Samir hilltop

After five years

Happy new year

The tummy test

I fail:(

State of affairs

Last year was a pretty eventful one, like the years before 2007. With the Almighty's and my guide's grace, I graduated from IIT, went to a dead-end job, chucked it and joined another company. In the middle, I managed to say off work for a good 45 days and made yet another cursory attempt at belling the CAT. Given the efforts, the result was pretty predictable. I can take heart that, if I hadn't dozed off in the last half-hour I might have scored a lot in DI and ergo would have "cracked" the CAT. Maybe, I really don't want an MBA really badly.

My good friends seem to be pretty relieved. Infact, all of them are in a better position than that of mine a year ago. One, the most circumspect and gentle, has landed a job with the biggest consulting firm and also scored the coverted BLACKI. Another went a step further and wooed a big British financial services firm into hiring him. He was non-chalant as usual. The temperate Punjabi settled with a startup but as usual, is itching to get into the rarified world of investment banking. The aloof Nagpur techie seemed happy with the offer from a data analytics firm. But I'm pretty sure he too is waiting for a better offer to come by. That, of course, will have to wait for the newest Heroes or Big Bang episode :) . The hard working branch-changer ,:x, is in the process of courting the top American institutes and landing the much vaunted fellowship. Sundry companies coming to hire his peers are not even a blip on his radar. Finally, the quiet gulti, the most determined in the lot, is surely toiling away in the microfluidics (?) laboratory and waiting to publish his next paper.

Good men all of them, each in search of that elusive dream job/app/whatever. Most of them bored with the monotonous fifth-year DD life. And eagerly waiting to get ahead in life.

I wish them all the best in their quest and hope that they get that proverbial pot of gold in the end of the rainbow. Or atleast something significant. Peace out niggas :)

Joy of the Shuffle

I'm finishing off some old posts that have perpetually been in the Draft section. Geez these things were meant to be published months ago

A little self-indulgence isn't that bad when the holidays haven't exactly been joyous and merry. So to cheer things up, I picked up an 1st Gen iPod Shuffle a couple of days ago. Not that I'm an Apple fanboy or anything but that it was the best option available for a shoestring budget. The Shuffle is pretty bare-bones and sparse on features.

The best part is that this little device is a psychic. It can really your mind. The device almost always starts with a Steely Dan or Bob Dylan number. After a serving of "Peg" and more of Dan's gems, it invariably plays a song from "Blonde on Blonde" or "Blood on the Tracks". A few songs later, Moby and Paul Simon vie for a play.

The songs maybe different but the order of the artists is always the same. Weird.

My guess is that the random play alogrithm is tweaked to be more favorable to songs with high play counts or better ratings. You see, iTunes dilligently counts the number of times you've listened to a song. It is also possible to rate songs based on your taste. A qucik scan of my playlist revealed that most Steely Dan songs had a play count of well over 50. Same for Dylan and Paul Simon.

I cannot help but marvel at the ingenuity of the engineers in Cupertino. The Shuffle is deficient on features - no LCD screen to list navigate, no FM tuner, averagish battery life - but it really knows my personal taste. I don't really miss the LCD screen, I trust the Shuffle to belt out my favourite tunes. Thats the beauty of Apple, they make products that lack features miost of us take for granted (video recording in a camera phone anyone?) but they get one big thing right. that makes the device so personal.

The hip sheep

Harmlessly passing your time in the grassland away;Only dimly aware of a certain unease in the air.

Or so sang Roger Waters roughly two decades ago.


The above picture is no dandy image I made with Paintbrush but a visualization in RealOne player. RealOne is a slow and ponderous media player but has one redeeming feature - the Sheep.She goes by the name of Annabelle.


She was a hippie once.



Then she got into discos in the Seventies.


She quickly discarded discos when the fires of punk raged high in the late Seventies.

Note the two sheep cavorting in the background. Let’s call them Nikki and Paris. They have a particular affinity for Steely Dan.




Annabelle has other friends too. My favourite one is is a bird, which I believe is the pikka bird.



You may find space oddities like UFOs and floating spectrum bars. Annabelle is blissfully unaware of them though.



Zen and the Sheep

I feel there is a deep and profound philosophical implication in this seemingly silly visualization. She dances to any music you throw at her – rock, hip-hop, metal, Bollywood numbers and she even gyrated to a depressing monologue by Samuel Beckett. Annabelle embraces everything – like the whore with lime panties in Catch 22 – alike without any discrimination. She is oblivious of the world around her and is content with boogying to music besides the fence. Music is an abstraction of the human mind and probably the most primordial human instinct is to dance to music – it is somehow wired into our brains. So, she tirelessly dances day and night in celebration of music. Santana may well spend the rest of his life trying to make the ultimate world music – the fusion of all music styles – but Annabelle has a revelation for all of us. The world music, if any, lies within us – it is up to us whether to listen to it or not. We need more Annabelles in today’s jaded world.

On a side note, boredom does amazing things to you.

EDIT : God bless Imageshack. May that generous enterprise grow stronger and host more images.

Rudie can't fail

As I had mentioned in an old post, the Delhi public - in general - is ultra rude. Having lived in this city for almost a month, I have more or less grown used to the boorish behavior.

Last Sunday, I decided to buy some hankies, as most of my old ones have a deep brown shade thesedays. Heres the (short) conservation I had with the a rudie :

Yours truly (YT): Boss, hankies milenge kya?

(Rudie looks dazed)

YT: Arre boss, handkerchiefs?

Rudie (R): Oh haan, saabji (then extolls the virtues of the hankies)

YT: Kitne ka hai?

R: Sirji, bees rupaiya.

At this point I decided to make a wisecrack.

YT: Arre boss, ek dozen nahin chahiye bas ek chahiye.

My chest swelled with (shortlived) glee - this was one of those rare occasions wherein I made a quick repartee.

R: Bhai, aajkal Times of India poora color main aata hai. Kaat ke pasina poch lena.

I had no answer to that.