A Mid-Summer(?) Night's musing

The Sun has come up finally. It's a bit wierd seeing the sky lighten before my very eyes. Usually it is dark when you sleep and bright when you wake up. After a long time I have seen dawn. I am sure many of my friends would claim the same (if they manage to wake up in the wee hours just once that is!) Not sleeping when everyone is, seems to be a very lonely and sad experiment. I'm sure many have endured night-outs. Preparing for IIT, the mid-sems, the end-semesters, etc, etc. Today is nothing special. I got no test tomorrow for which I need to stay up to complete the syllabus. It was just another run-of-the-mill, ordinary day. Still I have stayed awake for so long. Doing nothing. Sometimes dreaming. Gazing at the stars and the moon. Wondering about everything. Climbing to the topmost point in the hostel to be the nearer to the moon than anyone. There is a peculiar serenity about stars. I know they are really hot balls of a multitude of gases with some sort of omnipresent turbulence. But from here they look just fine. There is nothing hot or bothered about them. When I reach the top, I lie down and they seem closer than most. I vividly remember the galaxy Orion. It has a dark beauty about it. It represents a warrior. But oh such a peaceful warrior. I have no real important stuff on my mind then. Just run of the mill, little stuff. But suddenly they become larger than life. Just because they are there..

PS: Don't remember at what point in college I wrote this. Might have seemed a bad idea at the time, but I see I don't need to work on it. Qualifies as a musing, which is the point of this blog anyways.. :)

A Number Ubiquitous..

Ask an engineering student that what's the one thing that identifies him the most and in all probability he/she will wryly say 'CGPA'. It is seemingly a necessary evil. The question a professor mostly asks when you get up to ask an uncomfortable question is, "What is your CGPA?" As if it is the thing that defines who you are. Are we really so naive to believe that a person, an identity, an entity, a living breathing soul can be represented by a number? Can you really reduce a person to a number?
Its not only professors, the equivalence thing actually goes up to the highest echelons. The companies want CGPA. Simple. It doesn't matter whether you can kick ass when it comes to matters of the mind. It doesn't matter if you can speak for yourself. They come with a rigid mind, a fixed 'criteria' and that criteria unsurprisingly is CGPA. I mean don't they trust themselves to be able to differentiate between a good and a bad prospect on the basis of the test that they designed and interviews they will conduct? Apparently not.
Something happened recently. In an unfortunate accident, we lost a friend, a lovely person and the world lost a promising young man. Always greeted me with a cheeky grin and a "hello sir!". I vividly remember him arguing a case against a wrong judgement meted out to them just because they were freshers. It was hard to come to terms with the loss of such a wonderful person in such an unfortunate manner. I hope he is at peace now.
We had a little ceremony in the college. Many people gathered in the auditorium. The director asked us to observe silence for two minutes for Tarunvir Khurana, 2010 batch CGPA 6.25. Everyone did and the ceremony was over. The sad part of the proceeding is that even at such an unfortunate hour, for the institute, he was 6.25. I'm sorry Sir. He wasn't a number and no human can be just a number. Everyone is a wonderful being. Not knowing everyone doesn't mean we can know about them through a number. He was Tarunvir Khurana, Tarun to everyone. Not 6.25. And its a grave insult to his memory to remember him as just that.

Something about Happy Recovery..

Q: Your friend wishes an ailing soul happy recovery. Later shares his faux pas with you. And you draw a blank look and say: "Happy recovery? Wait. I've heard of Parallel Recovery, Safe Mode Recovery and a hell lot of Database Recovery Concepts but never of Happy Recovery!". The friend begins laughing. Now my question is quite simply: Tell the time?

A: Placement Time in the College

PS: Yes its that time of the stay in college when you got to cover everything sidelined during three years of fun 'n' games. The above Q&A was a half-hearted stab at humour, just to keep the blog going really.. I'm not sure really how many can find anything remotely funny about it (Except maybe the friend in question. Then again, maybe..)
PS 2: (a la Arnie in Terminator) I'll Be Back!