Advice: Everybody's Free to Wear Sunscreen!

You can check the original article here

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-970601sunscreen,0,4664776.column

Stuff of your dreams!

A very interesting article on 5 materials having 'unbelievable' properties.

Grad student life v/s normal life

Graduate student life v/s normal life summarized in 4000 words.

Definition of furniture:

Normal life

Grad life

Definition of Bed:



Normal life

















Grad Life

After all each picture is worth a thousand words! :)

Sleep!

This vacation I have slept a lot and just before sleeping I thought about the 'types' of sleep I love:

1. Sleeping after a heavy meal : Didn't get to practice this for a whole semester but doing this for the most part of my trip in Atlanta.Home cooked food cooked and served by someone else for a change :) and the sleep it induces is so heavenly that I get a hangover after I wake up.

2.Sleeping after a heavy workout:I remember when I went for trekking around Pune during my summer internship.We used to go trekking during the day and I used to play soccer after we returned from our trek and we used to sleep 12 hours straight for a few days.We were lucky that our guide didn't notice us missing from our work.

3.Sleeping in class after lunch: Most of us (I think) feel the boring lectures are equivalent to lullabies.I used to sleep so much in classes that some of my friends used to call me 'crash god'.During my school days one of my chemistry teachers used to chide me by saying 'supply that guy with pillows', 'wake the guy up who is try to brush his teeth'(due to my posture with my mouth open), etc.

I came across a very interesting link which categorizes different ways of sleeping in class.Here is the link to it.It is on a website maintained by Purdue students which says it is a survival guide in computers, academics and campus life. A very interesting read indeed, do check it out.

Life in Antartica

This is one of my favourite photo journals from BBC's In pictures section.

They have an annual marathon in Antarctica.It must be surely fun!

Do check out the photos of the year as well in the In pictures section.

Life in Antartica doesn't look so bad in the pictures.

Glad to be in a trash can!

The trash can at O'Hare International airport, Chicago proclaims "We're glad you are here".











didn't get it?

"We're glad you are here(trash can)"

What I do during exam time

I sleep for around 30 mins 5-6 times a day....just doze off when I have some heavy reading which I do right before the exams...

perfect proposal!

Enjoy!

Uncomfortable silences

I watched 3 movies in the past week .Out of the three movies, Black Hawk down, Seven years in Tibet and Pulp Fiction, the movie which I loved the most was pulp fiction.Now it is one of my favourite movies.I loved a dialogue in particular,
which goes like :


Mia: Don't you hate that?
Vincent: What?
Mia: Uncomfortable silences. Why do we feel it's necessary to yak about bullshit in order to be comfortable?
Vincent: I don't know. That's a good question.
Mia: That's when you know you've found somebody special. When you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably enjoy the silence.




I feel that a mark of a close friend is when he gets to know what you are trying to convey in 'comfortable silence' which is conveyed by this quote :

Everyone hears what you say. Friends listen to what you say. Best friends listen to what you don't say.

Pulp Fiction is a must watch movie and I don't why I didn't watch it for such a long time.

Black hawk down is a really long movie with not much of a story.Loved the quote at the start of the movie :

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.

Plato

Seven years in Tibet has a really nice story with good performances by Brad Pitt and the kid acting as Dalai Lama.The main theme of the movie is how a person from a western civilization, where(according to the movie) being at the top is the most important thing, confronts Budhism, where controlling one's ego is the most important thing, and undergoes a change in the outlook towards his life.

This is the life of Raghuram

Motivation : rhyme of Solomon Grundy

Bored after weekdays
played his heart out on friday
slept through saturday
woke up on sunday
realized had an exam on monday
realization didn't sink in the whole day
caffeine kept him awake for two days
but there is one more exam on wednesday
thus, he surrenders to caffeine everyday
This is the life of Raghuram

:)

The scariest thing

I watched the movie unbreakable today and directed by Manoj Night Shyamalan.

I realised it was a great movie in the end only as it always happens with MN's movie.I got to listen to this dialogue from the movie :

Elijah Price: You know what the scariest thing is? To not know your place in this world.

I don't know yet my place in the world. I am scared!

B Schools

An article which matches my opinion on B-schools (Thats why i am posting it)

After all,

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Aristotle

Nothing Gandhian about it

Check out this article on latest hit movie Lage raho Munnabhai.

Weekend!

Finally the favourite days of the week has arrived. After slogging out on homeworks for 3 days now I know how it feels like to be free :) .I had to submit three assignments, one on thu and two on fri. The time given was a week.I being an eternal procrastinator looked at the problems and thought they are pretty easy.This is how I finished my assignments :

Wed night

No enthu to start the assignment will wake up early and do it

Thu morn
woke up at 6...finished assignments at 0925...the problem was i had to catch the 0930 bus....missed bfast didnt take bath and was running helter skelter collecting my stuff and ran to the bus stop just in time to catch the bus...

Thu eve

worked for 5 hours continously and finished both assignments almost except one problem in each of them.slept at 230am and woke up at 0830 with class beginning at 0900....missed the bus for sure this time...I just brushed my teeth and ran like hell to the university and also thinking abt the leftover problem....reached just five mins before the class to realise that the class was cancelled...felt happy as well as sad...sad as i had put so much fight to reac the class on time for submission of assignments and happy as i have got a lot more time to solve the problem....I finished the other assignment due on fri just 10 mins before the class started...

From now on I will do everything on time!

Being an eternal procrastinator doesnt stop me from being an eternal optimist ;)

5

Once in IIT I remember when I looked at myself in the mirror, which happens once in a blue moon, that I had a few stitches between my eyebrow and eyes symmetrically positioned. Btw, I was reading about symmetry operations in my physics class and was checking out the symmetry in my face.

here goes the five :

1

I dont remember this incident though.It happened when i was less than 2 yrs old. Until then I had been thinking I had only one set of stitches between my eye and eyebrow. I had held amma's pallu and tripped over and fell on sharp protrusion.

2
This is the one i clearly remember. We were playing cricket nearby our house. I was only 4 yrs old so wasnt allowed bat or bowl. I was expected to only field. I am a sort of guy who wants to be invovled always so started going closer and closer to the batsman.I went so close that the guy swinged his bat with full force and it hit my face right above my eyes.Blood started oozing from the wound. I still remember the way the water turned red when tried to clean the wound before it was gonna be stitched. I also remember my brother getting a verbal thrashing for not looking after me while the play was going on.

3
I used to think I was a big hero in my childhood days courtesy chiru movies. I tried to jump from the top of slide and landed directly on my face, right near the mouth part which rendered me to eat only liquid food for the next few weeks.

4
This happened in IIT when I was hit by a cricket ball right next to my nose and it swelled like hell.Again had to follow a liquid diet for a few weeks as it hurt my gums pretty badly.

5
this again due to cricket ball bowled at 135 kph right in the middle of Saaranf our cult fest. It was thankfully just a cut and no swelling occured as it missed my teeth once again by just a whisker.I was wearing a bandage through out the Saarang though.

Culture shock!

I was given the course description of one of courses where it was mentioned :

1. Exams. There will be three examinations. They will be closed book, no cheat sheet, no formula list. Calculators are allowed. They will be cumulative but will emphasize most recent material. The schedule is shown below:

Exam 1 (50 minutes): 10/09/06

Exam 2 (50 minutes): 11/13/06

Exam 3 (100 minutes): 12/16/06 (10:30-12:30, SAT)

Then I thought "what an exam on 10 september!" it is already 7th



...then realised it was 10 october not 10 september.....here it was my first "culture shock"

A great Photo journal

Check out the photo journal on a bolivian jain on BBC....It is like a city inside a closed compound and doesnt have any Policemen...

here's the link....

Guess who is this person....

Me in my complete winter wear!

Mysore Sandal Soap...

One of my favourite columnists in The Hindu, V. Gangadhar, has writtem about the soap I still use in his column slice of life

do check it out.

Satisfaction!

After spending 2 days at another country I was very frustrated that I wasnt able to even have a single meal to my satisfaction.

my first day started off with a Pizza slice at 1130 then a veg burger at 1800 n then ready to eat chole at 1130 in the night with bread.I could have eaten everything at one go.

Second day I had an oat meal in the morning and an oat meal in the afty.Actually, I had gone to McDonalds in the afty for lunch where me n my friend took 5 mins to explain to the guy at the counter that we wanted a veg burger.He told us there were no veg burgers @ McDs.I got so frustrated I decided to cook something myself.My roomie took me for shopping at 5 and we returned at 2030 with a LOT of groceries.

To add salt to the wound I ended up with common cold, which I hate like hell.

Finally made aloo curry and ate it with curd rice.

Then realised what satisfaction really is! :)