Sudipta's Life

Our ragging period was just over. In the newfound freedom, most of us used to make sudden trips to the hostels of our seniors, just to get a feel of those places without the heart throbbing madly with fear. Among the many different things I did during the first 6-7 months before this when I wasn't copying seniors' journals, carrying roses to senior girls or "serving time" at the doomed hostels, I also picked up a book on Palmistry from one of my friends and read through it. Initial scepticism soon gave way to high statistical correlation, and I found that if you can declare in a first year hostel that you read palms, then there is no dearth of experimental subjects to trace the fine lines on. Some initial crazy predictions later, I found that I could at least tell some bits accurately and hold conversation with confidence with a person for about 5 minutes. I sort of became a mini celebrity. Word soon spread to seniors' hostels as well, in fact some were rather sad...

Hope. It is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength and your greatest weakness. --- The Architect in "The Matrix Reloaded"

[Yes, I know that the last post made little sense to any of you. Yes, the English and the presentation may have been completely outlandish and incomprehensible. But you know what, me trying to explain what it was all about is like an artist who has to explain that the portrait he has drawn is really supposed to resemble someone we all know. So I will just go ahead and enjoy writing the second (and concluding) part, while you contemplate all possible combinations of the phrases "rat's ass" and "I care".... just kidding! ;) But yes, I honestly expected everyone would get it! :(] ... continued The reader must excuse me for not revealing the full nature of the circumstances surrounding our presence at the university at that time. Events such as this cannot be referred to without referring to the private lives and affairs of some people, and the nature of that investigation can jeopardise the peace of many lives peacefully settled by grace of the intellect of my comp...

It was raining all across the university campus, and Loneliness* and I had been sleeping together for some nights under a thin bedsheet. It was early in the morning, and fogs had been lazing across the university boulevards since the night before. My loneliness had been letting out small wisps of sighs, every now and then. The room filled with the smoke of her drowsiness, and my thirst was growing every minute as the warmth of our bodies spread below the thin sheet, trying desperately to fight the cold breeze from the fan whirring softly across the ceiling. I reached for a glass of water on the bedside table. "It will be too cold to drink". The sudden remark brought me out of my reverie. "My dear loneliness! How did you know?" I was forced to ask. "Sudipta, my dear...", she began, "I have told you on numerous occasions how one may deduce the exact thought process in the mind of a person by just following his actions." "Well, I must admit tha...

I was off to St Louis this weekend. It is magical, how the prices of tickets nearly double during the vacations. So, while I enjoyed Christmas and New Year's celebrations right here, I went over to St Louis for the first weekend in the new year. My old manager from Accenture called me over: he is here with his family now and my good relations with almost everyone from the past sure seem to come handy at these lonely times :) The biggest attraction of the whole visit, I'd say, was this little angel, who took a great liking to me as I was the only person in the house ready to converse in her language of random syllables instead of meaningful sentences others tried to talk to her :) Anyway, the tourist line for the city reads "You don't know what is cute until you've seen St Louis". I don't know about cute, but the arch did seem to invoke one feeling in me: majestic! Yeah, if that did not give you an idea, maybe this will: Really, it is all of those Six Hundr...

You will not understand this book unless you've lived away from home sometime. You will never catch the little nuances of the story or the vast hollows in the hearts of the characters if you haven't lived alone, faced the world in all its wilderness all by yourself. You must have felt the need to find your roots, reminisce about your near and dear ones, missed them for the simple comfort and warmth of their welcoming smiles to be able to feel the theme of this book, The Namesake. The story traces the life of a child born to Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, who migrated to the USA when Ashoke came there to pursue his doctoral degree and post-doctoral faculty work. Through a quirk of fate, the name Gogol which they had originally thought of as a pet name for their son sticks with him for life. We see the life of this immigrant family through the eyes of their son as he grows up. Somehow the confusion of his name points to a more fundamental identity crisis in his generation. He never u...

30 GB of raw music and entertainment. Mindblowing sound quality. Status statement and style symbol. A reminder that I too can contribute to the world. A gift from a friend. All that, and much more... my new iPod: I don't know how your new years have started off, but I sure have had a rocking start to the year!! My home-grown 'Santa' came alive, and I was gifted this beauty sometime between Christmas and New Year! And yes, I wish I could smile a little wider to show how happy I am to have received this gift. It deserves a little history, perhaps. Lets just say my advice came in handy for my room-mate who was having a few technical difficulties in his office projects. At that time, my only motivation for helping him out with those quirky problems were the challenge itself, a little break at times from the sort of research papers I was grinding through, and of course the fantastic quesadilas he treated me to at the end of the 'consulting sessions', we shall say. Imagin...