By-Two Kaapi in an oilfield

Yup! Thats what this post is going to be. I am growing irregular in the blogosphere and I am feeling awfully guilty. So, here goes.

• Well, Bangalore is such a great place. First day while interning in Bangalore, me and my bunch of friends land up in 'The Forum', an awesome mall. Roam around there for close to 8 hours !! Here are some observations made there by us.
  
  
  
  • Pathetic guys get all the beautiful babes
    
  • Money is everything
    
  • Landmark rocks!!
    
  • Ghom's collection of stationery is surpassable!
    
  
  The ideal day in 'The Forum': A minimum of 10k bucks in the pocket, and girlfriend by the side. It would be a cool romantic getaway.
  


• I rarely dream in my sleep, but then when I do, I get up and think for hours over my dreams. The questions I ask myself:
  
  • Why did I dream about that?
    
  • Is it possible to turn real?
    
  • What if it turns real?
    
  • How do I turn / not turn it into reality ?
    
  
  In my dream I went into a room across the street where my friend was put up. I saw a photo there titled 'Shoot me into that castle' and the photo was unexpected - It was 'my house'! Before I could even get perplexed/excited, the photo moved and then I realised that it wasnt a photo - it was just a hole in the wall!! Beat that for whackiness in my dreams. I bet this wouldnt have made sense to you. It didnt for me as well.
  

Well, I could go on and on, but I gotta scram and continue reading the book - "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid" - C K Prahalad. I can feel it. It might be a book which might change my life. Watch out for more.

Its been a week since I came back home. And its been almost a week since this blog saw a post as well. Well, I didnt intend to blog as well. But then, destiny had other plans. The main motive behind this post is interesting.

Today morn I had been to a house warming ceremony of one of my cousin's uncle. (Well, the only reason why I went there was I got to drive the Indigo for a long long distance !!). I felt terribly out of place there primarily because I knew just a couple of people out there. But then out there in the hustling crowd, my eyes caught the attention of this lady. This lady whom I would refer to as Miss X. Well, the title Miss might be misconstrued, but whatever, she was a damsel. In her I saw something interesting, I saw somebody else. The face looked so damn familiar. The nose, the eyes, the way she spoke, her physique, ....everything seemed so much like I had kept seeing it throughout the year. Probably the human mind just seeks for similarities in things that now remain as memories. I just cant get the picture out of my head.

Next post as soon as I get over this. :)

Listening to: Darks barking outside at 3 in the morning

Times have changed and times are strange.
Here I come but I ain't the same.
Mama, I'm coming home.

Yet again, after a 4 and a half months gruelling life out here, I'm going back home. Feels really good to be heading home. A disastrous semester, a fun-filled one though, comes to an end. And off I am to home sweet home.

It's a weird feeling that I am halfway through my bachelors in Engineering. And yet, I feel I know nothing that gives me the privilege of being called an engineer. Will blog about that sometime later. I have so much to blog about, but words ain't flowing.

This will be the last post from the Alien's Gateway at Pilani for a long time. Shall resume blogging in a couple of days after I reach Mysore.

Every blog I scroll my eyes over has poetry these days. And I am just another brick in the wall. So, here goes (Or in daBombian lingo ... Take it!)

This post's got no reason,
Its got no rhyme.
If this is a poet's season,
Is hating poems a crime.

So, whats in a poem I said,
Apart from the rhyme and 2-liners.
Its how you see it, she said,
Its about feeling the 2-liners.

Trying to fathom the depth of 2 lines,
I was stupified and dazed.
For when I found diamond mines
Those lines left me amazed.

It's clear that if you've read till here,
you are so so disgusted.
You wont be coming back here,
At myself I am disgusted !!!


Spare the brickbats please!!

Listening to: Trapt - 'These walls' (The song has had no effect on me writing such a useless post)

Atul Chitnis, a pretty well known Open source enthusiast in Bangalore writes in his journal about his drive to motivate students into innovating while in college:

Stop thinking inside the box. College is like a petri dish - use it to make something of yourself. Don't lie in the petri dish, expecting that at the end you will emerge as something useful. Use the facilities, look for opportunities, stop making excuses about "bad educational system" and "no opportunities". I am a *mechanical* engineer, for $deity's sake! So is Kalyan! And Shanu, one of the sharpest guys in the field that I know of, isn't even an engineer, but a B.Com! Bill Gates is a college drop-out (albeit one born with a silver spoon in his mouth). Yet all of us have one thing in common - *interest* in our fields (which we are not even qualified for) and an ability to see beyond text books and syllabus, and leverage our education to get us professionally into the lines we work in today. Stuff we *enjoy* doing (and hence are good at).

One of the reasons why my project team and I built a hovercraft as our final year project was that we were told it couldn't be done. We were also told "why take the trouble? You will pass even if you build a model of sandmill/blast furnace/etc.". (In mechanical engineering, in those days, the sandmill project was what the text editor project is to C.Sc students today).

We built that damn thing, and it worked - when we started up the 1 sqm. platform, it rose and floated. The look of the guy taking our project viva was priceless. So was the look on our faces when we received the highest marks ever awarded by the university to a final year mechanical engineering project.

But I digress (quite happily so).

My point is - unlike in days gone by (and yes, that sounds like a nostalgic embellishment, but trust me on this), students today don't seem to try to differentiate themselves outside the scope of their exam papers. "Cookie cutter" is a term often used, and quite apt. Worse still, students take up Computer Science without any real interest or aptitude for the field, and then wonder why they arent being snapped up by the Googles of the world.

The answer to this is - innovate. Do something different, something no one has done before. Don't worry if you feel like this is a wild goose chase - you will learn from the project whether you succeed or not. Understand what the needs of today are, try and identify an unaddressed niche, e.g. the need for online URL directories (Yahoo), efficient web searching (Google) or standardised programming languages (Microsoft). Let your imagination run free, don't allow yourself to be trapped in a web of conformity and standardisation.

Innovate now - it's your best chance at a successful career later in life.

And while you are at it, learn to use the tools of innovation - the ones you don't have to plan on buying just to try them out. Try using components and tools that are freely available to you, and which encourage you to understand them (instead of hiding the details from you).

You may have heard this before, but the future *is* open.

You may feel that all this is just useless ramble by some guy with too much time on his hands. That's ok, as long as you remember that in the future, some such guy may interview you for that dream job you are dying to get - and whose first question will be "so tell me about yourself, what have you done that's different from what everyone else is doing?"

I cant agree more with him. I have met scores of people, who believe that scoring maximum marks in a course which speaks high of some darn motors and rotors is the ultimate path to satisfaction and fame. It's crap. A guy who dreams of something different, and implements that is far far superior than the one who can explain what infinite bus bars do. It is not just anything technical that I am talking about. Anything! Even a club that one might start to think diferently, think what others haven't thought of before. Or implementing a project that none have dared to venture into before. That's what I call intellect & passion.

Innovate !!

Not often do I walk out of an exam of 180 minutes duration, after 100 minutes. Well, thats precisely what happened today morn. Given the preceding posts of mine and the prejudice of regular readers of this blog (if there are any...yoohoo..), one might just land up at the conclusion that I didn't figure out the answers to any of the questions and hence I thought it would be better to come back to my room, sit in front of my gateway to the world and crib about the loss of my intellect. For once, I have proved you incorrect.

Yeah, and believe me, I am happy this happens once in a while. After all these add up to the joys in life. As you might have guessed it, I walked out because astonishingly I could answer 'almost' all questions and come out more than an hour in advance. Just as I was walking down the corridor, after I was done, the Instructor-in-charge stops me right there and asks me "Hey! What are you doing out here?" to which he receives a reply "I am done, Sir". He bursts into a loud guffaw with a tinge of anger that I have defied the very system of scribbling on a piece of paper for 3 hours, but more with a sense of pride that students are cracking his course as he is a good instructor (I didnt attend a single class of this course, though!).

For the first time I feel the sense of satisfaction after an exam. Fortunately or unfortunately that is driving me to cram more for my coming exams.

Apart from all that, here are a few things I came across on the net. Really good ones.

• Atul Chitnis, urging Innovation from students


• MIT's Eric Von Hippel releases his new book on Democratizing Innovation under the Creative Commons banner


• I have heard of Out-of the box thinking but here's a free whitepaper on what is claimed to be a ground-breaking analysis on In-the-box creativity & innovation. (Registration necessary for free download)


• OK. Innovation is diffcult. And measuring it too is diffcult in terms of RoI. But then, have we ever thought of the cost of not innovating


• And, I am on Google Adsense. Yeah!


• If you are on blogger then, you ought to check out these cool Blogger templates

Listening to: some cool Indian rock bands
Phenom, 13 AD, Motherjane

Song of the day: Trapt - "Headstrong"

Well, a cliched question everyone will ask me when I head home this summer. One question that I too have been putting some thought into these days. The options: MS/MBA/Ph.D/Job (Not in order of preference)

I was running through the web, when I came across some interesting notes as well


Notes On The PhD Degree: "When asked why he spent so many hours in the lab, he noted that the alternatives were to go home, where he would do the same things that millions of others were doing, or to work in his lab, where he could discover things that no other human had ever discovered"


Master's or PhD ??
Sumit Gupta
Sept 1999

Note: This article to some extent answers the question, "Where can a Phd take me ?". I realize that having a Phd does not guarantee receiving respect, being listened to, getting a better pay, or an easier rise up the corporate ladder. However, I am trying to show that you can make a lot if not more money with a Phd and still retain many more career options which may be closed or hard to come by with a masters. Also, a PhD is NOT only for people considering a career in academics or research labs. BTW, this article is meant only for computer professionals .. the rest of you can derive your own conclusions. Ofcourse, there are and always will be tons of exceptions to the generalizations made in this article. (For reasons on why to do a Phd, read this article by Douglas Comer: Notes on a Phd Degree)

MS = Start making money fast but have to work harder to rise in a technical organisation. A Phd atleast starts off with being trusted to have the right technical experience/expertise whereas a Masters has to prove him/herself. However, in our industry (and science in general), trust and respect has to be earned. So, both have to keep earning that respect. There are no research academic positions open to a masters and no/few research positions in industry.

PhD = Start making a lot of money but after 5 years. No limits, can go to academics or industry. Can pretty much get any job one wants. However, this is not to say that a masters who works very hard cannot do the same (except research jobs). However, doing a PhD is a personal decision, based more on your philosophy of life. If you just want money, do a Masters -- better still, do a MBA ! :) For those who want a bit more and are inclined to think about the later half of their career, a PhD may prove to be useful.

When it comes time to promote, it comes down to qualifications for 2 almost equal people in terms of expertise. A Phd always starts higher, gets better projects and can *always* stay in the bleeding edge of technology. Also, there are so many people who are getting PhDs nowadays that there is no dearth of PhD applicants for jobs. PhDs are given a benefit of a doubt over Masters when it comes to things like promotion, project assignment etc. That being said, when considering people for projects, managers usually actually look at past experience and reputation. If you have done a "good" PhD, you should be able to maintain a good record and reputation; ofcourse, provided you work hard enough :)

However, again, there is no dearth of startups nowadays, so anybody can get into good projects anyway. But it depends on the kind of work you want to do. A startup usually has a few PhDs and scores of Masters. They do different kind of work, even though, their compensation may be almost at par. Also, ever notice how most successful startups have a PhD as CEO !

The drawback of having a PhD is that sometimes you are over-qualified for jobs such as software engineer et cetera. Also, in bad times, companies may pick MS students fresh out of school rather than pay the higher salaries that are required to hire fresh PhDs.

That being said, a Phd can go anywhere - to industry, academics or start his/her own company. Generally, more respected and with many more contacts, it is easier to be involved in a new tech start-up. A Phd lends more credability when trying to get money from venture capitalists and banks. Also, most of your colleagues from graduate school are either professors or in bleeding-edge technology companies. The other differences are more subtle; often someone with a PhD is more likely to understand new, path-breaking technology faster than someone with a MS -- purely because a lot of the PhD training is geared towards this. However, some of the most technically sound people I have met, do NOT have a PhD. Also, a Phd does not imply that you will gain complete respect and trust for everything you say. Like I said, in the science community, respect *must* be earned.

Now, moving on to the more important things in life; lets talk about money ;) Say, a master's starts at $60,000-80,000, with increase of about 10 % a year (post-internet bust the increments are actually down to 5 %). A Phd starts at atleast $80,000-100,000 in the computer industry.

Money earned taking into account that Phd takes 3 more years than MS:

MS 60,000 * (1.10)^3 + 60,000 * (1.10)^(t+3)
PhD 80,000 * (1.10)^t

So, when you compare two people, one who started working after his/her masters and the other who finished his/her Phd in an additional 3 years, we find that the person with MS is earning about 80,000. So, it turns out that the Phd starts working with atleast as much as the person with MS. Ofcourse, this does not account for lost income in the 3 years.

In terms of stock options, I think this analysis can end up being skewed since a masters can make a lot of money with options in the 3 years that the Phd is still finishing. The Phd however starts off with better options and sign on bonuses. All this assumes that a Masters student will not to join a startup. In general, startups will easily hire a Phd but will look for considerable experience when hiring a Masters. So, all in all, Phds lose out on 3 years or more of money making and living the good life (yeah, right; 9 to 5 job, followed by a frozen dinner and a beer).

This, ofcourse, was an analysis totally from the point of view of money since a lot of naysayers argue that a Phd can not make money and definitely not as much as a MS. However, everyone assumes that PhDs will join academics or a research lab. The fact of the matter is that a large percentage of PhDs join the industry. (As a side-note, if you have work experience, don't even think about a full-time MS; if anything do a part-time Master's.)

After having said all this, I also have to say that doing a Phd is a very personal choice and requires a lot of thinking about what you really want out of life. Earning a lot of money and having a 9 to 5 job with a family to return to, is a relatively easy thing to do in the IT industry. However, having worked in the industry and come back to graduate school, I found that I get a lot of satisfaction out of the research work I do. Startups can be fun but not something you can keep doing for the rest of your life.

What should I do after my undergraduate studies ?
Sumit Gupta

After you finish your undergraduate degree, you should work for a few years, preferably in India, and use this time to decide whether you want to continue there, get a MBA/MS/PhD. Most people who work in India before going abroad are more likely to come back. They are clearer about the ground situation in India and realize that the work situation is not as bad as people/Indians in the US want you to believe. Also, you get to have the satisfaction that you atleast contributed a few years to the brain bank of your country.

In summary , you have to challenge the traditional Indian notion that you must do your undergraduate and graduate studies in one go and get it over with. There *is* a lot of time ! Work experience is a very powerful tool for you to evaluate your life, to realize where you are going and where you want to go and is hugely appreciated when you apply to graduate school and future jobs. Also, remember your parents are out of the 60s-70s and have no idea about the opportunities and new work environments that are available in India. I found the best resource for information, knowledge and guidance about career prospects and life in general were my college professors

Pack it! I still have time !!

Listening to : Matchbox Twenty - 'Unwell'

I was searching for songs that express my current mood and landed up with an excellent video song itself. U2's Stuck in a Moment. Almost 80% of the lyrics describe how my post on my neGATEd dreams synchronises with me being stuck in a moment i cant get out of. Check out U2 LYRICS - Stuck In A Moment

For lazy folks like me, who wont care to follow the hyperlink. Here goes:

I'm not afraid
Of anything in this world ; oh, yeah!
There's nothing you can throw at me
That I haven't already heard ; absolutely!

I'm just trying to find
A decent melody
A song that I can sing
In my own company ; found this song !


I never thought you were a fool
But darling look at you
You gotta stand up straight
Carry your own weight
These tears are going nowhere baby

You've got to get yourself together
You've got stuck in a moment
And now you can't get out of it


And you are such a fool
To worry like you do ; everbody tells me so
I know it's tough
And you can never get enough
Of what you don't really need now
My, oh my

It's just a moment
This time will pass

Hae you ever faced this situation - When a damn mistake you made in writing a gate ( a logic gate, of course ) screws up all of your dreams and ambitions ?

Well, I am damn facing it now. Excuse me for the phenomenal increase in the number of 'damn's i use in this post. It's just that I am frustrated at myself. Frustrated at my inability to follow my dreams, frustrated at my inability to slog towards my ambitions, frustrated at seeing people making better grades than me, when I can bet a million bucks anytime on me outwitting them in any conceptual part of the course.

I am feeling really sick. Embedded Systems wsa where I envisioned working on a few years from now. Now, I feel I am technically incompetent to even spell 'Embedded Systems'. When I cant make an A grade out of 300 people doing a damned course 'Microprocessor Programming & Interfacing', how can I even think of being technically excellent in my area of expertise. All this when this was the only course I enjoyed during the whole semester. I flunked all others coz I hated them. I loved this damn course and still I couldn't make a grade. Hah! Embedded Systems ! Forget it !

I cant help but think that this is just a passing phase. It was destined to happen. And Microprocessors aren't the alpha and omega of Embedded Systems. I still stand a damn chance. At the end of it all I am frustrated at the inequity of fate. When an AND gate in place of a NOR made the difference. I feel this is a inflection point (You know, something like the one in 'The Butterfly Effect'). My life has changed. People might scoff at the triviality of my post, and the stupid statement that I made above that a B grade can change my life. But step off dudes! It has !

Listening to : 'Judgement' - Anathema
(Whenever you see a feeling of frustration in my posts, place a dollar on me listening to this song...one day you will be Warren Buffet)

And amidst the blistering heat, it rained out here in Pilani. The best part was the breeze that followed. The coolest I have felt this semester. It felt so relaxing to sit on the ledge of the corridor half-naked and looking at the black and white clouds fight it out for control over the sky. I just sat there for about half an hour looking at the sky as Coldplay were performing on my computer. As if it didn't satisfy my soul, I grabbed a pack of NJoi strawberry drink and sat at the platform of the Patel statue right outside my hostel.

The cool breeze and the aroma of rain. Far far better than the RAM chips I have to interface.

Listening to: U2 - Stuck in a moment.
(Watch the video if you lay your hands on it...simply awesome)

A titbit:

• 
  I'm not afraid
  Of anything in this world
  There's nothing you can throw at me
  That I haven't already heard
  
  I'm just trying to find
  A decent melody
  A song that I can sing
  In my own company
  
  You've got to get yourself together
  You've got stuck in a moment
  And now you can't get out of it

I hate to say this again, but here I am on a blogging spree chucking all stupid pastimes like cramming, ghoting, mugging....

I read Aravind's blog on his ultimate aspiration. The only thing that struck me was the story of this kid.

The summer of '86 had just subsided and early monsoon showers had struck the garden city of Bangalore. Bangalore, in all its pristine glory during monsoon is something that is not to be missed. As, is pretty evident, it was early June. A lady had just gone into labor in a small hospital which lay below ground level (just that it was in a low-lying area! ). A cute, chubby, extremely fair young boy had just entered the world. As if he wasn't ignorant of all the filth in the world, the boy cried just to receive a smack on his back from the doctor. Ouch! Anyways, the small baby boy was the cynosure of everybody’s eyes because of two reasons: one, his extremely chubby cheeks and two, his unusually blonde hair.

As time passed by, his father got transferred to this small village called Belur where our hero started going to kindergarten. Not a single day went by wherein he didnt cry his lungs out to go to school. His mom became a worried lot, that her kid would become yet another duffer in school. Interestingly, in school our hero was different. Though he was a very very silent kid, he was the topper always, and the kid with the best hand-writing around!

Later on, the family moved to Mysore (incidentally, this is the place where I hail from). Our hero continued going to classes and continued to top classes, only this time around, he didn’t cry. His parents were a happy lot as their son was doing great at school. His pants grew shorter by the day. At every family gathering, he was caught by relatives and praised for his academic exploits. He never liked it, though. Attention was something that he liked, but not in this way. He was an introvert. He didn’t like gatherings. He used to fight with his parents to stay back home when they were going out to attend some family gathering. He hated traveling. He hated going out to trips in holidays. He liked sitting on the couch flipping through n TV channels. Or sit in front of his computer and race his time out.

Yet, he was academically the best in his school. In High School, though he lost the topper position, he was always there in the top three. He began to realize his ambitions. He dreamt of being an aeronautical engineer. He knew, he was destined to be one. Though the computer was his first love, he didn’t dream of being a s/w engineer for a long time, though it did make its rounds in his ever vacillating mind. He loved R&D (as he termed it). He wanted to become a scientist. By the time, he completed his high school he made up his mind to become a computer scientist working on aeronautics (I still don’t understand what he meant by that).


A brief character sketch of this kid till now:
Introvert, geek, nerd, hates talking to girls, hates parties, hates traveling, loves TV, loves computers, plays poor cricket, loves his family and friends, thinks, thinks , dreams, dreams.


Our here then enters college. Not much of a visible change in him. But then slowly he seems himself losing out in his academic strength. His friends circle becomes much interesting though (yet no girls!). He does freak out now and then, but no way close to what usual college kids do. His dreams of making it to the engg. college of his choice crashes. He makes it to this engg. college which he never ever dreamt of getting into. It wasn’t the best, but was there among the best. And it was far far far from his place. Though his parents weren’t fully consenting, he forcefully goes to that engg. college.

No considerable change in him yet: Still that introvert, the same old nerdish tendencies, dreaming of working in a research organization one day doing cutting-edge research. And all these days, he kept on denying he was an introvert and flamed at people who termed him so.

The sands of time poured out and he found himself in alien territory, some 1500 miles away from his home in a university pursuing a degree in a field which he was not interested in either. Computers being his main passion, he wanted to pursue studies in that field, and to do that he had to top the university. A notable chunk of the cream from all over India had landed up in his University and he stood back and thought whether he had made the right decision in choosing his university. He did not give a damn later on. He knew he could do it. He was a confident individual. The first days on campus, he found all his friends freaking out, getting their hands dirty with scores of extra-curricular activities. He felt left out. He felt naked. Most people around him were not the kind of people whom he dreamt of hanging out with. He did nothing but sit late hours in the Institute building cramming some stupid text-books. He solved every damn problem in the text-book. He topped every other test in his first semester. And then the small break after the first semester. He came back home.

Back home, our hero, suddenly felt lost for the first time in his life. Living in a hostel for the first time in his life, he had changed. He felt a chasm between his parents. All that he had done is cram and cram and cram. He hadn't spoken to anybody as he used to with his parents. Now, he felt his tongue was tied. He cried, not in front of his parents, but within himself. He was not heading the way he wished to. The consolation was that his parents were happy with him topping the University. Little did he know, that his parents too cried looking at their son who had changed. "From an introvert to a bigger introvert."

It was chilly winter, and he was back in College. This is when he began to change his life. He observed people whom he dreamt of emulating. He noted certain things. He realized that the first thing he needed was a good bunch of friends. Providentially he did find a great new bunch in his hostel. He began to hang around everyday with them. He began to listen to music, which he had never enjoyed till then. He began to play games all day. He began to savor life. This time, though he did not cram as much as he used to earlier, but he still made decent scores to keep him at the top. It was as if all the Forces of Heaven had colluded to make this happen. He along with his friends started a e-newsletter for his batch mates. It was something that had never ever happened in the history of the University among freshers. As a fresher, one was bound by various boundaries, but this kid began to break them. This kid (or whiz kid, as he was called back home for trying to learn C in class 6 ) began to love talking to people. He was no more the characteristic introvert. The nerd in him was dying. He felt he had made the best decision in his life by coming to that University and having such a great bunch of friends was his greatest gift.

Inspite of all this, the dream to work as a scientist on cutting-edge research still lingered. It was a simple setting - the inauguration of the campus-wide network in his college and there was a Panel Discussion on 'Technology-driven enterprise' . A group of 5 distinguished alumni from the same college. This kid who always believed that Management was for those who didn’t understand that the sum of the squares of the cosine and sine of an angle is unity. He believed that entrepreneurship was for those kids whose dads had coffers filled with money. He perceived technical research as the elitist of jobs.
2 and half hours later: He is awestruck. He felt a 100X change in him. He had seen the nerdish himself in those alumni, but then he saw the bigger picture. He saw entrepreneurship and management as fields wherein you need to put in more intellect than trying to solve Euler's graphs.

He realized: Throughout his second semester, he had been an entrepreneur himself. Trying to bring change around him. It struck him lightning. That was what he would become. An entrepreneur- because that was the only way he could change the world.

Back in home after an year at university. His parents were shell-shocked at the change they saw in their son. He had become so much friendlier, so talkative, so receptive, so philosophical, and so mature. They cried in joy. And, yes, he had topped the University and he was free to pursue studies in the field of his choice. He chose his dad's choice - Electronics. He was dying to do something big. He helped out with the making of the alumni association of his previous college. He instituted a fest in that college. His head called for innovation at every step.

He was back as a sophomore in his University. He did not give a damn to academics. He involved himself in countless extra-curricular activities wherein he claimed to have passion in. He was a master in wherever he put his best efforts in. He loved people around him. He felt that people make life. He loved to sit and talk to people for long hours. For the first time, he started talking openly to friends of the fairer sex. So much, that he was tripped with a girl as well! He understood the meaning of true love, true friendship. He pursued his passions. This time around, every course he undertook had the better of him. He slipped down his grades like crazy. He felt as if he was being sucked into a black-hole. He knew his destiny was to one day be at the helm of a company started by himself. But, every time it pricked him that he was slipping down in his technical strengths. He no longer could be working in dream R&D departments. He choked.

Another semester and it was deja vu. The same slipping of grades. No matter how much his parents tried to drill in the importance of grades to him, it didn't help. Though this time he put a much more concerted effort, he realized that he had lost his youth. He was no more the guy who could screw back every course. He began to question himself. Whether he was right in letting his grades slip? Was this the way he dreamt of taking? For all he dreamt of was to get a higher degree in his area of interest and get into a tech-based enterprise. How could he tell his parents that he had failed to live up to their expectations. He was no longer known on campus as the guy who cracked every test. Some of his friends had attained demigod status by continuing their cracking spree which he had vanquished after his first year.

Here comes to an end the long long long story. From a silent introvert to a bigger introvert to a guy who loves to talk to people about everything under the sun. A guy whose ambitions vacillated from research to entrepreneurship.

As of now, I know that this kid is still in that state - thinking whether he made the right choice. But deep down inside, I know he is going to make it big some day. For he always loves to take the path less traveled by. And he keeps telling me that 'Everything is predestined, and I know I am meant for something BIG'.

Just chanced upon this quiz. !!

Your Seduction Style: Ideal Lover

You seduce people by tapping into their dreams and desires. And because of this sensitivity, you can be the ideal lover for anyone you seek. You are a shapeshifter - bringing romance, adventure, spirituality to relationships. It all depends on who your with, and what their vision of a perfect relationship is.