Tuesday, December 2, 2008

The taste of IIT

"There are only two types of people in this world, one which has read this blog and the other which is going to read this blog." -- Adhiraj Alai

IIT is a prestigious institute, the place where almost all IITians are from. It is known for the leaders it manufactures, the brainy raw materials it take in and the useful workaholics it sends out to conquer the world. We all know about IITs and the IITM, but what people in general don't know is about the food in IIT. That is the purpose of my blog, to show the unlucky people who did not manage to get in that there is at least one thing they are better off at. This post is dedicated to all the people who've attempted to lose their lives in vain) after getting a taste of the food at IITM.

IIT has 6 main places where people find food-
Guru
Bassera
Tiffanys
CCD
Campus Cafe
SAC (students activity centre)
Mess


First of all Gurunath patisseries. According to 1931 census, it is known that more number of people go for guru for grub than to Thirupati for grub. Guru in some contexts represent the whole of IITM. Eg. It is a centre for bio-diversity; So many different species of living organisms can be found in one small area. Cats, dogs, deer, man ... you name it, you will find it grazing there. It is also reported that 2 million species of insects are found it that 30 x 50 sq feet of land. Species which include the puff chasing mad-fly and the fevicol ad-fly [The red beetle like insect which are self symbiotes {two insects stick to each other no matter where they go and hence fevicol}]. Due to the introduction of the pesto-flash, the number of insect species has come down from 2 million to million down 50% and hence the total number of species are down from 2,000,0004 to 1,000,004.

Guru is one of the wealthiest stalls ever. Hot veg puffs (or weggi puff as the owner likes to call it) get sold like hot cakes there. If one goes at 6:30 or later, he/she will find that the menu has only Veg puff and egg puff other than chats, speaking about which, one can hear "SAAAAR token numbar FIFty NAYAN" at least a hunded times a day in the chat counter***. The chat counter also sells Maggi. Recently a Pizza company joined the chat stall and now they sell miniature Pizzas. The side effect of that is that they now sell Maggi 30 minutes or free noodles instead of the more popular '2 minutes noodles'.

Guru also sells American sweet corn. A combination of Indian corn, Indian Masala, Indian land and an Indian salesman gives rise to American sweet corn. This is so because its obviously an American innovation of using Aluminium foil as an insulator for heat replacing the traditional corn skin which is a revolution in the corn industry. The stall is called Grills and steam. The founders of this empire were Bill Grills and Sweety pie (both American), that explains the origin of the terms "sweet" corn and "Grills" and steam.

You can find Ice-tea at the heart of IIT in the coffee stall. The guy who operates the thing doesn't speak. (I couldn't think of anything funny, so I put a fact instead.)


Coming to Bassera the midnight express, it is a place where food doesn't come in the order it is placed in. The place was once filled with people, lots of them and was called Quark Minar instead, now its Bassera. The Administration challenged the Pizza guys in Gurunath and reduced it to 29 minutes and 59 seconds or less and hence this barren grazing field, the home of all nocturnal IITians is called the midnight express.

Tiffanys: I remember, Just yesterday, the prizes were just like a baby and now its all grown up, brings tears in my eyes. The administration wanted to call it 'Tiffanys express' but then realised self mockery was not always good and later deleted the latter part of the name. One particular item I like here is the cup of horlicks where they add a little milk to a cup full of horlicks. Two boards have been put up there saying 'We deliver quality' and 'Self service' which send mixed messages to their customers. They also have a board put up outside saying "Table cleaners wanted". This is probably an attempt to open the waitressing industry options to IITians

CCD stands for Cafe Coffee day. Every day hundreds of IITians who are categorised under 'rich' come here to change their category. They offer a variety of coffee like cold, hot, with sugar without sugar, drinkable, eatable, with ice cream, without ice cream, affordable, unaffordable, Indian beans, Javan beans, with coffee, without coffee etc.. They offer other items too like samples of cookies worth 10 bucks which you pay for, Mint for 3 bucks a piece, water from the lake for 10 bucks a liter.

Campus Cafe: cant really complain here except, it can be called the campus restaurant instead.

SAC: The students activities centre not to be confused with students amenities centre at Guru or the students activities centre which ain't got no food, is one of the places where most of the people meet half their daily energy requirements. It has been calculated that SAC and Guru together contribute to 25% of the total ecological foot-print of India. Every year freshies who are unaware are honored with the pride of being a sac vol and then he is trapped for an entire year gradually realizing he has a lab test on the day of the sac-vol treat.


Mess: The mess is one place where the Darwinian law of natural selection doesn't hold good. RR mess hardly has any biological off-springs and yet is not extinct after a number of generations! The Aloo crap-fry that is prepared Monday Wednesday Thursday afternoon has no takers, yet not yet extinct. The friday evening M1 menu consists of Banana, bread, blood n balls (They call it veg-Manchurian). Blood n balls has no takers, still alive.

In the mornings we have Idly Vada (Monday), pulses,vegetables and masala (Tuesday), Dosa (Wednesday), Maggi (obvious), Kesaribath and bonda(Friday). what is served on Saturday and Sunday mornings is still a mystery to me and my sources of reliable information.

Other than the regular food there are a few occasional surprises like centipede, cockroach, staple pins, needles, frog-legs, human fingers, mixie blade and so on.

There are 4 categories under which these messes come under.

1 HMK and HMC for the old and elderly.

2 Excellent mess[XM] for the unlucky*.

3 Himalaya mess for normal people.

4 SGR for people who can have enough patience to wait for the food to come with Pure-vegetarian brand as an incentive

*Result obtained by putting the two following observations together XM << SGR <<; normal food

1. One of the many girls from the computer science department of my batch who prefers anonymity stated "SGR was much better compared to Excellent mess."
2. One of the x-freshies who tried to rag the seniors stated "SGR totally sucks. We have to wait for at least a fifteen minutes in the morning for tasteless food."

As Immy said and I quote "Ahhhhh! mess food! (long pause), when was the last time I had that?", people hardly eat at the mess and still end up paying for things that they don't eat which is worse than diabetic people paying for sugar-free sweet corn or sugar-free sugarcane juice.

There is a rumour that the utensils are washed in the lake near by. That explains most of the problems that come up regarding utensils. The taste-health war is on hold at the mess because neither of them is given preference. The explanation the mess administration food gives is "Look on the bright side, The Himalaya building is so beautiful that is a plus point."

The first of the all the above observations (Anti Darwinian result) can be explained using the algorithm that god himself has designed. This mess allocation system abolishes bribery and corruption because the mess administration don't have to pay anything to get their job done.

The algorithm is as follows.

Enum mess [CR = 1, RR, SK, SGR, HMK, HMC ,XM]

step 0: for all people do-
step1: Input 1st choice for the mess.
step2 : Input 2nd choice for the mess.
step3 : Goto step 7
step4 : Goto step 10
step5 : Input 3rd choice for the mess.

step6 : Input 4th choice for the mess.
step8 : Calculate the grievances of the previous months.
step9 : calculate the priority of the particular person.
step10 : go to step 0

step11: for people in decreasing priority do-
step12 : mess[person] = random(7) + 1

This algorithm takes in 4 choices for the mess. I was very lucky to get the 5th option. (5th option is shared among all the messes that I could not give as a choice.)

The working staff in the mess can be compared to the deer in IITM. As soon as a pack of deer hear a footstep they get all worried and a rush of adrenalin in their haemo-lymph is observed. Similarly, the test for the milk-quality is just started by the mess secretary and all the exited anxious mess staff huddle up and start discussing their future plans. Surprisingly, the only complaints that are ever received are Mixie is too noisy or floor is wet or Utensils weren't fully dry.

In Himalaya mess itself there are stalls called the CSU stalls where one can buy lots of junk food which provide you with excess energy for the excess work you do. One can also find a variety of fruits being sold like apple, sweet-lime, guava, custard apple, Apple, Mosambi, guavaa, custard apple, Big lime, pomaceous, Malus pumila, etc the list grows on.

That is about it for the mess and IITian food. Hope you had a hearty meal.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

ID120

This is my first non philosophical post. Its going to be a short one too. It doesn't need any disclaimer. The readers are free to think that the characters in the play are indeed real and not fictional. If you don´t see any resemblance with any character alive, you deserve to suffer too! Stop bunking all classes!

A few days ago there were a lot of protests going on against the 50% reservation for the faculty in the IITs.
I was against the joke too, I mean how can a guy who is less than a PhD come and teach in a
centre for academic excellence, the temple of learning, the treasure-house of knowledge, the forest of bliss, sattara-ab (similar to Punjab), the land of the Gurunath patisseries, the IITM where even the monkeys belong to the 100+ IQ level and use technology for the benefit of monkey-kind?

After hours and hours of reflection in class, the doubt was finally answered. Teaching in the IITM isn't really tough! In fact being a faculty is a piece of egg-less cake. Thanks to the new method of teaching where people handle simple jobs efficientl
y and make sure students LEARN things in pleasurable way.

This new way of teaching is ca
lled ID which stands for something "I Donno".
There are many ID courses. for eg 110 and 120.

I will be considering ID 120 as an example to show that any body can be hired to teach. Its not only famous for its superb teaching method but also because of its interesting content (The birds and the bees).




The course hires 15 people from the faculty. The following are the various posts available for the faculty.

4 + 4 + 4 guards cum attendance sheet passers - There are 4 people in CRC 101, 4 at CRC 103 and 4 at CRC 102.
Their job is to stop every one from entering the Classrooms after 5 minutes of commencement of classes. Accuracy of time is not important and hence the job is simple. They will also have to pass on attendance sheets from bench to bench and they ll have to keep an eye on the sheet and ensure that every one signs only once. Now that is the tricky part and hence requires patience determination and perseverance and other things but not a PhD.

1 laptop guy. 1 at CRC 102.
He is the techie, his job is to handle the complicated tasks associated with Laptops. Not every one can handle this. You have to be faster than a 5th grader. Our PH102 prof had very poor skills and he couldn't do it. The basic task is to press either the down-arrow key or the button
`next´ in the pdf-reader or the space-bar button. The complexity lies in the fact that the Laptop dude is right at the front and he should be able to handle stage fright but he doesn't need a PhD

1 Camera guy.
He is involved in the complex task of tracking the main guy (refer next paragraph), who some times moves from place to place. He should have good hand-eye co-ordination but a PhD is not required. He is not considered a faculty member but I thought it would be fun to have a faculty member take up the job.

1 Patrol Officer.
His job is to move around and try to find people using cellphones. He should have good line of sight (360 degrees). He usually carries a sack with him which probably has pepper spray and stolen mobiles. He moves around in search of all the mobiles that are being used. If he finds any, he puts it in his bag. He also searches for people who listen to the lecture putting their heads on the desk and having their eyes shut (which he considers a crime). He is the vice-captain of the team and his job isn't easy, he has to patrol the place so that no body gets distracted. A difficult job often well handled.

1 Main guy (Reader).
He is the main guy of the team. He is the captain. His job is to read every thing that is being previewed on the slides. The reason why his job is important is because he has to read the slides exactly as it is. He has to modulate his voice in such a way that people reading the
slides don't get distracted.

This he manages to do by reading in a peculiar way. His pitch is very low and his entire sentence is in the same frequency(No modulation) which not all 5th graders can achieve (only around 95% can). His lines go smooth and uninterrupted because 2/3rds of the class strength don't get to see him directly.
By far his job is the toughest. This job is a very demanding one and often there are shifts because one guy cannot handle the job for a long time. The duration for which one particular Main guy in in charge is between 1 and 2 weeks. After that a different guy comes in and takes over.

Thus this elite squad of 15 members manage to teach children NEW INTERESTING things. For us IITians who have cleared JEE securing 1,3 and 6 marks in JEE Maths, Physics and Chemistry respectively, this is all we deserve!

Moral of the story: I m jobless, so are you!

Friday, July 18, 2008

New-Darwinism : The new evolutionary theory

Disclaimer: Mutual-funds are subjected to market risks. Please read my blog carefully before commenting.

Warning: The following is a work of fiction. No part of it has been copied from any other work or any written/typed matter whatsoever. This is a warning because if you believe this has been copied from somewhere or if you suspect, thou shall be hang
ed! Any resemblance with any other post or with reality itself is totally co-incidental.

For copied works, culted Jokes and other arbit stuff visit Arjun Bharadwaj's blog!

Sarkashm starts here-

Prerequisites - PH640 - Nuclear Physics 2050 , CY458 The return of the Quantum mechanics.
oh ya als
o watch Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na (Genilia's in it)!



The earth as a place we see it today is a wonderful place filled with flora and fauna unique to every piece of it. That makes us all wonder, where did all of this come from? Has it been here for ever? What was it like before? What do these fossils tell us? Will Sachin Tendulkar make a good come back? Even if he does how will that have anything to do with this blog?

I bring to you the answers to these questions above.
I have conducted a day long research lasting from yesterday 5:00 PM to today 7:00 AM and have come to a conclusion that creationism theor
y cannot be correct. Most of the religious heads don't agree to this statement above. The rational and the intelligent people do not accept the creationism theory.

I have managed to come up with a theory that is fine with everyone (Aam Aadmi included). I call it the New-Darwinism theory. The theory which suggests human like creativity in evolution.

Consider the earth as the system, the surroundings as the surroundings and the universe as universe. Now there is one god for every planet and henc
e one for earth. He takes care of every one. There is only one god but there are 234,342,526,346,346,324,379 demigods.(source unknown and unwanted) they live in the heavens. the heavens are at an altitude of 36 km from the surface of the earth, in fact there are three heavens and they keep watch of the earth.(Philosophy ends here)

The God s
ends his demigod to the earth once in every hundred years for their project work and they scan the entire world of all the organisms and report the problems faced by them. At the end of that particular year, god comes down to earth and makes small modifications in the structure of the animals making their life easier. That is how organisms evolve. The principle of god wins the votes of religious people and the principle of evolution wins intelligent people.(No offense)

There are more phenomenon to be explained here. The phenomenon which indirectly suggests the existence of a human like mind behind the creation.
  • Evolution is a slow and an ever lasting process - So is our nation's progress, the reason: corruption! corruption among the demigods/government officials. Infact the corruption is much better than it was before. All god could make from 4 billion to 1billion years """BC""" was a silly jelly-fish that had only two types of tissues, 1 for propulsion and the other for offence.
  • Humans despite millions of years of evolution aren't immune to disease or other invisible predators -So is Windows, reason: god is perfect.
  • Certain creatures that had well established power in the ecosystem are now extinct - So are letters (emails have replaced them), test cricket(money has replaced it) and Prakrit language (Kannada rocks!)
  • Evolution has brought about changes that are impossible to think of - Well who would have thought that a monkey would change and over the years go to outer space or invent the Internet or master the DNA. Reason: God is great! Similarly Chinese have built the Great wall of China that even today no government can think of!
  • Humans were no where in the picture and has suddenly managed to take over the world - So as in the case of Windows. Cockroaches (penguins) will take over soon.
---to be continued in the next line

  • Some animals have organs which are totally useless created just for the expression of creativity for eg the antlers of a Thompson's Gazelle is totally useless and hence I consider it to be the signature of the person who upgraded it! A similar example is found in the Simpsons notice the MG on Homer's image
  • Elephants/mammoths don't seem to have evolved from any other living creature and they are believed to have an aquatic past. They seem to have been suddenly created out of nowhere --- clear indication of human like creativity for eg the origin of the word 'quiz' is unknown or may be the word appeared out of no where.(well I needed more points to support the theory and added this as one)
Conclusions:
None.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Computer center on one certain day


In winter 1994, I met a little girl (refer photo on the right) on a night train journey. I was very bored and since I was just 5 years old I liked stories. The little girl offered to tell me a story on conditions that I put the story in my second post. At first I hesitated because I did not know what a blog or a post was back then but anyway I asked her what the story was about anyway.

She told me that it was about 6 people in a computer center set in one day, she said it was the day,the day they received an email, an email from God. (some Greek god probably)

All but one of them considered it as spam and deleted the email. The next day they died of small-pox but only one of them stood patient among them all, he read it with faith or out of joblessness and he survived (survival of the fittest). It happened that god offered to meet him and answer all his questions as in an interview.


Thus I return the favour of the little girl and publish my second post.



Warning: The following post contains Adult content. So if you are 18- please grow up quickly or change your birthday like me.
Warning:The following post offers religious enlightenment. If you aren't ready yet, go watch teletubbies or something.


One day at a computer center.

It was summer, one particular year. It was very hot outside and these cheap Air conditioners probably made in China had broken down for the 7 th time that week. Good news: I and my 5 friends are playing our role in preventing global warming by having our A.Cs turned off . Bad news: we were sweating like hell and I was feeling dizzy. Sleeping on my job is not a nice option with Hari Sadu as my boss.

It was supposed to be a coffee break but the only coffee available was hot coffee and who would drink that? So me and my friends were passing the time checking the mail during the coffee break. Mary, was one of my colleagues. Her father had five children Nana, Nene, Nini, Nono, and of course Nunu (whose nick name was Mary). They were my colleagues, they had been working here before I did. I am not punctual.

I was scrolling through my mail although I did not read any. I found one particular mail with an interesting Topic, a topic that could change my life for ever. It read "Your best friend Sammy has sent you a gift. Click below to find out more" and then there was an emotionally blackmailing statement saying click yes to accept the gift and no if you don't consider Sammy(name changed) as your friend.

I didn't want to hurt my dear friend Sammy who ever he was so I clicked on the link but Kaspersky internet settings wouldn't allow me to do so. How dare a silly software stop me from accepting a gift from my unknown best friend. At that time I was really feeling the heat. I couldn't bear it. I felt drowsy but I continued any way. I killed the stupid anti-virus software from the system and went to the link again. I was really tired so I did not read any thing that followed that and I clicked on some download button in the link.

Suddenly God appeared in my computer and he offered me a chance to ask any question I liked. What a wish he granted. I could now solve all the mysteries of the world like what women really expect when they say "Do I look fat in this dress?" or what company recruiters expect when they ask "Why do you want to work for this company" or what my pet dog Shah Rukh expects when it says" Bow wow wow bow bow wow arrrrr ar ar, munyadaar munyadaar munyadaar" and so on. I had the opportunity to get to be the king of the world.

he next minute I am with god, god sitting on a sofa. He asked me to start off with the question asking. This is the actual conversation that I had with god.


Kash: Welcome god, Its an honor for me to chat with you and get all my questions answered.
god: God bless you son. Its my pleasure to be here with you and you can call me Mr G in short


Kash: So god put intro!

god: My nick is god so is my name. I live in the center of the universe. I have magical powers. I can control the entire universe.


Kash: That is it??
god: Affirmative.


Kash:
So god what does it feel like to be god???
God:hmmmm....... well it has its ups and downs. I have the power to do whatever I want like I can invoke a volcano or something and I can have fun by like watching sitcoms whenever I want, how many ever times I want. I can meet any actor/actress I want personally but
Its hard work I've got responsibility.
I am the Father of the world. you must know how tough it is to achieve that.


kash: Yeah!

god: I am talking about the soul creating machine that I have to use to create souls and send them to the various parts of the universe. The buttons don't press themselves you know!

kash: So how did you manage to turn out to be what you are today?

god: It wasn't easy I had to work hard for over 45 hrs a week for 2 years but there have been other demigods who have worked for 5 years in vein. Some make repeated attempts and fail.
I ove it all to Brainvita, the nuclear energy drink. The best drink there is. Brainvita is the secret of my energy.

kash: Ok, enough ads already! Only about 10,000 people read my blog.
Any way Mr G can you tell me about your network of gods.

God: ah yes! There are plenty of gods and they all help me as my subordinates to reign this universe. I have appointed 1 god for each planet. That is the secret of my success. That is how I manage to rule your planet flawlessly, everything is so perfect in your planet according to these reports that I've received. I should be a great pleasure to live there isn't it?
Kash: Ya, ya every thing is just perfect in here.
God: Not a single complaint received from any individual from your planet.
Kash: Thats so cool!

So god, tell us more about yourself. Are you an atheist or a theist?
God: A very good question son. No question is dumb.
hmmmm...... well I have only one motto that says 'You can not make progress if you don't believe in yourself' I hope that clearly answers the question.
Kash: Atheist it is then!

--We will be right after these commercials--
--The question of the day for today is " Who is Mr.G's most favorite fictional character?" The answer to this right after the break--

5 minutes later



--Welcome back folks! and now the answer to the question of the day. We will ask god himself--

Kash: God can you please tell us who your favorite fictional character is

god: well I believe in only two mottoes.
One about that progress thingie and the second one that says 'Have selfrespect, self admiration and love yourself more than any any one else in the world'.

Kash: Woah! I never knew that we had so much in common.

god: you mean you are also a selfish self centered maniac?

kash: Lets not get carried away! I was talking about having you as the favourite fictional character.

god: Oh rite!

Kash: OK more questions for you god, did it really take you a week to make this entire universe and bring man on it?

god: Thats outrageous! One week?
Thats total nonsense!
It took only a few minutes for me to come up with the planning, research and execution of my master-piece but.....
..... I wanted to make something really special, the most beautiful creation ever to be created. Something that would make all other creations cover their faces in shame. Something perfect, beautiful having a huge load to self --weight tolerating ratio, and I thought and thought and finally created a woman!

kash: why did you change plans suddenly god?
why didn't you complete your perfect creation and why did you create a woman instead.

god: Machcha! Lost enthu da!!

Kash: Is there any way by which I can be god for a day?
You know in movies they show people turning into CMs for a day!
If you can be a CM, why not god??

god: that my son only god knows!

kash: Huh? Whatever! can you tell me one really interesting thing about your administration?


god: yes, I have only one motto in life. 'If you close a door, open a window', for example, when there is a natural calamity like the Tsunami, thats the closing of the door and I open the window by having other people send in relief to the victims and they cancel out.

kash: Awesome! god I always used to curse you when such a thing happens, now I know the truth. How kind of you!

OK Mr.G now its time for the next round, The rapid fire round.
So are you ready god.

god: I sure am!

-- The Rapid Fire round --



K: who is your favorite actor.
g: Bill Clinton. He is so realistic. especially the tinkle in his eyes.
k: Sun, earth or moon, what do you like best.
G: The moon!
k: you are racist too! Great!
Any way next question I've forgotten my password and I am not able to blog
Do you know what my password is?
G: next question
K: If you were to be reborn, If you could have one thing, you dont have, what would you want to be and why?
G: I would like to be reborn as HRD minister for India
they have a lot of power!

K: OK god who is your favorite fictional character.
G: well I have only one motto, ' If you close a door, create a window!'
I hope that answers your question!

Where Mr.G do you see yourself in 10 years from now?

G: OK let me think, a second to me is like a year to you, a year to me is like 10000 years to me, so 10 years to me is like 10 seconds to me. Math is so confusing, I give up!


K: what do you have to say about the rumors about your crush on Genilia D'souza
G: thats nonsense
in fact she likes me,

K: Sure! OK what according to you is the difference between heaven and hell?

G: they are both five star hotels where you live like kings where you can get what ever you want, but only one of them is sponsored by me. In the other one you pay for your stay!

-- End of the Rapid Fire Round --

K: OK god we are almost at the end of our show.
Do you have any personal message for the jobless people who are reading this?

G: Yes I do. Science and technology you see is only an illusion, please don't fall for its lies. Have faith in me and you will live well.
You will also win a free life (dead) time stay at the heaven.
And you my boy, if you have any requests, make them now!

K: well it has been my lifetime dream ever since you offered to meet me, to see your super-powers in action.

G: granted son! Tomorrow a 1000 more people will be born in Chennai!
So see ya son, God bless ya, bye! miss me!


T