitis and a bloody operation running to 3 days is to be done. well with my current atendance percentage one just hopes that i am able to steer clear of the magical number of 75 .
the operation may be any time next week.

I AM AT HOME
my stomach has started giving problems and it's nearly 6-7 months since this is happening regularly , so i am bunking college to check what's up with my stomach .
so that means that i cant go to sairam engineering college tommorow for their symposium on friday and saturday . well when it comes to tradeoffs i dont like the feling losing an option , but thatz life and since this wud be my 12th leave this sem , i better be on guard with regard to my attendance which is sure to hit an all time low between the 2nd and 4th week in september , due to my GRE and TOEFL exams .

the city that never sleeps

yesterday i was waiting in central station for about 3-4 hrs tp pick me dad up from the station. I decided with so much of time in hand , i should have a good look at central station and it's adjoining areas . I was wandering from the higginbothams books stall to the end of the station traversing the platforms numbered from 2 to 6 . i found that this surely is a city in itself that is swarmed by people at all times of the day , with each person lost in his own small world of thoughts .

There are some cool fellas (like me) who do a last minute gallop towards the moving train , some sporting heavy baggage accesories , some group of children waving back to the parents on the eve of some trip of theirs, anxious parents sending of their son for higher studies, some people who while waiting for their train to bustle in, spend their time getting engrossed in worldy affairs all in the form of a magazine, some army JAVAN'S brushing general knowledge digest's to get selected in the government exams , some Iyer mami fuming that the sambhar or rasam from saravana bhavan didnt have the same taste as her culinary expertise , some old couple who didnt find a place to wait laying the bedsheet on the floor of the waiting room,coolies who rush upto u demading that u better give them the luggage !!, hundreds of people linded up in some hope that their waitlisted ticket is going to be reserved , some couples who are on their honeymoon and ..................... the list wud just go on ......... and on .............. .

It is indeed amazing to see that the gamut of life present here . I it was as if i was undergoing a course in seeing the time machine of the human being from being a kid to being a 70 something grandparent. seeing such viccisitudes of life certainly got me thinking as to pen down my experience tu all u people . I just got a feel of the frenetic city life and got a first hand access to see the various emotions and joy (encapsulated like a cricket highlights package) that go into making a train journey and i certainly had a visit down memory lane after my brief sojourn at Chennai central .

Seriously, however dirty Indian railway's may maintain itself , i guess my love for travelling in trains (with some one to talk to also!!) and making friends , wud never be eroded, by any level of modernisation.I would rate it a much better hangout than Ispahani centre and Spencers plaza . I like India for whatever it has , and accept it in it's present form , simply because i have a wanderlust for travelling and it's rubbed off in me writing this little piece.

If any of u have such interests in train journeys or anything that captures emotions or a fine xperience , pls do mail me at katchu21@gotmail.com , kartik_kannan@rediffmail.com

college these days is fun and it is on these days one has to cash it on these days , by coming to college and getting ur attendance. again we had a seminar in the morning , on certain management issues in the industry , which i felt was preety good, but the guys at college spoilt it by clapping the speaker ( or rather packing him off ) .

It is for this very precise reason that these days i dont take much interest in bringing any guest speaker to the college . I am prtesently blogging from the dishnet terminal at chennai central as i have to wait here for another hour or so , to pick up my father .

today i had a wonderful train journey from avadi to central along with a guy called b.karthik , who happens to be my classmate. there are numerous guys like him in our college who are getting freed from the clutches of a monotonous life before college ( only padips and tv) . he was recounting how he now likes to go and buy clothes for himself , as his clothes were earlier bought by his parents . he said that only in final year now , did he get to know what dress sense meant (after the ban of the uniform ) .

it's always fun , when u talk with friends on a long train journey , and he told me the info that our class was getting geared up for a tour to cochin and munaar in Kerala . I earlier had a lovely experience attending the partnership summit in hyderabad with my friends and of course that visit to amrita .

college as usual was kuthoo today with the first half spent in the cool confines of the computer lab , where the internet connection on my computer kept getting disconnected , and connected and ............ till i gave up !! . the second half was no sooner begun by sampath sir, we were asked to assemble in the auditorium for some function ( some senior going to australia- so bon voyage function) .

got some respite from the cat groups , that most of the guys attempt the questions on the CAT , only those that are familiar. i just wondered , how many guys could solve complex problems in just half a minute !!!!

There comes some point in life which may be called the "INFLEXION POINT" at a time when changes are rapid and newer techniques for success are called for .Life beyond the inflexion point may be either 10 times more rewarding or 10 times worse the current state. people who accept that times are changed and they need to reinvent themselves generally sail past the problematic "inflexion point " and the other's struggle to keep afloat , start to straggle and soon become a part of history . I thought this could just be a theory applicable to only companies , but realized that the student comunity offers more challenges while competing at that level .

well take for instance the CAT exam , every time I take a mock CAT I realize that my methods of solving a problem or practicing vocabulary are obselete by IIM standards ! ! ! and the national wise ranking would seem to suggest that my straggle is worth a serious look . It is during these times of tumult one has to keep courage and slowly but steadily reinvent strategies that are used in solving problems . at the end of the day , the guy who has succeeded , probably showed a little more grit in hanging there for a longer time with failures and raising the bar when it mattered .

One discovers all these thoughts only after a severe self reprimand when one sits down to do a logical analysyis of where the activities in life are taking him . All thats been said above is not by me , but my other half( not the better one ! ! !) my concience .

I find that currently i may hardly be a force to reckon with when it comes to tackling the combo of THE FAMOUS 6 (QUANTS,DS,DI,RC,VOCABS,LR ), but i've gotta go and sharpen my axe before i can slay the demon called CAT ! ! !

PS: till such time i slay the CAT , i have to get past the two smaller demons (but costlier by 1200 % than the CAT) , called the GRE and the TOEFL enroute to the CAT.


any of u people who are down and out preparing for these entrance exams , can share their current state of affairs with me and on this sobby article .

till then
KARTIK KANNAN
www.katchucrap.blogspot.com

it's sometime since i blogged . life currently is on a high reading many articles and being on the cat groups on yahoo , keep u awake like a hot rod on the arse .

my stomach keps me giving problems day in and day out , i donno why all of a sudden it's grumbling.

just booked for the TOEFL exam on the 11th of september .

well i seem to be jumping topics like hell , showing my desultory nature

err............ i am starting to blabber , lemme blog later

I am going mad at college , all due to some arseholes like BM( try and guess ) . Once college (BE) is over and i've got my certificates , I'l make it a point to thrash him black and blue .

There is absolutely no atmosphere at college and hanging out a 80% dumb crowd makes life even more sick . there are only few guys whom i can call decent enough to mingle with .

any more posts , and i will sound like " I am washing my dirty linen " on cyberspace

just as my friends ashish and kishore do i 've decided to jot down my experiences in hunting for a project .
It All started at ISG , where they do not offer student projects and the same at some unknown company . We are writing a test in a company at nungambakkam(name with held due to intense project competition !!!!) and today we landed up at tidel park.

last week 6 of my classmates(without me ) went to tidel only to be chucked out at the entrance itself , today we managed to improve by crossing one hurdle . that being the entrance . unless and until u know somebody inside , life is hell at tidel coz , each company has it's own security mechanism and see's guys like us , unwanted elements.

one cant even go into the lift as one has to clear a security zone ,which can be crossed only if u happen to have the company's swipe card and access card. lucliky we managed to go into sify , who asked us to come on friday .

but the only thing that went off well was our (myself,achut and joshi) lunch at the food court centre in pizza corner outlet at tidel , ground floor . we had a cheese pizza each and that kept our hopes alive of getting a project here. all the companies are ready to give a project as long u dont expect them to give u a place and computers to do it on.
their motto seems to be :DO WHAT U WANNA DO WITH OUR NAME ON IT (at home obviously), BUT GIVE UP ON THE IDEA OF DOING IT HERE.

Well , beggars are nor choosers and i guess , we've gotta be happy with whatever we get . lemme hope every thing goes well on friday .

finally the list of 10 is complete for the delhi trip and now everything depends on the P&P dept to sort out the money we guys have to pay for the marketing summit that we are scheduled to attend in Delhi on the 20th and 21st of august 03 . The only advantage of being in the college that I am is I have untramelled access to any of the CII events across the country and that is really cool .

the next two weeks are going to be all the more tiring as I have to hunt for companies for my project and the next 14 days we have our assmnt tests and mid sem exams ........ and most importantly that is precisely the gap i have to complete my quants portions for my mock CAT on aug 3 ...... That is some hectic work ..

i am currently immersing myself in this deluge of words from Economic times, Times of India and of course the 15th edition of Barron's GRE .

I find that my english which was stagnant for some time , is now facing an exponential increase in usage as well as knowing the meaning .... but it's gotta take some time to reach CAT level (probably a couple of more weeks) .

In college , we have to submit a mini project scheduled all too suddenly to be done in a month , other than the main project , and it is just getting a bit too cramped . but i guess i know my prorities , i am just gonna do the documentation and concentrate on my GRE/CAT preparation and leave the coding part to my fellow GRE candidates of my group Kishore and Achut coz they are more competent than me when it comes to the nitty gritties of the tech world

just feeling a little low as i see the competition for CAT , getting bigger and bigger. i've just gotta go at my own pace and see where i stand rather than rush with things . Our Chairman came and addressed us , saying that we dont do the events professionaly , as expected by the mngmnt . He said we should cll top level biz IT honchos for seminars and stuff rather than some local guy . It was nice to hear that at least some one in VT was talking like this , but given the current state of people working under them , I shudder to think this is gonna take a long homecoming .

Kareena kappor's latest quote went like this " I have only 2 friends, one is god and the other is Sooraj barjatya( the maker of MPKDH) . I cant help thinking in a similar vein as i keep fretting over something called a CAT exam on my blog. CAT seems to be my best friend and biggest enemy ( mock cat 1 !!!!) . A few days of sustained hardwork , i guess would drive away the CAT blues. (easier said than done) .


These days I am feeling empty at college , as no tech symposium posters are on the notice board . I am waiting for some respite from the drudgery of school ... err.... College.

Life is really moving at a frentic pace , thanx to the email revolution and the Bschool revolution as day by day , i keep seeing the voluminous mail i get from the CAT groups saying 3 hrs a day study , is not enough !!!( one struglles to make 2 hrs a day here) . I notice 1 thing for sure, this competition is either going to elavate me to the zenith of something called success or I may have to take to alms !!!!! in front of some "PERIYA KOIL".having only CAT in mind is a sure risk , as the nature of these Bschools admission is unpredictable , so i've been thinking abt a back up as my GRE EXAM( strictly only as a back up ) .

so waiting for life to unfold it's uncertainty's in the months to come ,but one thing is for sure , these moths of slogging is surely going to help me and i must conclude with a positive bent of mind , that I will make efforts to lock horns with the CAT and take it head on

phew!!! this is just where life begins for me . I am just getting 2 know the competition that is there for CAT , and belive me it's mind boggling. I still belive that I can make it to the grades of top b schools , by consistent hard( or smart) work . Just 1 mock cat is over and that pin prick is enough to get me going . I am blogging from Avadi , as i had some xerox work left and xerox works 66.67 % cheaper here than in the city .

I had my MOCK CAT on sunday and found that I was "mocked"by the CAT. attended college after bunking 3 days . well these guys in college( egg jam cell ) made me write the test paper 5 times forcefully bcoz i happened to miss the test yesterday.

thankfully tommorow is a holiday ,and that leaves me some time to get working on CAT.

The last 2 days had been spent sleeping over my CAT material ,pillow and biscuits.
These days , I seem to lie down whenever the phenomenen of sleep hits me !!!

I have an all India mock CAT tommorow , but seem to be wasting my time in shuttling between my driving school and home , all for those extra classes in driving maruti coz my est is scheduled in a couple of days .
I feel so releived at being offered no post in our symposium, coz CAT pressure is really getting high. from here on my blog will be a dedicated CAT /GRE blog with special usage of those unheard words. it's a kinda practice for me in terms of usage and for the reader too.

Life's really boring for now , as in college , practically nothing happens as far as three subjects are concerned. regularly due to lack of staff we are dumped in our peripherals lab .
How long will this go ? Well 60000 rs toward my engineering education just seems to be going down the drain.

Well , something to pep me up is the general quiz , hosted by the E&I dept in our college on tuesday. the prelims are tommorow . I only hope and pray that I qualify for the Finals and go on to win my 5th succesive VEL-INTRA QUIZ( so far it's 4 out of 4) , bcoz this time we have around 150 teams in the prelims .

Kiruba's speech yesterday was really good in the sense that he combined practicality , with a tinge of humour every now and then to ensure that we were all awake . The best part probably was the mini adzap session we hads with each team trying to put it across each other .

Today was a really long day at college as most of the time was spent roaming here and there collecting names for the symposium . The headache has just begun and it getting bigger with guys like selvakumar , arun and of course , the idiotic class B CSE final years , behaving kiddishly. to add fuel to the fire is our very own ARRY , messing up things .


The better part of the evening was spent in mount road , in Altosys , a software company , hunting for projects , along with achut

I happened to ponder , as to what was the most foolish thing I ever did amongst all my shenanigans , and the numero uno feat was ...............................................

I tried doing a "madhavan" /"vivek oberoi" humming "endendrum punnagai(alaipayuthe)/ "oh humdum suniyo re(saathiya) with the music blaring on my walkman as I drove the bike at 50kmph one fine day , All of a sudden the music was interrupted by a thud and my ears being given a jerk and i realised that the walkman was probably loosely attached to my pants, and it fell down on the road ...............

Many vehicles missed the walkman , by not much, but it was scratched here and there , bcoz of the fact that it fell down at such a speed.

To this day I regret that as my SONY walkman , still dosent have the radio functioning bcoz of my act ! ! !

THIS WAS AN ARTICLE I HAPPENED TO WRITE FOR MY KID COUSIN SISTER , IN SCHOOL AS SHE WANTED AN ESSAY IN 20 MINUTES .(FORGETTING HER HOMEWORK!!!) .SEEMED TO HAVE GOT HER ACCOLADES AT SCHOOL

HERE GOES


PERSEVERENCE IS THE VERY HINGE OF VIRTUES
Sometimes when we see succesful people going about in a Mercedes Benz or in a Ford Ikon it dosent take us long us to say" what a lucky guy" . What we actually seem to be missing to see, is just the effect of years of sweat and toil behind the guy , who seems to be travelling in a luxury car. Such is the power of perseverence , that it can be looked as a tool that can combine hardwork, dilgence patience and consistency and transform into a potent form of something as as sweet as the nectar of success.

Perseverence in itself a virtue that encompasses insistence ,hardwork,resolve,determination and diligence and finally this capsule when rigorously followed over a period of time , results in oppurtunities for mankind to excel himself in .Generally mankind measures the virtues of life in a very objective manner and perseverance being the stepping stone to success , automatically becomes a very high priority among the virtues of life , in such a way that all the other virtues tend to tag along with the important virtue of perseverance . So to say perseverence becomes the very hinge around which the door of human virtues moves back and forth , time and again.


We shall see an example of perseverance in shorter and longer perspectives .Take for instances day-to- day instances like the recently concluded World cup that was won by Australia where Australia easily won all the matches it played . It seemed very easy to sit back at home and say that they won because they were lucky .. but a behind the screen look tells us that they worked 7-8 hours on their fitness, batting and bowling and being mentally tough. Even though they were caught in a couple of dicey situations , they some how managed to wriggle out of it due to sheer grit and determination to succeed .Thus perseverance is purely of an offscreen activity that projects the person involved in hardwork in a better light on the screen .

Now , take for instance the very case of writing this article , which requires a certain amount of dedication to sit down and organize the thoughts and ideas and jot it down on paper and then later to rearrange the ideas in such a fashion to make the article look readable . This hardwork is spread probably over an hour and if the teacher who goes through this article finds this piece if writing interesting enough and she gives an A grade to me , probably somewhere among the last benches one would find frustrating rumours doing the rounds " what a lucky girl....................." . so the next time you see some thing flashy or good , try thinking how much of dedication and hardwork went into making it so good and with that I would like to conclude that , yes Indeed , Perseverance is the hinge of all virtues

2nd week since college reopened and still we are no where , as far as the initial objective of completing the portions well in time , is concerned. we dont seem to be having staffs to manage the department as 3-4 of them have decided to take a week off and the newer recruits seem totally out of place . Sometimes it really pinches me that to hear this drivel in college(or rather none) , I actually burn a hole of 60 000 rs anually in my parents pocket. I guess my engineering is highly screwed simply because of the lack of competitive flavour , in students and the lack of a proffesional college like atmosphere, which makes me really lackadaisical at my work .

Just as the system of PERCENTILE scores go in most entrance exams , the benchmark for judging the beauty of a woman would be Aishwarya rai , undoubtedly .... and this comes on the blog , coz I am watching "HUM DIL DE CHUKE SANAM" one of the films that catapulted her to fame in 1999 .
her lovely green eyes ,slim and tender figure, ladylike way of speaking ..............................it just goes on and on and on...............on . a little further on this topic , my blog for all u know may be tracked down by sushma swaraj(or Ravi shankar) and would meet the same fate as the banning of FTV .
well if any female wanting to apply if they feel they are in the 90 percentile category , lets make this blog as the medium of communication ...! ! ! !

today my stomach played truant from 4 in the morning, so couldnt go to college . it was a pity that the ache left me sleeping till 9 am , after which it was GAYAB. today's leave gave me ample time to work on my CAT preparation .

Today I had a first hand Glimpse of what goes thru the mind of a recruiter. I had been to India Software Group , to get some advice as to what recruiters expect from freshers as well as tech guys who apply for jobs, along with kishore of my class . I am really thankfull to kiruba who made this possible along with the HR manager Ms Sandra. and their recruit Ashish . They were very forthright in giving their views and gave a clear picture of how to go about hunting companies and getting down to orient ourselves better to get a internship during our 8th semester.

came back home , in a very happy mood wiser from the meeting with these corporate people . it's late 11 now , but i guess for a CAT aspirant , there is nothing called "proper time or raghukalam " as I have to write a mock CAT right now from 11:30 pm to 1 :30 am ...... phew quite a schedule ...........

I spoke to soon, err ............blogged too soon , about my new HOD whom I had praised in the last blog turned out to be a 1 day wonder ! ! ! today the guy not only had me in splits , but got on my nerves as well . This was with response to a question on "availability" in distributed computing ?
( more of general term "availability" than in technical jargon ). I happened to answer " the amount of optimum resources required at a particular time to either be supplied or......" . I said it in this form because i didnt want to use the word "availability" in the definition as it would look cheap from an engineering student's point of view .(some thing a la MS ARVIND'S definition of BANDWITH : width of the band !!!) My HOD stared at me and said that I always make it a point to say some thing that is precisely wrong .

I was still left wondering what could be the perfect answer to such a question , but that was interuppted by the same question , forwarded to one of those Andhra girls , who sheepishly smiled and after bilnking into the sir's face , said a stunner "SAR ( sir in Andhra slang!) AVAILABILITY is what iiis available" and belive it or not , the sir in response to this congratulated the girl by saying it was a brilliant and precise answer , much to my chagrin .

He then turned to me and said , that i should learn from her , how to be precise and I was fit for nothing!!!! . I got bugged by that statement and retorted back saying that "Any tom dick and harry can answer in that way" to which he turned his face ( I guess he had got an over-dose of a language called English , and decided to do a CTRL-ALT-DEL by facing the blackboard .


Well just as life is like two sides of a coin , my better part came in the CAT classes , later in the evening where I did the english test much better than I had expected to do and my preparation on the CAT front is getting slightly more organized , so that feeling at the end of the day , left me smiling at the vagaries of life that strikes a person in all magnitudes all too suddenly !!!!!

College has finally started and so has boredom.The heat in Chennai is just too much and today , since the staff meeting was supposed to take place , we were dumped in the computer lab , which did not have the AC functioning and the door too was bolted. We were told that the AC was functioning , despite repeated requests from the guys ,as were literally getting wet with sweat.
The classes have not begun in full swing and there is always this sense of idling around in class . We have a new HOD and i started liking him for 1 reason , he was the first HOD in veltech , who has spoken about conducting a symposium , addresing us on day 1 and he also becomes the first HOD to spot me napping in the class ! !

our symposim is slated on the 8th and 9th of august this year which may clash with the symposium of Amrita engg college, coimbatore . (not that it's going to deprive us of our crowd for our symp) , but we would love to be there in coimbatore attending their event than organizing our's in the midst of all kinds of troubles , that crop up here in the course of our symposium in the form of budget allocation........etc etc .
We had a lovely time last year , when we( achut and myself) qualified for the finals of their national level techquiz but came 4th out of 5 in the finals after closely fought rounds and to really lap it up we were enjoying nature at it's best as the college is surrounded on all sides by mountains and the mist covers the college till 9 in the morning . we had a royal time in ooty a day later , with 6 of us deciding to take a break from college .

well i am really interested at the prospect of doing something for our symposium , purely from a technical point of view and also managing the whole event . i guess none of my current 4th year batchmates are going to be that interested in this as they dont realize the latent oppurtunity that lies within of this being a platform to test our programming skills practically . well I guess I'l have to take up the mantle , this time again , hopefully with the secretive support of 2 -3 mates of my class

secondly last sunday i happened to attend a math workshop for solving the CAT , which also had succesful guys from the IIM's speak to us. i met quite a few engineers , who like me are in a way intested in their engineering , but somewhere along they played the fool, enjoying life the way they wanted, paying little heed to their engineering , and of course made their way into the IIM's . hope i too follow their path of making to the IIM's after a not so enjoyable bout of engineering !!!!