Now to all the lurkers, readers and everyone who occasionally opens up this place, LuminaR has now been shifted to http://theluminar.net .

From now on, thats the place where it will be updated. So please guys, link me back there… I really need them…

Now LuminaR is gonna be bigger, more frequent, with a lot more insights than it could ever have with this wordpress hosted blog. All thats needed is your support… and your viewership…

An old drawing of mine.Don’t be fooled into thinking its Jolie again. It isn’t.

And NO.I couldn’t have extended the drawing a couple of inches in the downward direction. My graphic imagination isn’t anywhere near some of the people’s reading this blog.

As the year slowly draws to a close and so does my school life, I have been making a lot of trips down the memory lane with memories not just related to school coming back in waves of nostalgia. The number of recountable memories is too large and I cannot accommodate them in a single post without being responsible for loads of sore fingers because of too much scrolling. I’ll be adding the memories one by one in a chronological order at the end of each post in a section called Afterthought – Delving into my pensive. Afterthought:The earliest images of this life that come to me after a lot of straining of the temporal lobes are those of playing on the Commodore 64. I remember that once every week my brother and I were allowed to hook it to the old B/W TV and play on.
I remember looking down into the huge trunk which contained the floppy disks(8 1/2 inches) of over a 100 games, like a child looking upon a bunch of Christmas presents. My personal favorite was a game called Donald Duck’s playground, a lovable little game by Sierra which to the date remains one of the few games I enjoyed playing.

Then there were others like Impossible Mission, Olympics, Adventure text games and a hundred more which I can’t even begin to recall.
We had to throw the disks away 3 or 4 years ago ‘cos not even a Kabadiwallah would take them and my mom was going ballistic about the space the whole lot of them occupied in the attic. The C64 (Along with a C128) however remains enshrined in our home along with other antic computer hardware like XT motherboards, 10 MB HDDs and 640 K RAMs Bluegenemaid.

Cast

• Shahrukh Khan … Kabir Khan
• Vidya Malvade … Vidya Sharma
• Sagarika Ghatge … Preeti Sabarwal (whistles..!!)
• Chitrashi Rawat … Komal Chautala
• Shilpa Shukla … Bindia Naik

Now, I am not vela enough to list the entire hockey team of 11…

Plot + Synopsis

The movie is said to be distantly based on the life of Mir Ranjan Negi, who was some bloke who was screwed because his team faced a humiliating 7-1 defeat in Asian Games (such things are common in Cricket and Football!) and that too against Pakistan. At that time, India wasn’t habituated to losing to Pakistan and accepting defeat shamelessly and complacently the way it does today. So this poor guy’s career was sucked dry and he made a comeback 16 years later as the coach of the women’s hockey team which won gold at the 2002 Common Wealth Games. Now, 5 years from there, he is back to coaching women. He trained 16 women/girls who didn’t even know how to hold hockey sticks to seemingly look like sporting personalities. Yeah, Mr. Negi does have a role to play in the movie, he is the actual coach. Good Job mate!

Now enough of trivia, let me get down to business. Kabir Khan is in a similar plight. Not only is he the unlucky captain of the team which loses to Pakistan in the finals, but also the one who misses the penalty shootout and also the one who is alleged of match-fixing. After facing intense humiliation in the desi-style, which includes getting dejected by the entire country especially the neighborhood that forces him to leave his ancestral home to (figuratively) live in exile. 7 years and 42 days later… (I am not kidding. If you see the movie again, in a dialogue, he says – “Saath saal, ek mahina aur baara din lage mujhe…” total that up, 30+12=42!) he makes a comeback to coach a team which is not yet made. The 16 shortlisted candidates from each state are then introduced. On seeing the trailers and banners of the movie, I had made up my mind that there is nobody in this movie to gawk at and let alone continue gawking even after the movie is done. But then, what I saw there actually stumped me. They didn’t showcase 16 supermodels in shorts and short tees, but one debutant really rocked and made watching the movie a lot more worthwhile… Sagarika Ghatge was the queen of this movie for sure!

And the training, planning, and playing goes on… Politics, both internal and external come in their way, mass sulking takes place, then mass revival does, and finally everyone starts feeling motivated to play the big tournament ahead. As expected India wins gold there thus stealing the rights to lick the trophie leaving SRK astonishingly surprised. So that was what the movie about.

Analysis + Verdict

Choice of characters is one thing that is important in any movie which features broad ethnicity. CDI makers did do well with the job of getting people who could speak in the typical tongue of their state but didn’t do the best job in assigning dialogues. At times, it felt as if some Great Indian Laughter Challenge guy is mimicking someone from another state. Slapstick comedy mostly containing humor pertaining to the accent and the use of words was put on the girls. Seriously, Paresh Raval and Rajpal Yadav style humor don’t suit girls very much. It was good that they thought of showing diversity, but there should have been limit towards doing so using vernacularisms. All the Sardar jokes which you people might have heard till date were thrown on one of the girls who was from Punjab. Similarly, stereotyped Jaat behaviour of being wild and short-tempered was thrown on someone from Haryana.

The composition of the team was expected too. You have people with diverse emotions in there ranging from egoistic to self-centered to envious to high tempered behavior. You have people having the ‘union leader’ traits as well. While making the movie look more real, the makers actually made it more dramatic. But then to partially compensate all this, we had SRK. No h-h-h-hockey sort of speech in vibration mode, no Kal Ho Naa Ho-like emotional sequences involving heavy breathing. His face and eyes did a fantastic job.

Then comes the presentation of the story. I experienced Deja Vu throughout the movie before each and every SRK dialogue. Everything that the council speaks, everything that SRK says to his team was clichéd and expected. Although SRK was at his usual best, the script writers had to do some work before making such a predictable movie, it had to be different from conventional sports based movies.

One thing that was different was the fact that they used real locations to shoot the movie. Unlike movies like Iqbal, where a large part of the matches were shot in movie sets, this one made use of an actual hockey stadium. Someone finally thought about hockey and made others think about it too. People of India are simply not interested in the game despite the fact that premier hockey leagues (PHL) do exist in India with rivaling clubs. For many reasons (which I am not able to phrase right now), people don’t see hockey the same way they see cricket or football. This fact was shown in the movie as well. And after the movie, it seems that the hockey team got a few new sponsors along with a boost with the govt. aid as well.

Now coming to the matches, which formed a significant 42% of the showtime of the movie seriously broke my heart. After watching movies like Goal! featuring continuous raw camera footage of the match which made it look more realistic and action-packed than what we see on television, this was totally unexciting. Here, the match is shown as if the power to the camera is continuously switching from one camera to the next in sequential order. Picture this, a girl is shown from her head to torso swinging the hockey stick and in the next scene you only see a stick hitting a ball and in the scene after that you see it flying into the goal with someone blurry jumping towards it. That is simply so bad when compared to the adrenaline-rushing sequences in Goal!

And of course, I expected the team to win marginally in the finals. I was just so damn pissed with the final match that I almost cried. The match ends in a draw after several substitutions and dramatized pieces of advice leading to a penalty shootout. The makers expect the viewers to stay gripped to the seat keeping their fingers crossed till the last decisive shot of the penalty was taken. Excitement, my foot! They just added more showtime with this. The people simply enjoyed the final match with no scene longer than 2 seconds. Add to it highly patriotic and inspiring tunes with extremely determined lyrics. Why? All I can say is that they haven’t seen a hockey match before or they haven’t seen Goal! yet.

Anything good about the movie? Sagarika Ghatge for one. Other than that, there was some uniformity for a change in a Bollywood movie. SRK wasn’t the only noticeable one here. Almost every character got deserving amounts of showtime. It is a great movie for kids. The soundtrack was average, but due to good timing, it blended well with the movie. Truly enough, this is yet another warrant to the fact that Bollywood disparately wants to grow up and is experimenting with stuff for that… that is a really nice thing to know for sure. I end this absurdly long review with my final verdict. CDI wasn’t the best of the movies I have seen, and I must say, I went there with high expectations and was disappointed.

Rating: 6.5/10.

Sept. 1^st, 2007, was a holiday alloted for the parent teacher meet for us. (God bless Fr. Agnel guys!) Gladly, without missing any classes, KPS proudly sent its 2 teams of three each to the venue in a Toyota Haice! (I guess KPS recieves loads of charity these days!) Father Agnel, situated 42mtrs away from one of the FIITJEE hostels sprouted many ideas about its name in us thus initiating a thought provoking discussion in the van. We were finally happy with the theory saying, the guys who wanted to register the name of the school misspelled Angel to Agnel and registered it with the wrong name. Having run out of money, they couldn’t correct and re-register themselves with the correct name.

Anyway, this was supposed to be a talent fest consisting of competitions that included stuff from C++ Programming to Drama, to slogan writing and other bullshit! Of all these, the Exquizzit Quiz contest is considered to be one of the more prestigious contests of Delhi. I had heard a lot about it from the Great Quizzards around me… I had to be there.

The quiz went way above my expectations… it was simply sooo daaamnn bloooddy brilllliant! Created by an extra-ordinary child of god named Rohan Monarka, an NSITian and an IIM-A alumni, it was what hardcore trivia, observer-friendly, and simply impressive quizzing meant. Even the prelims, at first sight, we couldn’t get any of it… but later, after intensive thinking, a good indexed search across the crevices and ridges in the brain, we figured out or gave calculated guesses to many questions… While discussing the answers with other teams, we got a hint that DPS RKP’s Ishaan Chugh is gonna steal this… He was roaming around with a smile spanning from one end of his face to the other silently announcing that he got each and every question in the prelims right.

Anyway, the result, we were 4^th in the prelims amongst DPS RKP (x2), DPS VK (x2), Father Agnel (expected!), Father Agnel Some-other-branch (expected this too…) and New Era. It wasn’t the friendliest of the preliminary to be honest, we were both scared and exhilarated to go up the stage finals. Also, they asked a team name. We made a gaming console once again, PSP (Prashanth-Sanket-Pratham).

Rohan Monarka, (who looks way younger than he actually is), decided to make it a flat score direct-pass sort of a quiz consisting of 5 dry and 5 multimedia rounds. There is one thing that happens to me in every quiz, I get the worst or the most unlucky place on the stage. This one was no exception, all the toughies went through me ripping me apart with feelings of “Oh, I knew this… I simply screwed it up, I should have given a thought!” Many questions which were seemingly instantaneously easy were concentrated on the other half of the stage… and due to some dumb problems, the quiz was reduced to 7 rounds. Finally, we end up badly embarrasing ourselves up there with Ishaan Chugh’s team fairing 22 times better than us… The quiz was stupendously brilliant though… I just hope some Fr. Agnel guy walks past this blog and feels like mailing in the entire quiz to me…

PS- I asked those guys to mention on the certificate that we were the finalists of the quiz, otherwise, it would be just another invaluable piece of paper for us. But they failed to do so thus making me a leave a small piece of suggestion to future quiz organizers. LEARN SOMETHING FROM THE COLUMBAN OPEN QUIZ, AND MENTION THE POSITION IN THE CERTIFICATE OTHERWISE, THE PAPER THAT YOU GIVE US AFTER SPENDING 42 Rs ON CUSTOM PRINTING IS NO MORE VALUABLE TO US THAN YOUR DEAD SKIN IS…

Which quiz is up next… can someone tell me? And can anyone please get hold of the entire finals questionnaire complete with visuals and dry questions including those which were scrapped!

PS – Introducing Pratham to the FIITJEE Pinnacle Quizzing team. Pratham is fat guy who is bloody brilliant in quizzes themed on movies, literature, general trivia, music and many other observation based stuff. He is an avid reader and one of the most Bindaas people I have ever met. This was his very first quiz in Delhi. Good job mate!

Anyway, coming to the most memorable Independence day of my life… The final (old) Dynamix Meet. For a long long time I was looking for a holiday on a weekday for one specific reason, a final reunion with all the honorable and respectable alumni of my computer clan, Dynamix. This had to be the time of the meet, it almost feels like the freedom fighters got it done on this day only for me. Roshan, Ayush, Ankur and Som were the chief guests of the event as thier home was going to change geographical coordinates pretty soon.

Roshan and Ayush got into foreign universities namely Alberta, and Drexel with Roshan leaving on the 21^st. Ankur was off to JNTU Hyderabad on the 17^th (Talk about the timing!) Anyway, the venue of this historical gathering was at Basant Lok (The same place where you have PVR Vasant Vihar!) more specifically Yo! China, one of my favorite eaterias in the capital.

Along with Uma and the four higher minds, I guess I had some of the better times of my life there. The feelings after it was all done were a homogeneous blend of nostalgia, respect, complacency, and finally a big bunch of good wishes. I would just sum up the key proceedings…

• Everyone came considerably late leaving Uma and me waiting there for 42 minutes.

• Roshan got rid of his MIT-style nerdy spectacles and got decent looking frameless ones.

• Ayush lost some weight.

• Som gained a lot during the meet! (Superhuman appetite!)

• Food at Yo! China was yum…

• Discussions were cool too…

• I got a bunch of H2G2 radio shows from Roshan! (whoopee!)

• All of us had nice memories to take home in the end…
  

So there you a lot of reasons to remember this day, so the next time, any LuminaR reader not wishing me would have his/her IP blocked! (I do have a database of the all the visitors on my blog, and I do note down the static IPs of the visitors close to me.) Anyway, my 16th Birthday was a nice day to live, so here is an account of it.

It was a nice coincidence on this day. Raksha Bandhan, the Indian day to celebrate the brother-sister relationship landed fortunately on my B’Day. Thanks to that, I had a holiday from school, and I had more than just one excuse to step out of the house and have fun. So first came the B’Day demands, 2 books – The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Stephen Hawking’s – God Created the Integers. Parents promptly gifted me those.

The afternoon was spent with friends at Nirula’s with a lunch. (Nope, I didn’t pay for the whole thing!) The evening with my sissy with a dinner at a newly discovered eateria called Garam Masala (will review it soon!) near Chanakya. Anyway, thanks to everyone who wished me on that day. Best wishes to the whole world, extra wishes to my readers, and love you all!

P.S: I have no illustrations for this post!

MINET stands for Mother’s Information Network. Although the fullform doesn’t really sound very creative, the acronym surely sounds cool. MINET has largely been responsible in convincing me that computer symposiums are winnable. MINET 06 was the very first computer quiz contest in which I qualified to the finals, which simply resulted in some desire to win stuff, greater aptitude towards computers, and a different perspective towards observing daily technology. This year was very different though. Unlike last year, where I used to have Uma as my permanent quiz/crossword partner, this time, I didn’t know who my partner was till the quiz actually started. The way I would go for such events is fundamentally different from the way it used to be before… more on that later…

Well anyway, a recap of the chain of events on the first day…

One of the things that is different about going to symposiums this time is that, I am the one who would be blamed if I don’t turn up in time for the event. I can’t actually put things on a bus driver who was drinking tea and due to the hangover caused by the extreme dosage of nicotine, he takes a wrong turn at a point and then goes into a fit of amnesia which makes him forget where he was going to and finally after barely escaping lethal collisions and flying over a clogged up road, we reach there 42 minutes late. We are on our own this time… Personal transport has got its own advantages and disadvantages..!!

Anyway, reached there about 30 mins before the event began only to see faces from Ramjas about whom I felt nostalgic about. And then I saw just the same number of faces from DPS RKP as well, which made me wonder about a problem that I would probably face…

The executive members of the MINET clan i.e Akshay, Raag and Milind, tweaked their schedule on the last day for no good reason. The plan initially had the quiz, the decode and the surprise event all lined up chronologically. This was very good for me as we people had just one team (which planned to have just one person in it) for all the three events. After some divine intervention, they decided to flip the crossword with the programming event which meant a bad clash. Strangely enough, the DPS RKP guys were in a similar situation. After some assistance from the MINET team, for which I am greatful, I managed to give in all the three events.

First came the quiz prelims for which I was supposed to be all alone, due to some fortunate tweaking Gaurav did with the Showcase event, I got a partner. So with lots of hopes, I wait for the paper only to be burdened with a history test. I have been bad at history ever since I have known what it is. And tech history especially, I am totally not interested to know who invented the mouse or the floppy disk…

After the pathetic prelims, in which I didn’t qualify by one point, I rushed off to give the surprise event alone. To my surprise, it wasn’t Banana Sculpting, neither it was making Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters, but it was to solve a cleverly made crossword. I took less than 42 minutes to wrap up the whole thing. I got three clues right because of the poster hung next to me… and in the end, it turns out that I am one amongst five teams to score 11 points. The way they eliminated the extras was very fair and neat though. Akshay analyzed each clue and alloted it different points based on the difficulty level. So, I was out of the Surprise event fair and square…

Next up, the Decode event. You had to solve cryptic clues relating to technology and stuff. For the first 42 minutes of the event, I was alone in it only able to get 2 clues right. Pulkit joined me later and we together got 2 more. Apparantly, it wasn’t enough to get to the podium. So, I return home empty handed and really really angry…

But the happy thing was Gaurav came first in the Showcase event all alone. He presented an alternative design to the OLPC and explained how it would change the method of education in India forever. He did that spontaneously cracking stuff about others who presented their stuff. The judges were by far impressed and were speaking to him for more than 42 minutes after he got the trophie. Kudos to Gaurav for this…

Varun, perhaps the best Web-spinner in Delhi, remained at the top to come first in the WebD event. The topic was to create an “interface” for an online Operating System. What he did in those two hours looked spectacularly cool. Unlike a few others who just made a rip off of the desktop operating systems, added a few useless functionalities, and coded it like they would do for a real OS, this guy actually worked to the topic. What they had asked was an Interface and not a working OS. Although what Varun made was more of DI than a WebD entry, the thing looked like a futuristic NetOS.

Day II

I didn’t go. I had no reason to. The quiz finals were very nicely made. It wasn’t a history questionnaire this time though… sigh! Anyway, Varun and gaurav managed to get the second position in the Digital Photography event. (Did I tell you that Gaurav is a photography freak and owns a Nikon D80..??) A few photographs taken with some intelligent tuning and some creative photoshopping can give gorgeous looking visuals that would treat any eye!

Who is up next tell me! Its clobbering time in the next symposium!

An impromptu picture taken during a power cut.

Bluegenemaid

These are the most rocking ear-phones I have ever used in my life including the iPod earphones which are quite useless when compared to this one. I don’t think anything apart from a Bose would make me change my opinion.

They have a neodymium driver for greater clarity,gold-plated 1.2m Oxygen-Free Copper cable provide uninterrupted transmission and soft silicon (Although I personally prefer foam) earbuds that come in three varying sizes for outstanding comfort and noise cancellation. Being In-canal they are greatly more comfortable than the other kind anyway.

The quality of the sound is truly pristine. Its so crystal clear that you can hear each and every note and instrument being played with excruciating intensity. It has a very good bass (Although not as good as they say it is, still, good enough). The music feels like it is being injected right into your brain.

The ear-phones do the noise cancellation part exceedingly well. With my earlier i-Ball earphones I had to put a pillow over my head, push the earphones right into my ears and the turn the volume all the way up to be able to hear anything at all.With these I can keep the volume pretty low even for soft music and not hear a goddamned thing apart from the music. Really useful when my parents start their heard-only-about-42000-times lecture on how I shouldn’t waste my time writing dumb review that nobody (Or about 16000 people (stats of my last review)) is gonna read anyway. All I have to do is jack the earphones in my ears turn on the music and sport a look of mild interest while watching their lips move.

Coupla bad things about the earphones: You can’t move a step while you are using the earphones. If you do you actually feel (hear) the thumping of your feet on the ground over the music which is a big negative point for people like me who want to use the earphones while jogging and working out. Which brings me to the next point. My earlier phones had the wires forming a loop that you could hang around your neck so that the mp3 player remains suspended across it. These don’t and it took me a while to get used to holding my player in my hand all the time when I wasn’t sitting at my desk (My player can’t be hooked to the waist band of trousers and I dislike wearing the wrist strap). I inadvertently let go of player once or twice while sitting on the royal throne (Read:toilet seat) and almost dropped my mp3 player along with the ‘phones down the john.

These ear phones are truly excellent for acoustic music with good vocals, and heavy yet intricate music but not so much for out-and-out heavy metal and hard rock. This fact bothers me little ’cause I already prefer listening to such music on my speakers for two reasons. One being that I love my ears and having Marilyn Manson shriek right into my canals is not being very kind to them. Second is that my Creative 2500 Inspire 2.1 speakers are mind-blowing (As Prashanth would testify) and manage to rattle the whole house when just about anything is played on them. You just couldn’t ask for anything better for Heavy metal.

There are better earphones available out there but for this money you couldn’t get any better than this. I’d strongly recommend these to any audiophile who likes his music served well.

My verdict:7.6/10

Bluegenemaid.

G@ateway 07 was the annual inter school computer fest organized by Mont Fort Sn. Sec. School, Ashok Vihar Phase – I, Delhi. Me, being unexposed to the western and the northern part of Delhi had no idea on how to be there… I had to take some assistance. The service which was kind enough to provide me the information just the way I would like to have it was Google. Google Maps as even dummies know has covered most of Indian big cities to a very high level of detail. All I knew about the school was its postal address… “Mont Fort Senior Sec. School, Ashok Vihar Phase-I, Delhi – 110042.” A quick search on Google Maps with the string “Ashok Vihar Phase I, Delhi” gave me a 3-4 square kilometer area of a network of roads, gullies, etc. My powers of deduction couldn’t really help me out here as there wasn’t much you could deduce from that address. Although Google Map’s database is comprehensive enough to list all the metro stations, shopping malls, movie theaters, markets, hospitals, etc, it didn’t seem to have info on the whereabouts of any school other than DPS RKP!

So, I took the assistance of another fork of Google, Google Earth. I scanned the URL, copied the geographical co-ordinates, and opened the very exact location on Google Earth. The same 4 square kilometer area appeared but this time. it was a satellite/aerial photography image. Someone just then told me there was a swimming pool at Mont Fort and I could see a bright blue rectangle over there. After further zooming, I inferred that it had to be Mont Fort. So, I reversed the previous process and then entered a few more strings in the “From” box for my home and there I had it – A ready to use map highlighting the route from my place to Mont Fort generated in seconds. In another second, a hard copy of the same map was passed from my hand to the driver’s hand and 30-35 minutes later, we were greeted by the Mont Fort welcome committee.

My job here was to get hands on the trophies alloted for the quiz/crossword (Dynamix-06 Style!) and the Group Discussion. But before anything started, we had a few speeches in the audi and a very cute song recited by the 4 yr olds. After a few more speeches, announcements, and stuff (during which the presentation guys were playing San Andreas on the presentation laptop!) I ran towards the Language Lab for the quiz prelims all alone.

The Language Lab should have been the venue to hold the quiz finals if these guys had 42 teams in the final round. All the benches were fixed with a voice recorder, a mike, a speaker and had scope to attach a buzzer. The teacher’s desk had an even powerful mike all set for the quiz master.

Anyway, coming back to the crossword prelims, I found cryptic questions in scanty amounts there. Much of the questions there were direct questions. The ones that tried to be cryptic were extreme sitters. Someone told me I was second in the prelims. Next up were the Group Discussion prelims. Of everyone sitting there, Radhika from DPS RKP was the only one I could recognize. Most of my competitors had faces and schools with names new to me. I was ready to take on the most philosophical/controversial/though provoking topics of them all including GPLv3, Novell-MS Deal, DRM and many more only to get a very very general topic to talk on. I wouldn’t actually blame the Mont Fort guys for this as the participation wasn’t of the kind where they could place in such topics. Anyway, my topic was – “Is the collapse of the Internet a mere exaggeration..??”.

It wasn’t really the toughest of the jobs to reach to the finals from there but that didn’t really stop me from getting nervous. In the finals with me were Radhika (there goes the first position!) and several new faces from DPS MR, St. Columba, and few forgotten ones. The so called moderator, who is actually a kid studying in Nursery – A announces the topic from a small piece of paper in this fashion –

Now I would like you people to discuss about [GPLv3!, DRM!] “The Positivity in the interaction taking place on the internet.”

Sigh, was this for what I came there for? Damn this topic.

Before I finished thinking these two sentences, some tension started building on the stage with each and everyone blabbering balderdash about social networking and how thats creating a change in people’s life. I dozed off for sometime in hope that stuff would cool down and people would comeback to their senses. Five minutes later, I wake up to hear these guys still ranting about the same damned social networking stuff with the word Orkut highlighted ones every 2 sentences. I couldn’t help it but I shouted it out!

Interaction happening over the internet isn’t just Social Networking and meeting your pals and stuff, but is the information exchange taking place there. The World economy shares its immensely timed updates through the internet. So much of scientific research info. is shared among scientists, researchers and engineers panning the entire globe using the internet. You have entire operating systems created on the internet, namely Ubuntu using the skill of the developers situated in the remotest tot he most accessible parts of the globe. Stressing on social networking would be extremely shallow on anyone’s part as the real utility of the Internet is exploited by people in these fields. This is what the useful interaction is and positivity here is obvious as seen!

After a nanosecond of silence, one of them continues – “As I just said, Orkut is….”.

Shit! Shit! Shit! I felt like banging my head there. I was totally pissed off by the topic and even more pissed off with what these people were talking about. The nursery kid tried his best to stop these guys from shouting at each other and giving reserved people like me a chance to speak out, but no, these people were actually competing to see who knows more about the utility of Orkut! So it was obvious from here that I wouldn’t make it to the podium in the GD. But, a small request to the organizers of future computer events – PLEASE KEEP MORE SPECIFIC TOPICS RELATING TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMPUTING, RELEVANCE OF A TECHNOLOGY, OR IN OTHER WORDS, TOPICS WHICH ONLY TRUE COMPUTER GEEKS CAN OPINIONATE ABOUT. ANYONE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE A LIVELY DISCUSSION WITH PEOPLE FOR, AGAINST, OR NEUTRAL TOWARDS A NOTION THAT COOKS UP DURING THAT GD. SECONDLY, FIRM MODERATION WOULD HELP A LOT. THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO KNOW WHAT THEY ARE SPEAKING, BUT NEED TO BE GIVEN ADEQUATE AMOUNTS OF TIME TO SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES. (Do I need to give any examples now?)

Next up was the quiz finals, something what I was waiting for. I have had bad encounters with these, ever since I have entered this small localized world of computer quizzing. I usually manage to qualify to the finals in almost every quiz and tank on the stage in the end. So, I end up with a participation certificate which doesn’t even mention that I was up there on the stage giving a fight. This time, I did get something, a sweet local made trophie which says in bold alphabets – “2nd Place – Quiz”. The good thing about this is that I opened my account in the very first symposium I attended, alone.

The quiz was of a good standard. Not too many easy questions, especially the round of trivia called Digital Fortress where you had to know the biography of eminent hackers and cyber-criminals. I am really bad at computer trivia relating to the bygone history. Even then, scored a few questions in the rapid fire and finally secured a podium finish beating DPS MR on third. DPS RKP continue their winning spree in quizzing. I was all geared up for the quiz in the next symposium – MINET 07!