God Promise !
If there is any time when strong emotions run between god and its student disciples, it should be during exams, and more so on the eve of the results.
Clearly, i have rather been a chicken when it came to exams, and distress calls travelling upwards were shamelessly sent by me at unearthly hours, either to rescue me from a sparse matrix or the 8086 microprocessor. inane as my effort to please god on the 11th hour, i had partly considered then that he was personally responsible for my welfare, and hence preparing for the exams all alone was not what i was prepared to do. God, i insisted, should equally work hard in areas of luck and memory management- exams where he had to come clean every semester.
Exams usually brought out the worst kind of paranoia in me. Starting off with taking a month long hiatus from getting a haircut, before and after the exams, to which side of the bed i got up on the day of the exams, to the grumpy face i would need to wear lest i displease the god of luck. Love for god usually peaked during exams to extraordinary levels, with early morning visits and circling around the temple while my mind shuttled between recalling "system call to create a file in linux" to the number of times i had circled the temple. An inkling of doubt on whether i had completed circling the idols a magic 9 times, would push me towards making another - not the one to displease the gods, and face their wrath.
My mother didn't help the cause either, often advising me to take the entrance to my house that faced east while going for my exams, instead of the main entrance that i usually took. While this was rather a burden, if starting in the east direction gave me luck in the 'analysis of algorithms", i'd rather take it than try acting smart, i reasoned.
God, i observed, seemed to be particularly liberal in fishing out luck for me when i prepared well for the exams. Then again, what's the point in him trying to be goody goody when i had done all the hard work !
Our appetite for cheap methods of obtaining easy-to-read materials was a boon come true for the photocopier-boy. In his late 50s, he spoke in one direction and looked in another direction. That was still better than the peculiar way he used to say "Zeeraax" to denote a photocopy. The 30 paise per copy that he had mastered not only gave us notes for cheap, it came with a stink which even the mongrels standing nearby used to detest. Not the one to take this cheap trick of mine easily, my mother had forced me into hanging all the papers in the balcony, like wet clothes, to drive away the obnoxious phenomenon.
Voracious readers that we were, books were photocopied including the copyright page :) (okay okay, the previous post notwithstanding. Irony has a weird sense of humour). One subject which we had to study went by the name "Computer Ethics and Society" which spoke of copyright infringement, ethics, patents etc., and had three text books for the subject and ironically was probably the most photocopied book ever in our college history. While we read ethics and copyrights to our hearts content, it was insignificant that it was coming from the stinking 30 paise photocopy :D
Exams were tough, and even tougher were the irritating practicals labs. The programs used to be a big dud, but the external examiners were a pain sometimes. Half the ICs and chips in the lab had breathed their last breath, and the other half waiting for salvation. computers looked like they had been beaten to death, with keyboards rampaged by rats. External examiners generally came to labs to have a nice lunch and enjoy the lush greenary in the campus. programs were but a reason, working or not working, examiners went on gut feeling chosing a number between 75-95 if the program worked, and a crossed look if it didn't, with wierd markings on the paper suggesting evil intentions.
While we used to take turns to secretly try and overlook how much they had marked us for the program, it would be the wildest fire on campus that day "who got how much ?"...one fool had come running down to me after the Myu-P lab shouting "Hey that external examiner took down your name and was discussing about you. you are done for good"...well, at that time i didnt know if she was impressed by my program and was trying to find which star i was born in, or she was so pissed off with my answers that she wanted to do some voodoo stuff on me. Not the one to take it without a fight, i made an emergency visit that day to the temple promising god an 'archaney' and a coconut offering, if i scraped through the lab. That i didn't earn money enough even to buy a matchstick was totally unimportant at that hour.
Even funnier is the extent to which lab attendants used to go to rag us, and we inturn them...
one particular lab attendant, a dud by choice, used to berate us :
"Do not keep your book on the processor ! it will get heated !"
one clever guy had convinced him one day by saying :
"no sir, the processor is inside, this is just the cabinet. See it says here 'Intel Inside' !" :D :D..
needless to say, the attender gave us permission to keep our 1gm books on the 'Processor' without much ranting after that !
Invariably every semester had one 'black sheep' subject that would run down our throat like a cacti scared stiff. Most of us used to leave the sleeping beast for the last day, fearing it would take its toll on the other exams. I had resorted to what i did best: doubling up my presence at the temple, just so that god gets a second helping of the carefully picked flowers, and force him to remember my face well enough so that he could recall it while distributing lucky coupons during the exams.
It was the 7th semester .... and there was this particularly tough subject on linux internals. An elective we should have rather not taken, our lecturer had famously tried hard to talk us out of it before we decided to nail each others head with a doornail.
On the day before the exams, plugging my ears with the fattest finger i had, to cut down all extraneous noices, i tried hard to concentrate on the bad omen better and went on :
"the bootstrap program loads into the memory, and that in turn loads the OS."
"the bootstrap program loads into the memory, and that in turn loads the OS."
"the bootstrap program loads into the memory, and that in turn loads the OS."
Hopelessly falling short of memorizing stuff even worth a mark, i tried to do a bit of a Mckenna and decided to picturize the whole page, hoping to remember it like a painting !...that i rushed a couple of telegrams skywards 2 minutes later conclusively proved that not only was Mckenna's 'Photographic memory" a stinking lie, it was a deliberate attempt to influence young impressionable minds.
The day of the exam was one of mayhem and confusion, with half contemplating suicide after the exams, and half not even turning up on time, making us to think if there was a holiday rush to the heavens.
The poop-brain examiner stood on the ramp, emotionless, trying to beleive that he had suddenly acquired a halo, acting like an angel guardian, swooping down on anyone who would dare as much as wink an eye at anyone except him. The need for copying was never so greater with some using their toes( as kiran puts it ) to turn the pages of the book kept on the ground, to a few looking at others desperately for help. I had gone to the exam hall with a certificate-of-visit from 3 temples in the morning, the proof of which lay on my forehead with the 'kunkum' blaring. If god ever passed by, he'd have no reason to say that he didn't notice me.
I had already started emotionally blackmailing god about the consequences of him failing to sail me through this exam. While the coconut, i believed , was a huge temptation for god to grant my prayer, i did have doubts whether i had been stingy in my offering. After 3 hours of writing how linux's ability to screw-up was as good as it's ability to boot-up, i dropped the pen down.
"15+8+12+5+10"... that would be my score for the exam, i mentally calculated...for 50 marks i'd write another operating system, god only had to make the examiner a bit drunk while evaluating my paper. Optimistic as my calculation was , the code i had written for the bootstrap program might as well be used as a virus to infiltrate it.
God would have to choose between me and linux. He had no choice as far as i was concerned.
Spending the holidays until the results were out was a nightmare...any building that even remotely looked like a temple would get a full bow from me, and "Jai hanuman" by Sanjay khan and "ganga mayya" by dayanand sagar suddenly had a avid follower in me.
After months of worship, the d-day arrived, and LI was the only subject anyone cared to check out. One last prayer shooting upwards, clicking the results sheet, the page loaded slowly, as though someone was sitting behind the monitor, virtually painting line by line...
.and then the result showed up !
... FCD !!!! yippppeee !!!!.... Long live the creator, LI had been successfully conquered.....54 it said was my score in linux internals.... i was by now sure that god had given a few extra shots of tequila to my evaluator, while having a vodka-martini himself, before asking the evaluator to evaluate my paper. Linux was now "been there done that !"
While many a Exams came and went, LI brought in more TV ratings to that one-eyed bat ramanand sagar's weekly pain-in-the---- serial than any of his other promotions did.
My fear for exams is still intact, but hopefully god will always be there to save the day :).
I kept my promise with the customary coconut offering, though it was God's Promise in return that had been more alluring !
Clearly, i have rather been a chicken when it came to exams, and distress calls travelling upwards were shamelessly sent by me at unearthly hours, either to rescue me from a sparse matrix or the 8086 microprocessor. inane as my effort to please god on the 11th hour, i had partly considered then that he was personally responsible for my welfare, and hence preparing for the exams all alone was not what i was prepared to do. God, i insisted, should equally work hard in areas of luck and memory management- exams where he had to come clean every semester.
Exams usually brought out the worst kind of paranoia in me. Starting off with taking a month long hiatus from getting a haircut, before and after the exams, to which side of the bed i got up on the day of the exams, to the grumpy face i would need to wear lest i displease the god of luck. Love for god usually peaked during exams to extraordinary levels, with early morning visits and circling around the temple while my mind shuttled between recalling "system call to create a file in linux" to the number of times i had circled the temple. An inkling of doubt on whether i had completed circling the idols a magic 9 times, would push me towards making another - not the one to displease the gods, and face their wrath.
My mother didn't help the cause either, often advising me to take the entrance to my house that faced east while going for my exams, instead of the main entrance that i usually took. While this was rather a burden, if starting in the east direction gave me luck in the 'analysis of algorithms", i'd rather take it than try acting smart, i reasoned.
God, i observed, seemed to be particularly liberal in fishing out luck for me when i prepared well for the exams. Then again, what's the point in him trying to be goody goody when i had done all the hard work !
Our appetite for cheap methods of obtaining easy-to-read materials was a boon come true for the photocopier-boy. In his late 50s, he spoke in one direction and looked in another direction. That was still better than the peculiar way he used to say "Zeeraax" to denote a photocopy. The 30 paise per copy that he had mastered not only gave us notes for cheap, it came with a stink which even the mongrels standing nearby used to detest. Not the one to take this cheap trick of mine easily, my mother had forced me into hanging all the papers in the balcony, like wet clothes, to drive away the obnoxious phenomenon.
Voracious readers that we were, books were photocopied including the copyright page :) (okay okay, the previous post notwithstanding. Irony has a weird sense of humour). One subject which we had to study went by the name "Computer Ethics and Society" which spoke of copyright infringement, ethics, patents etc., and had three text books for the subject and ironically was probably the most photocopied book ever in our college history. While we read ethics and copyrights to our hearts content, it was insignificant that it was coming from the stinking 30 paise photocopy :D
Exams were tough, and even tougher were the irritating practicals labs. The programs used to be a big dud, but the external examiners were a pain sometimes. Half the ICs and chips in the lab had breathed their last breath, and the other half waiting for salvation. computers looked like they had been beaten to death, with keyboards rampaged by rats. External examiners generally came to labs to have a nice lunch and enjoy the lush greenary in the campus. programs were but a reason, working or not working, examiners went on gut feeling chosing a number between 75-95 if the program worked, and a crossed look if it didn't, with wierd markings on the paper suggesting evil intentions.
While we used to take turns to secretly try and overlook how much they had marked us for the program, it would be the wildest fire on campus that day "who got how much ?"...one fool had come running down to me after the Myu-P lab shouting "Hey that external examiner took down your name and was discussing about you. you are done for good"...well, at that time i didnt know if she was impressed by my program and was trying to find which star i was born in, or she was so pissed off with my answers that she wanted to do some voodoo stuff on me. Not the one to take it without a fight, i made an emergency visit that day to the temple promising god an 'archaney' and a coconut offering, if i scraped through the lab. That i didn't earn money enough even to buy a matchstick was totally unimportant at that hour.
Even funnier is the extent to which lab attendants used to go to rag us, and we inturn them...
one particular lab attendant, a dud by choice, used to berate us :
"Do not keep your book on the processor ! it will get heated !"
one clever guy had convinced him one day by saying :
"no sir, the processor is inside, this is just the cabinet. See it says here 'Intel Inside' !" :D :D..
needless to say, the attender gave us permission to keep our 1gm books on the 'Processor' without much ranting after that !
Invariably every semester had one 'black sheep' subject that would run down our throat like a cacti scared stiff. Most of us used to leave the sleeping beast for the last day, fearing it would take its toll on the other exams. I had resorted to what i did best: doubling up my presence at the temple, just so that god gets a second helping of the carefully picked flowers, and force him to remember my face well enough so that he could recall it while distributing lucky coupons during the exams.
It was the 7th semester .... and there was this particularly tough subject on linux internals. An elective we should have rather not taken, our lecturer had famously tried hard to talk us out of it before we decided to nail each others head with a doornail.
On the day before the exams, plugging my ears with the fattest finger i had, to cut down all extraneous noices, i tried hard to concentrate on the bad omen better and went on :
"the bootstrap program loads into the memory, and that in turn loads the OS."
"the bootstrap program loads into the memory, and that in turn loads the OS."
"the bootstrap program loads into the memory, and that in turn loads the OS."
Hopelessly falling short of memorizing stuff even worth a mark, i tried to do a bit of a Mckenna and decided to picturize the whole page, hoping to remember it like a painting !...that i rushed a couple of telegrams skywards 2 minutes later conclusively proved that not only was Mckenna's 'Photographic memory" a stinking lie, it was a deliberate attempt to influence young impressionable minds.
The day of the exam was one of mayhem and confusion, with half contemplating suicide after the exams, and half not even turning up on time, making us to think if there was a holiday rush to the heavens.
The poop-brain examiner stood on the ramp, emotionless, trying to beleive that he had suddenly acquired a halo, acting like an angel guardian, swooping down on anyone who would dare as much as wink an eye at anyone except him. The need for copying was never so greater with some using their toes( as kiran puts it ) to turn the pages of the book kept on the ground, to a few looking at others desperately for help. I had gone to the exam hall with a certificate-of-visit from 3 temples in the morning, the proof of which lay on my forehead with the 'kunkum' blaring. If god ever passed by, he'd have no reason to say that he didn't notice me.
I had already started emotionally blackmailing god about the consequences of him failing to sail me through this exam. While the coconut, i believed , was a huge temptation for god to grant my prayer, i did have doubts whether i had been stingy in my offering. After 3 hours of writing how linux's ability to screw-up was as good as it's ability to boot-up, i dropped the pen down.
"15+8+12+5+10"... that would be my score for the exam, i mentally calculated...for 50 marks i'd write another operating system, god only had to make the examiner a bit drunk while evaluating my paper. Optimistic as my calculation was , the code i had written for the bootstrap program might as well be used as a virus to infiltrate it.
God would have to choose between me and linux. He had no choice as far as i was concerned.
Spending the holidays until the results were out was a nightmare...any building that even remotely looked like a temple would get a full bow from me, and "Jai hanuman" by Sanjay khan and "ganga mayya" by dayanand sagar suddenly had a avid follower in me.
After months of worship, the d-day arrived, and LI was the only subject anyone cared to check out. One last prayer shooting upwards, clicking the results sheet, the page loaded slowly, as though someone was sitting behind the monitor, virtually painting line by line...
.and then the result showed up !
... FCD !!!! yippppeee !!!!.... Long live the creator, LI had been successfully conquered.....54 it said was my score in linux internals.... i was by now sure that god had given a few extra shots of tequila to my evaluator, while having a vodka-martini himself, before asking the evaluator to evaluate my paper. Linux was now "been there done that !"
While many a Exams came and went, LI brought in more TV ratings to that one-eyed bat ramanand sagar's weekly pain-in-the---- serial than any of his other promotions did.
My fear for exams is still intact, but hopefully god will always be there to save the day :).
I kept my promise with the customary coconut offering, though it was God's Promise in return that had been more alluring !
posted by Jagadish at 2:15 PM
37 Comments:
Ah..those VTU days of yore!
=))
rofl
haha juggi, you have taken me back to those exam days of each sem. Yea like you said there had to be one subject every sem with some controversy. I Remember OR, CSDA, ADA... And unshaven for weeks.. haha..
Remember PJ? He had to visit Tirupathi after each sem exam :D.
Oh no.. im afraid i cant say..'u reminded me of those exam days' More like.. you are reminding me of the coming exam days!And the closest temple is 250 kms away!!!
Dear God, i pray through Juggy.. that he do all the necessary coconut offerings and temple visits.. jus transform the credit to my account. Sure, Juggy can get a bit of comission on that... i dont mind tat God. Just make it snappy.. and make me happy!:))
I remember spending more time analyzing the question pattern over the last ten years, then actually studying something. And finally when I had made up my mind on what to study (we only had to answer 5 out of 8 questions), there was two days left for the exam.
Sakkth juggi !
Who man the Linux internals subject definetly deserved an entry in your blog.
I remember the day when half the people commited suicide before the exam and the other half who confidently went to write the exam commited suicide after coming out.
Good 1.
Keep riting
/Kiran
Size doesnt matter. Try breakin small walnuts.. atleast the 'nut' part is the same...
(its a desparate call.. as u can see!)
Wish i used this quick thinking in my exams too!!!
:D :D...ok will do that ;)
that again was rib-tickling:)
my CA exams are 5 months away.i send God an SOS everytime am down..he's pretty having a tough time dealing with my tides..
btw what did ya score????private question eh??:P
thanks kavitha :).... hmmm, i did mention in the post that i got 54 :D...less but enough ;)....or did you mean the Myu-P lab ? :D
all the best for you CA exams :)....
the lab scores...??
do girls really score better than boys in pracs( prvd the one who overlooks you al is a male ;-))???i heard the my engg and medicine frnds complain about this very often
Jaggi, sooper blog , Linux Internals was one huge nightmare, I had given up the evening before the exam on this subject.
BTW, did you take OR as an electiev in 6 sem? If yes, you definitley need to write a blog on that exam. You remember? odidde ond subject, examd bandidde bere, people that day flocked temples through out blore....lol
VTU doesnt want people to graduate nowadays. That's all what i can say.
The 30 ps xerox ... Malleswaram 18th cross is famous for those notes .. and we called it "seemay yenne " kerosene xerox ..the stink..yappa unbearable.I actually had an allergy to that smell ...but that was after the exams :)
Lo yavdo addu temple .. it looks like you spent more time at the temple, than studying ..
If god ever passed by, he'd have no reason to say that he didn't notice me. >>> Uahhahahaa...
Lo hogro hogro .. VTU exams are so easy ask your seniors BU is and was the toughest. gotha gotha ...
kavitha: hmmm, the lab scores ? it would look like i am bragging, so lets just think that i got a good score there :D...
hmmm, on whether boys are better at pracs than girls, i think that's a very sexist question i dare not answer :D...but i can assure you that external examiners were as devilish as possible, irrespective of the gender...
Shreyas:
thanks :)..oh yes, OR was my elective too, and was as big a nightmare as LI. ADA and CSDA were no less troublemakers :D..and yeah, the damn OR paper had everything out of syllabus !
Akshaya:
hmmm, how things change so soon ! Hope it changes for the better.
bangaloreguy: :D...yeah very much from VTU :)... 30 paise "xerox" was a rage then...the smell had a tranquilizer effect, always ! :D
VC : hahaha, yeah man 30 paise xerox had infiltrated everywhere..banashankari area nalli it had become a cottage industry :D...every family there had converted their kitchen or veranda into a 30 paisa photocopy churning area :D.. BU was tough, i agree, but we had a lot of new subjects we could not fall back on ... ;)
hehehe, correct aagi ond paper irodu ond sem ge, praana hinDodikke :D
he he...
sooper jaggi!!!
nandantu bari AJM gale...
yeno.. ottalli devara daye... napaas aagde.. paas aagi uldiddu :)
peace
~/.shripad
yeah man ADA, CSDA igloo nidde inda yabbis bidatte. BTW we poor CS guys had another subject in 7 sem, Advanced Computer Architecture, adu just teltu boat 35 marks inda ...lol. Kachda subject, ad saldu anta manohar was the teacher...rofl
shirpad: thanks :)...nung yaako doubt.... neen yavaaglu 80% thegithidde alva ? :D... graphics was one more subject where the subject was as horrible as that poker teacher we had.
Shreyas: oh howdu, you guys had that parallel architecture and stuff right :D...we guys were spared from it..i remember vivek used to swim through 3 books, and i used to carry a small 100 page text book(MIS) with me while doing combined studies :D :D
i know you are willing to ans and i got the hint :D :D
boys are no ways better than girls..whts the proof??:P
:D...u seem to be hell-bent on getting some answer out of me ;)..
The only thing i know is that intelligence is not dependant on gender. It, however, depends on how much of his/her brain cells he/she wants to set aside for that purpose :D.
:P what we always get isnt a precise measure of what we are capable of..and another reason of inclusind this in a students curriculum is perhaps to drive home this point :))
phir bhi,allow me to smugly conclude that you aint aware of the ans :D:D
hey jaggi when did u go to a place called VTU...i thought it was just Battani,Christ and Pepsit(sorry PES IT)
"i made an emergency visit that day to the temple promising god an 'archaney' and a coconut offering"--- emergency visit...ha ha ha i found these words particularly funny!
i remember what a nervous wreck u were during the exams!!
god will be thinking the more exams i give this guy..the more coconut offerings i'll get!! ;)
--neeraja
Neeraja: :D :D ...thanks.
VTU is our university :D, i didn't go there :), our college was under it's aegis.
nervous wreck ? me ?!! ;)...that was only when i was a kid :D
kavitha: well i do know the answer, just that i do not know if its right :D..and i don't want to be wrong, get beaten up and find the right answer posthumously ;)
Juggs,
yeno barithiya... awesome dude. [certificate-of-visit from 3 temples] is second only to [murdered inch-by-inch, neat and clean], in its class.
I guess, I was more seasoned a player (more precisely student) than you, after having started to go through such emotions from 4th semester itself. I think, by the end of my engineering days, visiting temple and presenting offerings had become a routine; I would at times, do it even without any exams!!! But getting exactly 35 marks, after re-valuation of Computer Profession and Ethics paper in 7th sem (after getting 27
initially), was a bit too stretching for god also. It showed how greedy even god could get for my offerings :-))
PS: God, sorry; I will be needing your services shortly!
u see,ambiguity is beautiful...the dangling shadows of apprehension add charm...good tht u didnt express :D:D.it was my shooting gesture :P
Supreeth : Thanks :).... oh yeah that was CPS alva :D....hmm, time pass subject :)... gave us the creeps though.
Kavitha: finally i gave some convincing answer :D
Hah. I cringe when I think of my engineering college days. Nightmares to say the least! Well it was the closest experience to hell for my parents!
But your devotion quite reminds me of my bro's except that he grovelled at God's feet to become a topper in each semester. I was a mere mortal hoping to get decent grades.
Oops sorry didn't sign off.
--kk
:D...hehe, true during those times days were filled with exams and temples with students :D....my small prayers did seem to work well with amazing consistency when it came to exams :)..how else can i explain passing graphics, or that CSDA subject ;)...
oh no it hasn't, i live in NJ, 35 miles off NYC...I have not been following the news lately, but i think the Judge ruled against the strikers ....planning to go to NYC this weekend, hopefully things are hunky-dory by then...:)
I too did all the things to please god... looks like I am not all alone here.
CSDA was nightmare ( I wrote for 1 hour and then felt that I better start preparing for next CSDA exams), so was basic electronics... Apart from these two I dont think I have never had any trouble.
Suneel
suneel, strange, but LI was made to be a universal nerve pulling subject..wonder how u were'nt affected by it :)
pradeep mn: glad to know that you are learning more at work than in college. it's a rarity these days...
coming to think of it, i think i learnt more in college than i'll ever learn working in the industry, reason being projects in VTU gave me a lot of independance to design and create applications. One can hardly do that in the industry, which is more driven by client needs and stuff, which is awfully boring and such a waste of energy.
then again its one way of looking at things....
except for a few subjects, i think VTU syllabus was pretty decent. It's stress on individual projects etc was indeed commendable. i'd stick to that model any day, than what we are asked to do here to get paid...
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