April 3, 2009 by Kulbir Saini on BC, Fun, Life, Photography, Travel

Mushroom or Santro Rock

In last four years, I heard a lot about Mushroom Rock (popular by the name Santro Rock among our super seniors) but never got a chance to visit the same. Today we (Me, Sachin, Alok, Pankaj, Kapil B, Atul, Abhinav Paro) decided to visit Mushroom Rock. It is located near Games Village for World Military Games building which is behind OBH. It was almost 6PM. The dim light in the atmosphere added to the beauty of the place. The ambience was awesome.

We had difficulties in climbing up but we finally managed it. The wind was awesome. We spent almost two hours there recollecting the happenings in past four years. Then we sang songs from 60s to present day 😀 It was an awesome feeling.

We at Mushroom Rock

Nobody wanted to return but the hunger forced us to return. Don’t forget to take some eatables in case you plan to go there 🙂

PS : Lots of BC lately. Everything coming to an end 🙁

October 14, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on BC, Fun, Life

Embarrassed

October 08, 2008

We (Me, Pankaj, Deepak, Nitin Bansi) just entered the main gate of IIIT Hyderabad after shopping. A delivery boy was already there with a Pizza ready for delivery. He was looking for help. I asked security guard “Whats the matter?”, just for the sake of moral responsibility.

Delivery boy : Scooter mein petrol khatam ho gaya hai. OBH jana hai. (There is no petrol in my scooter. I want lift up to OBH.)

Right at that moment a two wheeler entered IIIT gate. I didn’t realize who was it.

Me to delivery boy (pointing at the vehicle) : “Inke saath chale jao..” (Go with him).

The person (on vehicle) stopped right there because I pointed at him. And it turned out to be a faculty member. “Mere pairon tale se jaise zameen hi khisk gayee”. OMG. What I have done?? Why in god’s name will I ever stop a faculty member to ask for giving a lift to a pizza delivery boy.

Faculty Member : Whats the matter?
Me : (stammering) hmm… umm …. this guy .. um… this is a delivery boy (as if it was not obvious from his dress). um.. he is looking for help …
(Delivery boy almost took everything for granted and watch trying to approach the vehicle …)
Delivery boy : Scooter mein petrol khatam ho gaya hai …
Faculty Member : What he needs?
Me : hmmmm … he needs a lift …
Faculty Member : For what?
Me : To deliver pizza.
Faculty Member : (I couldn’t really get what he said but approximately) why are you bothering me?

And he left. I took a DEEP breath. This was one of the most embarrassing situations I ever faced at IIIT 😐

October 11, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on BC, Camera, Fun, Life, Temple

A walk to remember

This incident or series of incidents happened in the night of October 9, 2008. Time – 11:30PM. I was sitting in front of my PC thinking of thinking something which is not video caching because Kapil has cursed me enough for thinking about video caching 24×7. Pankaj buzzed ans asked for a BC session at coffee shop. Replied positively without any doubts in mind. After a few minutes me, Pankaj, Sachin and Sambhav left for the coffee shop. On the way Sachin said that he is hungry. I was not hungry but the way he said made me feel hungry. When we were in front of NBH mess gate, it just clicked me that coffee shop is closed due to Dushehra. Everyone of us hopeless as nobody had the backup of any eatables 🙁 We walked down to main building where Ajay joined the company and he was also hungry. Sachin proposed that we’ll go to Indira Nagar or High Tech. looking for something to eat. All of us agreed. As we crossed main gate, Sambhav headed back to hostel as he has to prepare for GRE.

We four walked up to the bust stop and eventually an empty bus arrived. All of us shocked. An empty bus!!! WTF!!! We got into the bus.

We asked for a ticket upto Indira Nagar. The conductor gave the ticket but driver didn’t stop in Indira Nagar. We landed in Gachibowli where we thought that its better to go to Hi Tech. We waited for sometime at the cross road but taxi appeared. We started walking towards Indira Nagar. Somani knew an eating point somewhere on the way from IIIT to Indira Nagar.

This place is on the street to Kendriya Vihar. But the entrance of the street was totally flooded with water obviously with no place left to walk across. But we somehow managed to cross the water body by holding the wall.

And we discovered that the place called KKD (Kadalivachina Kanaka Durga, Nobel prize to me for remembering the name correctly 😛 ). It was almost closed. But ice cream and soft drinks were still available. We had butter scotch (somani took vanilla). Ice cream was awesome. It might have tasted awesome because we were dying of hunger.

We headed back to IIIT. But everybody felt the urge to visit this temple on the way to IIIT. We walked upto the temple and sat there for 10-15 minutes. It was around 12:30AM. We took few shots as well.

After that we headed back to IIIT. Had juice at canteen. And that was it.

October 8, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on BC, Fun, Internet, LAN, Life

Internet != Anonymous

Learning of the Day : If you choose to use Internet that in itself implies that you are sacrificing your anonymity. Over the past few years, I tried to invent ways in which you can try to be anonymous, but every one of them had inherited flaws because after all everything has to flow on a wire which is not something you control.

Advice of the Day : Don’t post something as anonymous which you won’t if you were exposing your identity because it gets embarrassing afterwards. And I have personally felt the heat several times.

October 6, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on BC, Fun, Life

The mobile blah

I came back to OBH after having dinner at Yuktahaar. Entered my room, started Punjabi music at full volume. Suddenly phone started vibrating. Unknown number. I received the call and to my surprise some lady speaks up ..

Lady : Am I talking to Kulbir Saini?
Me : Yes. You are.
** Totally surprised.
Lady : Is it a good time to talk to you?
Me : Yeah. Just go ahead.
** Koi kaam to hai nahin hamein .. ( we are jobless people.)
Lady : I am from <some> company in Delhi. We have contacts with a fortune 500 multinational and they are looking for people in analytics research.
** If this is research, why the heck are you calling me 🙂
Me : Wait … wait… Where did you get my number?
** I was like wtf … I banned Vodafone and now these companies…
Lady : It was a search effort. I was doing it since last week or so.
Me : Are you sure?
Lady : Yeah. I swear it was a search effort. Nobody referred your name or number.
Me : Yeah. Go ahead.
** Oh… I am popular 😛
Lady : Can we proceed further with your academic qualifications?
Me : Sure.
Lady : So, what are your qualifications?
** I opened this. My resume in text format 😛
Me : I am doing my B.Tech.
Lady : Are you sure?
** Lady was like WTF!!! Totally embarrassed.
Me : Yeah. Because its me who is doing it.
Lady : I thought you are doing PHD.
Me : What?? Thats why I asked you “Who gave you my number?”.
** PHD??? Isn’t it a too much of popularity 😛
Lady : Anyway best of luck with your further studies/academics/life.
Me : Thanks a lot. Use Google next time.
Lady : Thanks for the tip.

Anyway it was fun …

September 30, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on BC, Computers, Fun, Hacking, Internet, LAN, Life

Post and Comment of the century

I was trying to sleep and somebody woke me up. I tried controlling myself, but almost shouted at him. Was retrying to sleep since last one hour, but failed miserably as usual. Woke up. Started browsing the regular sites and happened to check comments on my life blog. And saw a back link. Visited and read this awesome post by Sanrag Sood. I never read such stuff in my life. I am sure the guy is crazy/mad/whatever. Its a must read thing. For me its a post of century kinda thing.

Also, I was browsing comments on IIIT Post the other day and read this awesome comment by a guy named “very”. This comment is also a must read kinda stuff for IIITians. For me its a comment of the century.

September 24, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on BC, Fun, Internet, Life

Never ever screw your friend list

I have been using Kopete instant messenger since almost 2.5 years now. Never faced a problem with anything and it support all IM servers like yahoo, gtalk, irc etc. But one fine day (when, I don’t know. Probably a few months ago), I mistakenly put Hemant Verma‘s (a student at IIIT Allahabad) name in Vishnu Fafat‘s (a student at IIIT Hyderabad) contact address in my friend list as shown in the image below.

Since then I was talking to Hemant Verma as if I was talking to Vishnu Fafat. Hemant (or Vishnu 😛 ) used to put links in his status message like “Checkout http://profile.iiita.ac.in ” and related things to IIIT Allahabad. I was totally confused about his status messages.

One day (in the beginning of this semester), I asked this

I was shocked. Rawat sir will not allow proxies and attendance is compulsory at IIIT Hyderabad. I thought Vishnu Fafat has gone crazy and will end up screwing his course 😐

The other day, he asked me this

I said somani knows all this stuff as if I would have said to Vishnu Fafat because he’ll know somani. Hemant got a bit confused but he happened to know Ajay Somani because he also takes part in programming contests.

I remember another incident when he asked me for suggestions about the site http://profile.iiita.ac.in/ . I thought this guy Vishnu has gone mad. Why the heck he would ask for suggestions about a IIIT Allahabad site provided he is a IIIT Hyderabad student? But I didn’t care.

And the final incident happened today as shown

Vishnu said he developed that site from scratch. I was almost mad because of two reasons

Why Vishnu will design a IIIT Allahabad website?
Why IIIT Allahabad will ever give complete access to a IIIT Hyderabad student to their main website?

I was totally mad at this. But I couldn’t say anything to Vishnu (or Hemant). Accidentally I checked his name in the friend list and in the pop up kinda thing, I saw Hemant Verma (refer to the first picture in the post) and I was like WTF!!!!

While writing this post, I thought I’ll search my Gmail Chat History and I found that I was talking to Hemant Verma as Vishnu Fafat since 26th February, 2008. See below.

I am already not able to remember people’s name/face relationships and then incidents like this totally blow my mind 🙁

May 21, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on BC, Fun, Life

Best day spent this summer

This day started exactly 30 minutes after yesterday midnight when rain god showed *some* interest in Hyderabad after a month or so. With rains came a lot of power cuts at midnight ( almost 4-5 in a period of less than two hours). My desktops became totally unusable with those frequent power cuts. Me and Sambhav decided to stand in the corridor and enjoy the fragrance of sand that was spread all over the place by rain 🙂 After standing there for almost 15 minutes, we went downstairs to grab a cup of tea. Thanks a *millions* to the coffee machine at OBH.

We went to the square platform between OBH and OBH new extension block and enjoyed the tea while it was drizzling 😀 It felt like heaven. I enjoyed rain this way after a lifetime, I suppose 🙂 Around 2AM rain stopped and weather became awesome. It was cool feeling after a really hot day. Then started the BC session. We were only two but BC can be done when you are in mood. We talked about *everything* that happened in last three years right from joining IIIT, ragging period and then how people went crazy about the stuff they liked (open source, programming, robotics, cgpa 😛 ). We discussed how people met each other and how we became friends. Ohh yeah. Not to forget, some issues of institute interest were also discussed 😛 How our institute is making progress in every possible field. We also exchanged thoughts and feelings from pre-IIIT life as well. How not getting into IIT proved to be a lucky chance. We also planned how we are going to visit each others’ (everyone in friend circle) home. While discussing all this, I just asked sambhav about time. And OMG!!! It was 4:50AM … we did all this from 3 hours !!!! Time to rush back to work.

We came back and got back to work. Well at 6AM, we woke Mahaveer up for cricket. Now we three, went to play cricket and we found Prashant Singh (PK) on our way. Now we four, went and sit on the stairs in the felicity ground. The air was really fresh and was blowing at a damn fast speed that it could have blown me away if I would have tried to move in its direction 😛 After 20-30 minutes, few M.Tech and MS guys came with cricket stuff and we started playing cricket.

While the match was on, it started raining again. It felt so cool that we were playing cricket in rain while the entire IIIT was in deep sleep -cum- computer labs. It was an awesome experience to get wet in rain 🙂 After cricket match, we had breakfast and returned to our rooms. I took a bath and went to bed. 😛

Probably this was the best day of my summer’08 🙂

PS1 : Do read this post by Himank. IIIT is RISING.

PS2 : @Pati,Shiben,Paresh whats the hurry to get MS yaar. One more year plzzzzz 😛 There are few good people left at the insti 🙁

May 1, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on BC, Fun, Life

Back to Life

Vacations have become much more enjoyable since a few days .. 2-3 days to be precise … atul and mahaveer is back and sambhav will be back in a few days … coffee shop @ IIIT is THE place that I’ll never forget throughout my life. there are a LOT of memories related to THE place 😀 Its one of the spots where we friends socialize 😛 Since last three days we are spending a lot of time out there … two days before yesterday 3 hours ( 9PM – 12AM)… day before yesterday 2 hours ( 10PM – 12AM) and yesterday 4 hours ( 9:30PM – 1:30AM) .. OMG .. it feels so good sitting out there and breathing fresh/cool air …

PS : Sachin is leaving today … a$$hole X-(

March 20, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on BC, Fun, Life

Farewell & Cultural Night 2008

We had Cultural Night and Farewell this Tuesday and Wednesday respectively. Organizers faced huge troubles in making things go smooth. How can you organize something without a stage? Still the organizer showed there talent and came up with ad-hoc arrangements. The events started late by more than an hour on cultural night. Classical dances were boring except the one. Vipul danced really well on ‘Nain Jab Ladi Hain To’ 🙂 After classicals everything was fine. As all people from our group except Alok (he was busy with his DDBMS stuff) and guyz from OBH were present, BC started immediately after the classical dances. People were raised high in air with their chairs whenever someone directly/indirectly related to them came on stage. I was also one of them and I was raised three f***ing times 🙂 We had helluva fun teasing the performers.

Apart from all this, reinventing the lyrics of songs that were being played was REAL fun 🙂 For some reasons I can’t write the lyrics here. I hope you can understand 😛 We all sang them loud in chorus. Commenting on the performers was also fun. But one thing I found bad about cultural night that dances were not sensored 😛

Farewell started with lectures from well known personalities from senior most batches. This guy, Prashant Gopal delivered a great lecture which should be remembered long. I hope somebody or Prashant Gopal will write that down word to word and put at a publically accessible place. That would be an inspiration for the juniors 🙂 Lectures were followed by different awards for people who excelled in different spheres of life or academics if possible 😛

After dinner started the real thing. The informals session 🙂 This was way better this year as compared to the informals session this year. I really don’t remember all the things happened. But this guy Sandeep Saini really rocked the audience with his PJs (phatte). This guy is king of PJs. People were exposed through different activities on stage. Some were given titles, some faced the rapid fire questions etc… All in all it was a great event and I felt lucky being a part of it 😉

PS : End sems are coming soon 🙂 Should start looking if people who are with me in courses started preparing 😉