On Top Of My Little World...

29-May-2008

Pearson Professional Centers
18, Ramnath House
Yusuf Sarai
New Delhi

Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT)

Sodium Hydro Phosphate

Quantitative: 51
Percentile: 99

Verbal: 47
Percentile: 99

Total: 780 out of 800
Percentile: 99

Analytical Writing Assessment: 5.5 out of 6
Percentile: 83 out of a maximum of 89 at 6


My Big Day :)

--- To Yusuf Sarai - The first world of my second life ----


Silently I had promised to your streets
That I would not walk you just today
As an 11 year old, holding my mom-dad's hands,
weak with surgeries
Struggling for life

With a child's certainty
I had promised to you

That I would come back
On my own bike
With my own money
And with a control on my life

That I would walk your streets once again
In a very different form
And my head still high
With the same old attitude
That only I rule my life !

The one where Sodium was getting married..

In a post written on the marriage anniversary of my parents, I had demanded of them, in jest, the recruitment of new entrants to our home.

My parents took a cue and began hunting actively for a fitting candidate. Soon they started bringing me multiple proposals a day and as I was not really very keen on marrying for sometime still, I turned down all of them. But they were not deterred and their search continued. One day I had a long discussion with my parents on this because I could see they were spending a lot of their time and energy on that. Even they wanted the things to materialize. So, we reached a deal. I was to accept one of the fitting proposals now and would get engaged but marriage would not happen for the next two years. In a few weeks, I gave my consent for one of the proposals brought to me by them. They tallied the birth documents and fixed a date for two years later. In a few months, I got busy with my work and career and forgot all about it (Yes, I did forget it completely). And since I was not living with my parents because my job took me away from home, I didn't know that they had started the preparations 6 months in advance. I was reminded of the approaching occasion only a couple of months in advance. I had neither seen the photograph of my finacee nor had a single word with her since I gave my assent to the proposal. And then I thought I was not like it. Perhaps I had been so busy with my career that I didn't realize that along the way I had not been the same. I thought if I had waited this long to talk to her, why not wait untill marriage then.

I took the leave only a week before my marriage and went home. The preparations were in full swing and everything had been done. I was only to sit and wait to be the second chief guest at my marriage (the first one was the bride of course). And then all the ceremonies happened..the haldi, the mehendi, etc. With only one day to spare, I decided to see my fiancee finally. They had come in the town and were staying at the marriage home hotel. But a meeting of the bride and groom a day before marriage wasn't allowed according to our customs. So I decided to ask my sister to show me the photographs.

The shock came when I saw the photographs. This was precisely what I had feared all my life. And I had no idea how I had let this happen. My fiancee held some unknown degree from some small town and had not been able to find a job after her graduation. She had the looks of an uneducated villager. Her mom resembled my house maid in the way she dressed which was probably the future look of her daughter. When I asked my mom about how she spoke, my mom told me she had a loud and shrill voice and an unsophisticated accent. The sky fell on me. All the preparations were in place. Every single relative from both sides had come. The next day was my marriage and here I was, wishing I could go back in time somehow, find out how this happened and change the course of things. But there was no way now. If I did anything now the other side would not let us go easily. We all would be on national television the next day with breaking news banner showing above all our heads. And who knows if they would resort to violence as well before turning us to the television crew. My fate was sealed. I was almost chocking. My thoughts were that the next day I was going to marry a girl who would be my life partner for about next 40 years and I wouldn't be able to share a single intelligent conversation with her on my dinner table. I wished I would wake up and find it all only a horrible dream.

And then, INDEED I woke up. This had been a dream. And I realized how small my problems are as compared to what worse can happen to me.

A 'Laplase transform' on sodium's life in the waiting..

My life has become a differential equation in complex numbers.

The first part means the external and the unknown variables of the universe affect my life's value.

And the second part implies that my life has both, the real and the imaginary components.

The components of the real part take their values from the domain

WORK = {Office, CAT, GMAT, Social Networking Site, ...}

and those of the imaginary part take their values from the domain

FUN = {Girls, Dating, Love, Promotions, MBA, A Respectable job, Money, ...}

And all the time I am trying to integrate this differential equation to introduce a new constant, preferably from the imaginary part, in each integration step...so that my life gets some pleasant predictability at least.

Happy Marriage Anniversary to Mummy - Daddy :)

Today is the marriage anniversary of Sodium's Mummy and Papa.

Many Many happy returns of the day Mummy Daddy :)

We are indebted to you for all the love you have showered on us and for the person we have become because of the environment created around us by you. And we and the future recruits need your blessings for a long long time to come.

So, our demands would not end. Close is the time when you turn recruiters and use your experience in bringing in the best recruits available.

(A note to my cousins who might read it - This sentence is not to be used to pull my leg ! Thanks)

The atheist in Sodium..

An atheist sinner was going through a rough patch in life. Many of his well-wishers suggested him to take a bath in the holy river of Ganga to get rid of his sins. He asked everybody of them how it would work, what would rid him of his sins by taking a bath in the waters of the river Ganga. But nobody could answer him, not even prestigious saints. Eventually, after facing a lot of personal problems and driven by despair, he went to Hardwar to take bath in the holy river of Ganga. He took a long dip in the freezing water and chanted some lines he remembered his mother teaching him when he was a child. After the bath, propped against a wall, legs crossed, he sat in a corner on the steps of the river ghat, in bright sunlight, and began thinking about how this might possibly help him. Fatigue of a long journey, and the bright sunlight after a bath in chilling water quickly lulled him into sleep. When he woke up, he found himself before Lord Shiva, the greatest God in Hindu religion, on the Great Mountain of Kailash which, in the scriptures of Hindu mythology, has been told to be his home. The man was confused and surprised. He hadn't been sure if all this exists somewhere. Now that he was witnessing this, he asked Lord Shiva, what no-one on earth had been able to answer him. To his surprise, he found a blank expression on Lord Shiva's face. The God told him that even he had no idea how taking a bath in the holy rivers of Ganga could rid the man of his sins. Then the God suggested him to ask this to Lord Brahma, the creator of life and the universe according to Hindu scriptures, and offered the man a ride to Lord Brahma's Lotus flower with him. In a moment they were before Lord Brahma. Seeing Lord Shiva there, Brahma stood up in his flower in respect and bowed to him. Shiva asked the man to pose his question to Lord Brahma. The man obeyed and was even more surprised to watch a blank look on Brahma's face as well. So, my doubts about the abilities of Gods have indeed been correct, the man thought in sadness. He was sad at the way his poor fellow men were deluding themselves with the divine powers of God when the truth was that even Gods had no idea of the guiding force behind life. He wondered what actually the guiding force was then. The train of his thoughts was broken when, seeing him sad and hopeless, the two Lords offered to take him to Lord Vishnu, the third of the trinity of the greatest Gods in the Hindu mythology, to ask his question. The man was not very hopeful but he thought why not to see the ground realities there as well. If two of them are not worth their name, the third would only complement them. Why not to see the whole reality so that he can go down there and tell some sensible people what lay behind all those putative holy scriptures of Hindu mythology. The three of them went to the deepest depths of the Oceans to see Lord Vishnu. Lord Vishnu was delighted with this sudden visit of Brahma and Shiva and they bowed to each other. Shiva asked the man to pose his question to Lord Vishnu. The man repeated his question to Lord Vishnu, already anticipating the same blank face the other two had drawn. He had accidently discovered the ground realities of the ancient scriptures and whatever little belief he had had in the Gods, the putative creators of this world, had shattered. Mythology was after all derived from Myth. The holiest saints of the world and the writers of the holy Hindu scriptures were as far away from the reality as he had been as an atheist. But that was not to be. He was jolted out of his thoughts as Lord Vishnu slapped him on his face. He saw that Lord Shiva (also called Mahesh) and Lord Brahma had moved to the sides of Lord Vishnu. The halo behind them was blinding. Lord Vishnu was telling him "You couldn't have been more stupid. You are witnessing the corporeal presence of the trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Mahesh and are still asking how a bath in the holy waters of Ganga could rid you of your sins!"

The brightness of the halo had blinded his vision. The man couldn't see the three deities any longer. He put his hand on his eyes to block the enormous light blinding them. He felt that the water of the ocean at the ocean bed had become cooler and a chill was rising from his legs up his spine and making him shiver. Suddenly he shook. The priest on the river shore was waking him up. The water level in Ganga had risen and had half submerged the step on which he was sleeping. A long time had passed and the sun was high up in the middle of the sky, its light penetrating his closed eye lids. It took him sometime to gain consciousness. It had been a deep sleep but perhaps he had woken up eventually. Perhaps the water in the Ganga had risen to wash him off his sins in the presence of Brahma, Vishnu, and Mahesh. Perhaps the sunlight had been blinding because a curtain before his eyes had been lifted. Perhaps this was the time to start life afresh.

Those who dare..

The exam asked this guy to write a 3 page essay on 'This is how I dare destiny...'

The guy left the 3 pages blank and wrote at the end of third page:

'This is how I dare destiny...'

He was called for an interview. He sat calmly as the interviewer, an eminent U.P. cadre IAS officer, examined his face. The guy had not shaved and had come for the interview in a stubble.
The interviewer asked him
'Have you done so to hide your personality ?'

The guy replied:

'No Sir, I have done so to REVEAL my personality'

The guy was an IIT graduate and had snubbed a job offer from a reputed MNC in the pre-IT boom era to prepare for the Civil Services exam.

'And he was selected for U.P. cadre,' told that eminent IAS interviewer to me when I went to see him for suggestions on the preparation for the Civil Services exam in my 3rd year of mechanical engineering.

The officer went on..

'And you know this guy had prepared the entire year after snubbing that MNC job offer and still when he saw this essay topic, he decided not to sing songs of his attitude but to do something that was intrinsic to his nature. A moment had been when he weighed whether to write some narrative from this life or to do something which would become a narrative of it's own for others to share. And for such people, risk is not a word they learn from the dictionary. They act. And when they act, there are no limits. You IITians have an edge in the IAS preparation in that.'

I couldn't have agreed more. But his opinion for the IITians needs to be put in right order.

It's not the IIT that makes such people, but it's such people that go to places like the IIT and make IIT the place it is.

As pointed out by someone..

'IIT is not a place. It's a way of life.'