Tag: Food

Categories
College Life

Bas das minute lEga

Yeah right. We were fools to believe such a statement.

It all started on a lazy Saturday afternoon when Vishnu returns from the mess empty-stomach’ed complaining “it’s the same old crap again, let’s go somewhere else”. Having seen a tiny cockroach in the food I got in Hall 1 canteen, I expressed my desire to avoid the canteen as much as possible and go to the Campus Restaurant instead.

Vishnu, who had taken an oath not to go to the CR ever again, surprisingly agreed. He probably considered anything to be better than the sort of food we get here sometimes. The SBI ATM in front off Hall 3 was non-functional. During the registration time I had taken out money from the adjoinig UBI ATM and had failed to notice and surcharges, I thought we should take it from here again. I wasn’t ready to spend that extra 50 Rs. we thought would be charged and instead took our chances of finding the SBI ATM at the ShopC working. Bad luck, or was it procrastination on Vishnu’s part? The ATM wasn’t working!

We step into the bank and enquire about the ATM. ‘bas das minute lEga’(should take ten minutes)  was what one of them told us – to which Vishnu said, “shall we go and order our food in the CR then?”. After such a re-assuring assurance he had given us, he goes “woh mat karna! (don’t do that! LOL)”. Fine, we decided to wait. We even had a lecture on GIMP we wanted to attend at CS101 – for which I had personally put up posters at places inside the campus. We waited from 2:15pm to about 4:15pm. Yes, we did. We were probably jobless. Not really. We probably wanted to behave like we were jobless 😛

So, why that long you ask? Well, there did exist a cash-counting machine (German-made, 700 million Indians don’t have sanitary facilities – it’ll take another century for India to make a cash-counting machine) and the person whose sole job was to put cash into the ATM whenever need be was counting 500 rupee notes by hand! When Vishnu asked a co-banker why the cash-counting machine wasn’t being used, the reply he got was “he has already used it, he’s manually checking it to see if the machine was right”

“…”

When we had just reached the bank, India had beaten Australia (cricket ODI, don’t really care) and people were celebrating and congratulating each other (yay! Harbhajan made another fortune in this match, let’s be happy and continue to shit on roads). This banker whose sole job appeared to be “taking care of the ATM” was apparently watching the match in the bank – yes, there was a TV in the bank, not in public view. And just when India had won, he had stepped out of the bank to buy sweets for the family to celebrate the glorious state of their toilets which happens to be funded by Harbhajans earnings in each of the matches he plays.

There was a characteristic colour of incompetence painted all over this character. Apparently he was nearing his retirement – according to the watchman. This watchman was considerate. He appeared to have gained wisdom by observing people. Soon, other co-bankers on looking at our pissed-off faces, helped get 1000 bucks out of the ATM. So much for the “A” in the ATM. (Forget about the cash-counting machines)

Finally, we ate.

And Praneeth showed up. He joined us to watch a documentary movie (Q2P) on the state of public (female) toilets in the metros. This was Umang season BTW, film-festival.

We walked through SAC on our way back to Hall 1. Got eliminated in the preliminaries of the investigative journalism contest. What a day. Mid-sem exams in 10 days. Two major coding-assignments to go.

Categories
Travel

An afternoon in ISKCON

Three days ago my parents brought up the idea of visiting the ISKCON temple just beyond Yeshwantpur in Bangalore. Apparently, neither of them had seen it before and we had to take two U-turns on a pretty long road (that God this was a two-way) to climb up the hill and park the car. Yes, this temple is on a hill and it overlooks the Bangalore beyond Yeshwantpur and it looked really cool.

This is a new temple. Built in the late 90’s. NRI-funded, I heard. As it appears, a *lot* of money is spent purely on the building itself. I though gone were the days when kings foolishly spent on temples when they could’ve done a better job with providing civil-amenities. I remember having a somewhat heated discussion on the IITK newsgroups during my second year. That was fun 🙂

There were two ways to get the darshan:  either we stand in the long winding queue chanting hare krishna hare krishna hare rama hare rama hare hare on each step or pay 150 Rs. and get an instant entry (good if you’re running out of time or don’t like the people in the queue or want instant attention from Lord Krishna). Once we entered the first check-point, we saw the venkatEShwara avatAra. We were given some bUndi to eat and had to return our recitation card which had that “hare krishna” chant in 6 languages relevant to Bangalore – English, Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and Tamil. (We don’t need a *single* national language for this country, please) – I’m glad ISKCON sees what’s right 🙂

The next check-point we saw the vamana avatara and another idol. It looked almost like the on at Tirupati. So much for plagiarism 😛

The final check-point was the main area itself where Krishna, Balarama, Radha et al stood tirelessly. For the prasAda right there an amount had to be paid, we hardly saw anyone do that. This particular area didn’t look too much like a real temple for some reason, the architecture I mean. It looked more like some Roman chapel with paintings on the ceiling and stuff. I’ve been told that Krishna is an extremely dark-skinned dude. I’ve heard of people naming their dark skinned kid “Krishna” (or “Krisna” rather :P). Except one portrait the rest were all Hellenic and light blue-faced. Next we were presented with an array of books about Krishna in various Indian langauges – for a sum, of course. We didn’t buy any. We stepped down to the next “floor” (this is a hill), and there were all sorts of stuff my mother would’ve like to buy for the dEvara mane which made my father stand a furlong away and call us away using sign language from the items we pondered on buying. There were numerous items on sale. It looked like a holy market. I wondered where the money would go or if any part of the profits went anywhere at all. We did come across a section which explicitly mentioned that the money we put in this particular hunDi (cash-pot) would go to a mid-day meal scheme for public schools children.

Finally we entered this food area where food of all types that would cater to most Indians were there. Again, for a fine-sum 🙂  I enjoyed the best puLiyOgare in a long time. We even bought two laddus part of which still lies besides me (my sister doesn’t seem to eat much (sweets) these days, dieting?) Was this all about money? What about the poor people who come here? I took the safer path and assumed that the profits went in to help the poor in some way – the haves would spend money here which I assumed would somehow reach the havenots. And we stepped down to another floor and guess what? There was the prasAda I was expecting! It was probably some sort of hot pongal. Took a couple of pictures and got into the car. It got dark soon. Did we spend almost three hours looking at things we didn’t want to buy?

Categories
College Life Entertainment Gymkhana LAN Linux/BSD Software

Been a while again!

So, I’ve been away from blogging for a while now. Several things have happened around me during this period.

Formation of the SSCVC:

We called for what might have been the first informal Anime-club meet at the campus. Most of were present (bheekling was asleep) and presented our idea for forming a formal club under the Students’ Gymkhana. We hadn’t thought of a name yet and we hadn’t met people either. The following weekend, we arranged for a show in the hall1 TV room. We were a little late and some people had turned back. But then, we went and called some people to come and watch :D. We screened the first two episodes of “NHK ni youkoso” and “GITS: GIG 1”. (Lord Vash’s wide-screen and , BigBong’s laptop were used). We couldn’t bear it anymore and basilisk and I decided to meet Amitabha Mukherjee (a prof. in the CSE dept., who we reportedly heard from Nishant Singh that he was into anime(!), which turned out to be false). He pointed us to Satyaki Roy’s direction >_>. Next stop was Suchitra Mathur ;). Bheekling got us appointment and LordVash, himself and I met her. She was interested with the plan and all that and we still hadn’t come up with the name. I remembered Genshiken and how it was about an anime club. I quickly googled to get its full-form. It was the SSMVC – Society for Study of Modern Visual Culture. In a day, we met with Satyaki and he suggested that we change it to SSCVC – Society for Study of Contemporary Visual Culture. Woah! We still haven’t put out our proposal for the club yet. Hopefully the iitk-animesociety should help us out here 😉

Revamp of my data:

I have two hard-disks. Started off with a Samsung 160GB SATA disk three years ago. It had a warranty of period of one year as compared to Seagate and I yet went with it :\. Something I soon realised was that Samsung and LG were these two Korean companies that dumped junk in India for a while (only recently have they set up their own plants in the country and get decent products). Another thing being – to not buy computer products such as hard-disks, motherboards or CPUs in Kanpur (and maybe in the whole of UP!) . One – I have personally come across cases where a dealer takes screwed up disks from you, refurnishes them and sell them to someone else. Same is the case with mobos and CPUs. A model of RAM you bought at one time won’t be available a few months later (suppose you have 512MB and wanted another identical stick – tough luck).

Some time ago (during the summers, I think), I had repartitioned my data and set up ZFS via FUSE on linux. Wasn’t production ready and very shaky at times. Couldn’t share my whole data on DC++. During the past few days, basilisk had tried to install Gentoo and ended up cleaning up his 250Gb harddisk with Ubuntu :P. I transferred all my Anime, Movie and TV onto his disk, the Music went into a confidential location. Set up four partitions on my reliable ATA Seagate disk, one Boot, one Root (20GB), one Swap and one large Home. The other unreliable disk is one big reisrefs partition 🙂 Removed my FreeBSD and that extended partition windows had created. I had played around with FreeBSD too to get good ZFS performance before I removed it. Updated to 7.0-CURRENT and zpool segfaulted at zpool import :\ Considering the hassles I’d have to go through if I had stuck with FreeBSD amd64, I decided to stay with Linux itself. If at all I need to experiment with any of those at a later point of time, they’ll be on a different hardware :X! (Notes: don’t ask me how I went to 7.0-CURRENT from within the campus)

Food:

Yes, I’ve been eating mostly in the canteen or at the gate. I spent a lot of money. Just for food. (I payed off my earlier debts too)

Classes(!):

I haven’t been to classes for a couple of weeks. It’s a bad thing. It suddenly turned cold here and you feel like staying in your bed like nothing else’s important. Exams are coming soon – 8th Oct.! I have to do whatever has to be done. This sucks 😐 For now, I should try not to waste time on anything else (:P).