Notes

This happened a long time ago: the weekend of September 10 last year. I didn’t feel the need to write about it, simply because there was nothing special about it. I’ll devote a post to it nonetheless so that I have one less point on the ‘blogging topics’ draft I’ve saved on Gmail! We were four people (Samrat, Anuj and Rahul, apart from me) on two bikes (my Classic 350 and Anuj’s Apache RTR) and we left Ghaziabad on Saturday morning at about 6am. We reached Mussoorie around 5pm and apart from a stretch on a toll road (about 75kms long) which begins just after Meerut, the road conditions were pathetic, to say the least, throughout. ...

I have heard many people (including my father) bragging about how bad the traffic condition is in their city and how difficult it is to drive there. Their favourite line is ‘If you’ve driven in my city X, you can drive anywhere in India’! To all such people, I extend my kind invitation to test their driving skills in Noida or, for that matter, in Uttar Pradesh once! The people are highly impatient when they are out driving on the road. The shared-auto drivers and rickshaw-walas, on the other hand, behave as if the roads belong to their father! They change lanes or stop their vehicles (to pick up or drop passengers) in the middle of the road on their own free will and ignore you even if you are travelling at 70kmph, even if you have to use disc brakes to avoid a collision and even if you are raping the horn of your vehicle like a maniac! Moreover, the red light signals stand merely as an indication that you might want to halt when the light is red- you don’t really have to if you don’t want to (this stands true for drivers of motorcycles, cars, buses and trucks alike: rickshaw-walas never stop at red lights!). Most motorcycle riders never wait at a red light unless there is traffic policeman visible somewhere or they are locked in a place from where it is difficult to manoeuvre their vehicle forward. ...

This post may contain a few, but not big, spoilers! I began writing this post yesterday, just after I got up after completing my ‘preparation’ for the Academy Awards ’12. But by now, the awards have already been announced! Still, here’s a gist of my preparation and a wee bit more. I had decided some time ago that I would watch all the movies that had been nominated for the Oscars this year- that is when I began my so-called preparation! As with college semester examinations, I could not complete the entire syllabus; rather I am contented with what I could finish. Below is the list of the movies I managed to watch: ...

Imagine you have to conduct a class, which has about twenty kids, all under the age of ten years, for about an hour. You don’t have to teach them math (which would probably have been easy). Rather, you are expected to talk to them about things like Republic Day, Holi etc. or organize games. How easy do you think it is? I will be frank- this happened to me once and the experience was nothing less than a nightmare! ...

Every person who knows me knows very well how big a fan I am of Pulp Fiction. It is high time since I paid my tribute to ‘the’ best movie I have seen till date. This post is not a review of the movie- you can find literally hundreds of them on the internet. It is more about what this movie means to me. I am one of those fellows who do not want to know anything about a film before actually watching it. For choosing which movie to watch next, all I rely on are things such as the movie’s ratings on IMDb, the star cast and, on a few occasions, recommendations by friends. I have a slight distaste for romantic comedies, but apart from that, I am not even concerned about the genre of a film before watching it. This was how I first watched Pulp Fiction. And since then (trust me, I am not exaggerating this), I have watched the film for more than at least three dozen times (till now)! This is apart from the numerous other occasions on which I have ‘revised’ it by watching scenes from here and there. ...

If yes and if you love watching movies as much as I do, I will make two recommendations to you- two movies which you may not have heard about but will like enormously. But first I’ll tell you a few things about The good, the bad and the ugly. The good, the bad and the ugly was directed by an Italian director (and one of the greatest too) called Sergio Leone. The music was given by Ennio Morricone, a legendary composer (and a classmate of Sergio Leone, something I found just now while writing this post). And of course, the movie was based on cowboys with Clint Eastwood in the lead. ...

It is 2012- the year that I enter the 23rd year of my existence. 23 years is not a small time, at least for me, and if I see in retrospect, I am decently satisfied by how my life has turned out until now. What worries me today is that I haven’t yet achieved something that I can be substantially proud of. Sure, the one year spent in Kota was great; the four years I spent in DCE will always remain ‘the’ golden time of my life and the same goes for Adobe. The point is that it is nothing what a guy who begins working hard right from when he is in class 11 cannot achieve. I only find comfort in thinking that all these were supposed to be steps in the way of me achieving something higher in life- and that is still true. I have met many people in recent times who are doing exactly what they didn’t see themselves doing some four or six years ago. That may be fine, only if you are consciously trying to change things around. But not trying to change things even when you are not satisfied with them is a sin in my eyes- at least in that case I have stood true to myself. ...

I have been thinking from quite some time about writing about the one year that I spent in Kota, when I was in class 12th. I guess it is about time before I actually start forgetting about it! I had begun dreaming about studying in IIT even when I was in class 9th. That was when a fellow classmate told me about Bansal classes in Kota- he told me about the huge number of students that study there every year and about the tough competition they face to get into both Bansal and later, IIT. Truly speaking, it were the stories of the fierce competition at Bansal that actually made me poke my dad every other day (when I was in Ahmedabad in class 11) to send me to Kota next year. My father supported me completely, as he always does, and I was only 16 when I went there. Two batches were made that year for freshers of class 12th, F1 and F2- I was put in the former. ...

The Yamuna expressway is a promising project- it is supposed to be as good as the one connecting Noida and Greater Noida, only a ‘little’ longer. But on last Saturday, I didn’t know that it was still under construction. Imagine yourself driving along it for the entire distance of 185km: you begin by driving along a decently built service road that runs beside the expressway (you cannot drive on it as entry to it is blocked), but after a while, you realize that the decency of the service lane was only for the first few kms- after that, all you find is a heavily muddy rock-strewn ‘road’. Still you go on and suddenly you find a way to take your bike on the expressway. There are stretches where the road is in mint condition (there was one such stretch where I managed to run 12km at a constant speed of 110kmph!) and there are others where you will actually have to find a path to drive even 100m further (the road is uneven at some places and does not even exist at many others- with mud, tar and gravel lying freely here and there). ...

This happened on Sept. 3 this year- the longest I had driven before in one night was when I, along with a few teammates, had gone to Panipat (which is not more than 120kms or so from Noida). It was a Friday evening on which I and (a rather reluctant) Sardar decided to go somewhere on the Bullet. Ankit also joined us and it was about 11pm when we left for Jaipur. ...