Ticket to Extinction

The phone bell started ringing at 10:15 AM in the morning. My mother picked up the phone and woke me up and told me it was a `different` voice on the phone.

To start with , I don't like people calling me up that early in the morning. (Now don't tell me it's not `early` in the morning. It is.). But the word `different` and the way my mother said it made me get up without much haste and talk. It was Samer and he gave me h-o-r-r-i-f-i-c news. I was to go to CST today with him and Ayush to book tickets for the industrial visit of our IEEE student branch.That meant that i would waste an entire day of my PL yet again.

I have hardly studied for 5 days in my entire preparatory leave.And now that i have wasted another day, there are hardly 5 days remaining :(.

I ,Ayush and Samer reached Churchgate at around 3:30 PM. Another junior was to join us there. After searching around , crossing the same road 10 times and going around in circles we found him finally or rather thankfully. This junior was to help us in booking tickets. His father is the DRM of Bhusaval division of Indian railways.(for techies,lug members and gpl fanatics, DRM here means Divisional Railway Manager :P ). Very influential.

Our Industrial visit starts of by catching Udyan Express to Bangalore. After visiting a few (irrelevant) industries there, we were to go to Mysore and from there to Ooty and finally on the last day to Calicut to board the Nethravathi Express back to Mumbai.
Initially we had thought of attaching two extra coaches to Udyan express for our journey as we had 183 people coming with us.But unfortunately we were unaware of the extra coach policy.The coach policy says that the extra coaches that you take along with you have to travel with you and come back with you.In effect we have to pay the travelling expenses for that coach from place x to y to wherever and back to x ( in short : we have to leave the bogie back from where we took it else pay for it to come back ). And as we are travelling by road in between Bangalore and Calicut, we would have had to pay the fare for moving the extra empty coaches from Bangalore to Calicut so that they can come back with us from calicut to Mumbai. Plan Cancelled.

We then went to check the availability of tickets ( which surprisingly had not been done yet by anyone !! ). We realised that only 192 seats were available for the 7th of January, our departure date and we had to book 183 of them + the fact that we didn't have proper permission for group booking of that many tickets \o/.

What to do ?. Junior calls up daddy and we get loads and loads of automatic privileges :P. All permission issues resolved. We went to some lady in the ticket reservation centre in CST who apparently was also in a very influential position to help.
So it was like,
Junior-> Daddy -> this lady => things get better :)

There was just one BIG missing link (and rude shock) remaining. We had to fill up all those reservation forms for all 183 people, both ways. We sat down writing the reservation forms.
2 trains
for each train :
180 odd students
9 concession forms (20 students on each concession form)
4 reservation form for each concession form ( upto 6 students on each form )
and loads of information on each form, right from full name, to gender to age to concession form number to this to that and the person behind the counter wanted every millimeter of information correct. :(.
I don't know how much i wrote. It was all done in a trance. But i don't think i can ever forget 6529 and 6346 the two train numbers i entered umpteen number of times.

The only entertainment I and Samer had was overhearing a conversation between the person who was sitting be hing the foregin tourist counter and was lodging some complaint with the police.We had seen around 3 Nigerians at this counter.Apparently these Nigerians showed an expired Visa to this counter person.The Visa itself was apparently fake. The counter person got suspicious and told the Nigerian that he wasn't sure of his Visa and that he had to verify it with someone and went inside. When the person returns back, the Nigerian is nowhere to be seen and his passport was left lying on the counter. :).

With 99 tickets booked at 7:50 PM, the counter person closed for the day telling us (read: Ayush) to come tomorrow. Thankfully he has blocked the rest of the tickets for us so that no one can book them. So someone hopefully goes today and books them while i sleep / try to study :)

R4nD0m Cr4P

100m race. 90m done , racer well placed .. 10 more metres to go. And the racer slows down. And he stops. And finally he sits down to update his blog. Right that's what i am doing.

Had a hectic semester ( or made it so ); too busy even to sit down and give justice to the best game on earth ( for those who already don't know, it's minesweeper ).
Ok, maybe academically it wasn't much of a hectic one, but well, i like doing extra-curricular stuff, and i guess i had too much of it this sem.


To start with , the most tiring and draining was being in the Tech Team of Nirmaan , an IEEE organised (almost) technical festival in my college. Was a test of every damn thing on earth for me. Test of endurance, test of patience, test of .. [put every bad thing here ]. None of the tests were technical though.

Being in the TechTeam,
I realised that there's no such thing as "Nothing is Impossible". There are things which (who) are impossible."People".

I don't think google has enough storage capacity to store my rants about such people i encountered, so i won't write them here.

Then there was my PCT ( Presentation and Communication Techniques) project. Group of 9 people. That figure says it all. 9 people in one project !!

Even if realising it once wasn't enough, I realised again that there's no such thing as "Nothing is Impossible". There are things which (who) are impossible. People.

The most impossible of all the people is ,i guess, my new principal. Who else can think of a brilliant idea to make people who have less than 50% attendance in more than two subjects this semester to sign an undertaking on a stamp paper that they'll attend atleast 95% (+n impossible) next semester. Or else their results of this semester will be null and void.

Had to do many decisions this sem, most of them being hard.And, for the first time maybe i don't repent most of them that i took. Infact from the decisions that went wrong i got confirmation that some decisions that i took in the previous semesters were right on target.:).So all in all it was a win-win situation. :P


All of the above very much related to my college stuff.

Elsewhere, at a place called home, things are getting weirder with another cat temporarily camping. Intentions seem to be making the camp a permanent one, but i don't think my previous cat entertains the act much. That's one thing which needs to be kept a watch upon.

Programming goes on as usual with me seriously considering fitting my sleep time within compiles.:P

Was seriously disappointed to know my exam dates.Why the hell did they have to keep an exam on the 24th of November ?. Hell. We have 8 days of holidays between some exams. But 24th had to be an exam day :(. Too bad. Foss.in, Maybe next time.

Only two weeks remaining for my exams, and i'm still wondering when i'll actually start studying!!.
So before i lose link with whatever minuscule bit i know,off i go. ( er, off i go to sleep i mean. maybe i'll start later today ;) )


p.s. yes, i know i've lost it. But it was you who was an idiot who read the entire thing even after it was titled `R4nd0m Cr4p`.