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Showing posts from December, 2013

Just Another Optimization Problem

I think this is going to be my longest post of the season. So as Ned Stark would say, “Brace yourselves!” (for long post). I recently read a post by Rutuja on the topic of marriage and career. Since I have gone through a similar thought process in this year, I thought I might pen down some of experience in this regard. It had all started last year when my parents started asking me that long awaited question – “When are you getting married?” I kept avoiding that question till the end of last year. By the end of March however, I realized that it was about time I started looking for my partner, as my school/college friends started getting engaged/married. Whatever one might say about peer pressure in office/studies, there is a similar pressure when it comes to marriage. It can be very awkward in the end of marriage season, as each of your buddies gets committed and you are the only one remaining single. Of course, the real problem isn’t that. As I have always said, life is li

Danny's Wedding

At Dnyanesh's Wedding Woooh! It has been exactly a month now. What a wonderful time we had! First it was Sangeet (Halad) on 29th November. And boy o boy, did we dance? Of course, probably we were crazier at Kiran's Sangeet, but this one will be remembered for crazy moves by Aditya (he was even better than Viraj!). The wedding was in the late afternoon. Thankfully we all reached on time, before the muhurta . It was unbelievable how Dnyanesh’s friends lifted him after the mangalashtaka were over for almost two minutes (for those who don’t know him- he weighs more than 90kg!). After the muhurta , we had more than 2 hours before the reception started. So we decided to spend time at Shivaji Park with the usual katta level discussions going on. Once we returned back, it was a laughing riot going on, as jokes were targeted from one friend to another including me (Of course, Nikhil will still say that they don’t target me at all). On a lighter note, hopefully, Tejash

The Act Begins

The date is set for one of my best friend – Susmit’s wedding. Of course, that is not the only reason I am excited. At the time of his engagement, few of my friends had performed a small skit which received amazing response. Unfortunately I could not be part of that skit. But this time we are planning a similar but bigger skit at his Sangeet dinner. The anchor will again be Aditya. I will be replacing Nilesh as his side kick this time. There are also going to be a few dance sequences where most of Susmit’s friends will participate. The rehearsals have started and it is going to be fun practicing next few months. Here is video taken at the time of engagement -

IIT-B Visit

I visited IIT Bombay campus today for some official work. I was in a meeting with Dr. D. B. Phatak in his office. In between the meeting, there was a continuous inflow of students with their queries for the Professor. One such group of 4 students came to meet him for a research proposal. While asking students about their projects, Dr. Phatak mentioned that " Sudarshan Sir " would give a challenging project to his students. After the students left, I asked him if Dr. Sudarshan he mentioned earlier, is the same person as from the "Korth, Silbreschatz, Sudarshan" trio of Database Management System Concepts book. When he affirmed that he is same person, I actually envied those kids. The person, whose book is read by majority of engineering students in Mumbai for DBMS course, is their teacher. It is still one of my favorite technical books apart from all books written by Andrew Tanenbaum. You cannot ask for any better teacher for learning Advanced DBMS, can you?

Half Marathon Preparation - II

It has been 2 months since I started the practice. Unfortunately around 10 days ago, my old nemesis - lower back pain - resurfaced. Because of the pain, I have stopped running (honestly I should not say "stop"; I simply "can't" run). Otherwise, I used to run 4-5 km every 2-3 days in half an hour’s time. The marine drive stretch is a treat to run even in the evening. Since I hate to wake up early in the morning, I prefer running in the evening after work (my point is that if I didn't get up early even for studies when it was so important, how can one expect me to get up early for running?). It is a bit crowded when you reach Nariman Point, surprisingly even on weekdays. Once I reach home it actually feels a bit relaxed. I think I would start the preparation again next week or so. Till that time I have to get my "back" back into shape :)

Paper Checking

Recently an interesting incident occurred related to my school. One of my  neighbors  studies in 6 th   standard at my former school. I got the news from one of our common acquaintance that he fared poorly in science paper. Few days after I got the news, the boy himself started telling me about his marks. He had got decent marks in rest of subjects. He initially did not talk about science paper, but after a while he started the topic by informing me that all the students got the beating in Science paper. He stressed on the fact that even the topper had 30 marks out of 40. Since, I had seen his casual approach during exams; I thought he himself was responsible for his dismal performance. However, when he told about the way his teacher responded to the students’ queries about the paper, it frustrated me a lot. The teacher had told all the students that if anyone comes to her for changing the marks, she would cut that student’s marks. This according to me is ridiculous. As I had see

Reading

Since August this year, I have taken up reading very seriously. Till that point in time, I usually spent free time researching/studying about some exam, certification or future career. August-September was very critical point in my life where I decided to change the priority of these things. Problem is that I cannot spend my free time by doing nothing. In school/college I always had something more to study, even during my 2 year pre-MBA job stints I spent time preparing for CAT. With the free time available after work, I have been able to read more number of books in last 5 months as I did in 5 years before that. I have concentrated more on mysteries, behavioural economics and classics. Agatha Christie has been my favourite. I guess she deserves a separate post. I also read 2 books financial crisis – The Big Short (based on Subprime Crisis) and When Genius Failed (based on Long Term Capital Management). “The Great Gatsby” and “Pride and Prejudice” were followed by the movies (One

On Demand

Its been so long since I blogged last time that even my browser history does not have my own blogger link now. Well, this post is specifically dedicated to 2 of my friends. One who on her FB post forgot to mention me in asking fellow bloggers to start blogging again, but remembered me after hitting the submit button ;)  Thanks   Rutuja for asking me to come out of hibernation :)  The other one is the person who made the most fun of my "self centered" writing when I was writing the blog (and making fun/exposing other friends), suggested me that I could use my blog style of writing to write a speech about a dear friend of ours. The speech would talk about the friend's good/bad qualities, his past "quotes" (" Papad tar papad "), memories related to him. We would present it at the time of his engagement to his bride to be. Now, since I have stopped writing the blog in 2013, I was not sure how I would approach the whole thing. So I have decided th