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Personal Reflections

raraahahahromaromamagagaoohlala

This year's April Fools' joke (NOT brought to you by)...

Visitors who came to my blog yesterday would’ve, quite unexpectedly, found themselves being redirected to RA RA AH AH AH ROMA ROMA MA GAGA OOH LA LA. Did elicit a few “Yo maan yor blog bin hacked lol” emails / messages being sent to me, but I assure everyone that no personal details would’ve been stolen as it was merely a spur-of-the-moment idea of a joke. It sounded a lot more hilarious when I staggered home at 6am.

The first of April. Ah, that day. The day this blog shifted to WordPress. The MAD TV releases prank-ing videos for. The day technology companies around the world vie to make the best jokes. Sources assure me though that Photoshop CS5’s content-aware fill feature is not an April Fools’ joke intended to ‘content-aware fill’ your homework for you. (If it could do that, I’d buy it the day it was released.)

It’s also the day when many of you who’ve applied for US colleges and universities would get your application decisions. Much joy and exasperation will follow, and I wish all of you best of luck. Rejection letters seem doubly bitter when served on this day. Whichever way your decisions swing remember this – the best few years of your life are soon to follow. 🙂

Easter bunnies are privy to a conspiracy...

So, Easter break has started at my university. When I expand on this definition and tell you that ‘Easter’ break is a whole goddamn month long, you’ll wonder whether the definition of the holiday has been redefined here. Last heard nobody’s complaining though. This break is also meant for students to revise for the exams…which come six weeks or so later. We also have an electronics design project to work on, where we have to build a specified device from scratch. Prior to the Easter break, I also got a pleasant surprise in that I was one of the students who got the departmental international student scholarship. UK universities, being government-run and funded institutes (UK residents essentially don’t pay upfront; they pay it back after they graduate), don’t offer much support to international students but as a gesture it’s nice.

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I quite fancy travelling a bit during this break but will see how everything works out. For one, I’m working at SCEPTrE on a week-long national education conference. I wonder how much time I’ll have left for anything beyond within-borders travelling, given that I must revise my academic stuff and work on my project too. I’ve a whole pile of books ordered from Amazon that I need to devote my attention too too, and I’ve slowly started attacking that pile over the past few days. Expect some book reviews. Those heading off to US institutes (well, even UK too) should definitely buy The CollegeHumor Guide To College – you will find it full of utterly hilarious and ultimately useless take on college/university life. 😉

I’m addicted to strudel too now. And I’m listening to these songs on repeat currently: Are You Gonna Be My Girl by Jet; Supermassive Black Hole (cover) by Tiffany Page; Team Drama by The Automatic. Also, I never noticed until now that that Moldy Peaches song mentions the Konami Code.

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Personal Reflections

“What’s Wikipedia?”

Do you ever get that feeling when you’re walking to someplace or working on something, when you’re hit by a sudden feeling of nausea? It happened to me yesterday when I was at the Tesco supermarket. I suddenly felt listless and quite nauseated. Maybe it was due to the fact that I was wheeling my shopping cart round and round in circles. I have no idea why I was doing that. Maybe it was because I hadn’t had any breakfast. Anyway, I felt that I was this close to puking. I quickly checked out with whatever I had picked up so far.

As soon as I stepped out, a massive blast of fresh air hit me and I felt so much better instantly. That’s when I ‘saw’ for the first time how green this town is. Whether it’s on campus or other parts in town, you’ll find large lush green fields, or at the very least many trees dotting every road. I did notice this fact when I came here, but for the first time the greenery all around me struck me as I stood there drinking it all in.

Delhi is a concrete jungle. Even the few trees you have left will be covered with soot from the thousands of vehicles driving past them. I was quite fortunate in that the place where my home is does have more than average green cover.

I miss being in a hectic city where people are always zipping from one place to another, cocooned in the comfort of your vehicle, the Metro, or even the humble autorickshaw. It’s a big change coming to place where practically everything is, at max, half an hour walk away. For one, it’s given me a perspective of how incredibly huge New Delhi is – and given its size, how it does a reasonably good job of handling transportation and civic infrastructure.

I find it difficult to put into words what I was about to say now, but the gist is that that moment outside showed me how wonderful the enviroment of this place is. Given the number of things I’m involved in, I’m often rushing from one meeting to another; rushing from one deadline to another; rushing from location to another as I try to fit in multiple layers of work sandwiched in day.

I won’t lie – I am stressed by this hectic schedule, and I love this stress. I’ve realized this fact about myself that I have often suspected – I enjoy working under pressure. I hate not having to work on something with the clock ticking down.

But I also realized that within this schedule I can and should take some time to slow down. Go for a long walk. Watch squirrels fighting with each other near the lake. Drink in the freshness.

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Promotional flyers for my Twitter demo

I work part-time at SCEPTrE (not to be confused with the James Bond Evil Inc ‘SPECTRE’), which – to cut a long story short – gets fuckloads of money from the university and external government funding agencies, and puts it to use by paying their employees (even part-time ones) quite well and conducting events to improve ‘personal development’ of Surrey students.

We conducted an event last Thursday, where businesses from various industry verticals came along to learn about social media technologies. We had people from PR companies to give them a lecture first, and then they were given a demo of various social media sites by us. My task was to demo Twitter. At the same time, it was an opportunity for Surrey students to network with businesses.

I was prepared for the fact that a majority of the attendees would not know what Twitter is, even if they had heard of it in mainstream media. I walked in to the event confident I’d be able to field most questions they asked.

What I wasn’t prepared for is the following. Someone saw a flyer mentioning ‘wikis’. So she came up to me to ask:

What are ‘wikis’?

A fair question, you would say. Might not have heard of wikis in general, but would surely have heard of Wikipedia? So I mentioned how it’s “just like Wikipedia”. Pat came the response:

What’s Wikipedia?

I leave that as a parting question. How would you explain Wikipedia to someone who’d never heard of it? I fielded that one, following it up with a prolonged session of headdesking when she was gone.

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