SNIST experience Part 3

I still remember the time:- 12:50 am on 2^nd July, 2009 and a knock on the door which in retrospect felt like a buzz in my sleep. A second, louder knock and I was up (Son of forest sleep with one eye open- Old Jungle Saying J) and awake. But getting Sandeep aware enough to open the door took some time and as I sat on the bed in marched 3 POLICE OFFICIALS. One of them was a rank 3 Inspector and he asked us if we knew Hindi/Telugu. Sandeep looked like he was in a coma as he reclined against the far wall and knowing his sleeping habits, he probably was! I then had the once-in-a-lifetime experience of having a most unexpected interrogation by the police as they asked as many as 9 questions including a hilarious Koi Ladki ya Bomb kamre mein hai kya? (Any girl/Bomb in the room?) Clearly they took no chances and I found a new respect for these men in Khakhi. After they seemed satisfied of our innocence they left but not before we snuck a peek out the door long enough to notice simultaneous raids had taken place in all the rooms. It was impossible getting back to sleep – well for me atleast – and when the sun shone out at 5 am I was there to give it company.

Room service later (Lazy bums FTW!) the same procedure of getting to Uppal for the bus ensued but we found instead of Dr Rao, his fellow department faculty who took advantage of us and for the next 1 hour talked on his views about not allowing Abstracts to be the basis for selection of scientific papers to the extent that he had filed a High Court case on the matter! Extreme measures but the talk was interesting.

Now after last afternoon showed us the level of presentations to be expected, we had agreed to leave at 2 pm citing my journey back home as an excuse. The morning saw more guest lectures including one by an alumni of Dept of Chemical Engineering, NITK and then we were about to take out leave from SNIST as Dr Rao came to bid us farewell and presented to us our certificates:

The poor man had taken trouble to get those ready in time for us and if that was not enough, he than arranged for an exclusive SNIST mini-van (Which not even the Profs get to travel in) to drop us to the nearest bus-stop but not before we took the customary pictures with the college as the background:-

Now we were at the bus-stop but sight of a 7-seater brought memories as we chose to go through the whole ordeal again only to see if our old record of 13 people could be bettered. And so it was: with a maximum of 16 people on board at a point, it was all we could talk about for the next 20 mins as we got down in front of our hotel and went straight to a nearby restaurant to have our fill of Hyderabadi Biriyani – We were not letting Hyd get the better of us here! With prior experience in mind, a smacking lunch ensued we weren’t leaving the city disappointed and the afternoon was made all the better by the timely arrival of another friend, Rahul Nesergi, who gave us company and news of many a NITK acquaintance:-

Finally it was time to leave Hyd – One last time before I leave for the USA, and to say I had a great time would be an understatement…

SNIST experience Part 2

Room service was made specifically for lazy bums like us! A quick meal aside (remnants of the biriyani still haunted us), we soon learned the auto drivers of Hyderabad are a much more honest folk than those in Mangalore/Bangalore. We had to take a college bus from SNIST at a place called Uppal which was about 7.5 Kms away from the lodge and it was there that we met Dr. Ramagopal Rao who was responsible for inviting us to participate at the conference and, as a friend of Mr Prasanna, promised to help us in every way possible despite being the coordinator of the entire conference.

From first glance, he seemed a good chap and by the end of the day we were jealous of the SNIST students to have such a good person among them as a professor even! The college itself is in Yamnampet, Ghatkesar- about 28 Kms from the main city and has great facilities. The entire Dept of Biotechnology is air conditioned and the building which houses this dept also houses the School of Management Studies and a certain room titled “English Lab” which has inside a horde of PC’s, LCD Monitors and a humongous 48” CRT TV.

The place itself was undergoing construction work for more facilities and it was interesting to see scaffolds a metre away from the classrooms. The simultaneous inaugurations of 3 workshops being held there began after registration and here we heard first hand from the main protagonists of this event: The Principal of SNIST, The HOD of Biotech dept and the Dean of research who turned out to be a most magnificent speaker:-

After all this we had a chance to finally see our conference paper in hard copy and it was a great delight to say the very least:-

In case you are wondering, VSS stands for Varun-Sachin-Sandeep and if the bacterium was only 4% off the standard strain we would have got the opportunity to name it after ourselves ourselves L

Anyway off we departed to the Electronics Dept Seminar hall which was the venue for our conference and a few guest lectures preceded a lunch after which our seminar was the very first presentation in the conference which went very well despite the computer not having the necessary codecs to play a movie file during the ppt itself! Once our official participation was over we settled down to watch the remaining presentations and soon found our stride as proper NITKians as we proceeded to find fault and make snide remarks of all the mistakes prevalent in the other works - among of course! The proceedings for the day ended at 4:45 pm and we took the same bus back to Uppal. However no bus was in sight and we decided to adventure a 7-seater…

The working mechanism of a 7-seater journey is you sit in a place meant for mice while the driver and his accomplice try to wriggle in more people heading the same way. Although there are supposed to be no more than 7 passengers, this particular trip saw a maximum of 13 people with the accomplice hanging on by fingertips as we sped across roads needing more attention than a village pathway. To say we were shaken up would be an understatement.

On the way back, after a total of ~1.5 hours of calls between us, Kiran, Rahul Nesergi and Swapna Bandi we finalised on meeting the Bandi sisters that evening at Prasad I Max and it was great meeting them after 3 months. The mall had its attractions and a trip through a so-called Hall of Mirrors turned out to more scary than the girls wanted:-

Me with Optimus Prime :P

All four of us in the Hall of Mirrors

The look down the mall from 2nd floor

Interesting Name for a Pastry

We had to leave early after dinner at Mcdonald’s since my uncle and aunt from Secunderabad were coming over to our room to meet us while getting “goodies” to take back. After they left at about 10:15 pm and a quick game of DOTA later, we retired for what we hoped would be a peaceful night’s sleep: We were so wrong…

Much ado about nothing!

Lots of hype was created for the "Total Solar Eclipse" which was also the longest in some time. I knew better than the well-intentional albeit stupid promotional scheme run at the local observatory to have people watch the eclipse for free: This is the middle of the monsoon season and we are in a place that gets 4+ metres of rainfall each season! So instead of being able to see something like this:-

All that was visible here was a lot closer to this:-

Anyway watching the live feed from 3 different internet sources made up until the news from Gulbarga, Karnataka arrived where kids with ailments were buried sometimes upto their necks and then exposed to the eclipse for "treatment"! Its too harsh a sight to post any pics here but you can imagine the situation. This was almost as bad as the recent honour killing in Haryana and the politicians advocating it as "personal views" to save their legislative seats in the upcoming elections there..

Such things I shall not miss when I am in the USA, but what Continental Airlines (My flight carrier) did to Dr APJ Abdul Kalam was astounding! The airline staff argue that Dr Kalam never once informed them about his VVIP status and permitted himself to be frisked - Which is very typical of him might I add - but all the show started when his escorts saw this and created an uproar. I dont blame the airlines for frisking anyone who didnt inform them of his/her privilege and its just one of the recent controversies in parliament; the other being the Indian version of the show "Moment of Truth".

To close off, my classmate Manoj has created his blog which is really a fledgeling right now here

Heights of Recession!

Sreesha Y Rao, the college topper of NITK surathkal (Ranked 3rd in placements in India) who has an SGPA of 10.0 on a scale of 10 and a CGPA of 9.8+ is unemployed! Stupid Alstom has no idea what they are missing...

SNIST experience Part 1

When my major project guide, Mr Prasanna, suggested I present my project results at a National Biotech Conference at Sri Nidhi Institute of Science & Technology, Hyderabad, little did I know this trip was going to be a bang in more ways than one! For starters, it would be the first time I would be on “business” for myself and I also got an excuse to meet some of the guys in Hyderabad. Sadly Sachin didn’t get permission from BPCL to join me but Sandeep certainly was enthusiastic about the entire thing…

So here I was on the evening of 29-0-2009 in the KSRTC Airavat bus bound for Hyderabad and I found myself watching a Telugu movie with no idea whatsoever about the dialogues but could grasp enough to see it was a pretty good movie.

The morning of 30-06-2009 at 8:22 AM and I was in the Mahatma Gandhi Bus Station (M.G.B.S) terminal which, as I certainly found out to my chagrin, is the biggest bus station in all of Asia. Sandeep was no different than the last time I saw him (Just 2 months ago) and we checked into the nearby Nandhini Lodge.

If you have been to Hyderabad before then you realise why as a non-vegetarian we crave for their Kebabs and Biriyani and this was on our minds for the past week. Sadly the two most popular biriyani joints (Bawaarchi and Paradise) were too far away from were we resided so we took a chance and went to the Char-Minar area hoping to get a taste of authentic muslim chicken biriyani. It took about 30 mins to get away from the maze of jewellery shops all around but finally we decided to take a risk on a Hotel Shama (which we later learnt was famous for its Irani Chai) and went in…

The décor was pathetic but the food- Only here did we realise that the quantity contemplates the quality of the biriyani as we each ordered 1 plate each to realise its actually a mountain full. After 45 mins and various rest stops with nothing but our egos making us continue, two muslims gave us company in front of us and took great delight in announcing that the local women could have a plate each while the men had a few rotis before having a plate each. With our egos totally destroyed, one of them took the liberty of “advising” us in Kannada no less to just stop and leave it which we gladly did.

We planned to walk back the entire way (5+ Kms) and decided to explore what looked like an old palace which turned out to be the Osmania General Hospital!

After 30 mins of sitting and groaning, we came back to the room and slept our asses off for a few hours before rehearsing for the presentation the following day and, after a few Russell Peter joke segments, retired for the night: The biriyani was omnipresent still now L