And this too shall pass...
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Sleepless nights and nightless days,
Good hope that stays and memories doth spin,
Memories that weave and good hope betrays
Only adds to the pain within.

The Last Man on Earth

A few days ago we had a story writing competition back in office..... The situation provided was - "A beautiful day and i was enjoying my stroll in the park with the breeze" and we had to build a story on that...

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The Last Man on Earth...
A beautiful day and i was enjoying my stroll in the park with the breeze. I heard someone calling me from back and when i turned - I could see no body. My body was trembling with fear, and sweat was dripping all over my face, because I knew no one could have called me as I was the last man alive on earth…!
I carefully crept past the tall deserted buildings of Manhattan , most of them in shackles and dusty as it had been more than 13 years since a single person stepped into or out of them. This morning walk that I took was my routine which I followed since the last 13 years before which the greatest ever disaster shook humanity when the third world war saw two big democratic superpowers go head on head and the largest ever nuclear missile that was developed, got misfired and totally destroyed mankind off the face of earth. I don’t know whether to call it my destiny or misfortune, that I happened to work off the coast of Antarctica as a deep sea explorer, where the nuclear waves never reached sparing my life.
I reached home after my nostalgic morning walk. It had been a long gruesome, agonizing 13 years where I spent my life in total solitude back home, and did not have a soul to talk with or share my distress. There had been plentiful of everything that a man could ask for – money, food of all kinds –tinned, canned, absolutely nil traffic on the otherwise bustling roads of Manhattan, too much space to live in, the entire world at my disposal, but there was not a soul to whom I can share my feelings.
I had made all desperate efforts through worldwide radio signaling, TV broadcasts, just to check out whether there could be alteast one other living person whom I can contact and share my solitude and all that had been in vain for the last 13 years.
I opened my diary and the page read “26 November, 2065” and i started writing-
“I knew that with me dead , will come the end of the term called humanity. All theories of God and Religion have become null and void and are mere hypothecations. Science after all has proved itself, as man was but a mere by-product of the big bang. I have reached the summit of my desperation and I am going to end my life with it”.

I closed my diary, took a full 360 degree look around my surroundings, opened a bottle of champagne and took one final sip, in the other hand still lifting my .42colt Polish Revolver, and pointing at my forehead - finger on the trigger. That’s when it happened….the bottle of champagne slipping from my trembling fingers and crashing…. my body getting drained off the living fluids…my face becoming as pale as dead snow...

There was a knock on the door...!

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The CAT purrs yet another time...

This is an extract from my personal posting on a forum regarding my attempt on ‘CAT-2010’ with a little customisation to suit the needs of an effervescent blogging strategy...
Here it goes....
There wasn’t any particular rhyme and reason for me to put this specific mind threads into binary....
But thanks to the few guys back home & office who urged me to put my writing skills onto the keyboard which dint work for a long time....
Until now that i feel pushed to the edge of the cliff and desperate enough to write something about my (much frustrated) "CAT - 2010" experience which forced me to find a biased equilibrium on the seat for 40 odd mins (which i knew would eventually seem like eternity)... and put the following few lines onto the papyrus
I am not even sure whether what i am going to write in the next few lines is exempted under the disclaimer tag which the (no-optioned) CAT takers including me have signed before the independent moment that we could make the CAT purr...

This blog is purely dedicated to the few guys (including the likes of Nitin and Satish who did a great job in cribbing to me about the way the CAT was conducted in the last 2 years) and for me as of my share has to complement them equally about the same (out of my personal experience though) so that it might (just might...) provide a soothing feel to the highly enervated nerves of ember that are possessed/processed by these guys....
Inspite of all the 'build-up' that i had given above, i am going to keep the screenplay very sweet and simple. A very brief(though brief implies it's quite meagre) intro about the scenario...
Like most other engineering guys, CAT for me too had been:
· a religion - a religion where the devout self sacrifices himself/(in few cases - herself) for a virtual idol that eludes millions for victims together YOY...
· an addiction - an addiction that gets the wards the patronisation from the parents themselves
· a slowpoison deathblow - that the GIRLFRIEND herself allows to be inflicted on her man love for its a matter of I...I...M... (God save them)
(i need to mention this here thought its unwarranted but it keeps lingering in my mind often- Shruthi you have done a great job and have all the rights to put airs on your head for you are a part of the franchise... :)
The bottomline - You know that you are hanging by the strings of silk on a 10000 ft deep cliff, and hog on hamburgers at the same time.
To the point -
CAT 2009 - the first CBT of its kind was nothing but pathetic.... (the only person who is not yet aware of that should be the grandson of Vinoth Ramalingam)...
CAT 2010- The apple of my eye (or the eye of my apple? i am not sure how to frame it coz both are into oblivion now)
The promises that were made clear cut before the exams could begin were that "CAT IS GOING TO BE GLITCH-FREE THIS TIME". We in India normally hope against hope that something that has a pathetic history will come good eventually - but we do fail to realise that the word eventually doesnt have a reference to a particular time frame - what i failed to understand in std.8, becomes evident to me now - thanks to Albert Einstein and Mrs. Susan George - my physics teacher @ SJC.
As expected, CAT was indeed a mixed bowl this time around. For me it was like the wires of a computer mother board entangled with our own version of chinese hakka noodles... The paper was good (any person out of my jurisdiction reading this please make a note that i aint discussing any questions in particular!!!).
RC and Verbals - my strongest forte could not be breached by the hardcore questions that were set by the most intelligent brains in the country.
DI and Logics - my version of Mathew McCoughney's 'Fools Gold' was quite dodge-able this time.
BREAK.
I had 47 mins pending on the clock which was fast melting as an ice chunk that was laid on Chennai's own OMR and i had one full section of Quants to complete...!
BREAK.
The most undesirable thing happened. All the test taking machines got shut down - reason – servers (damn) were out of something - some jargon no-one but the admin guys understood.
While most of my fellow test takers had infinite number of reasons to thank their lucky stars for giving them an idle window (the fortress of the phila-chronistic fairies had frozen) using which time they can solve the questions that were half resolved in their mind. On a broader sense when i think how in the best way that i can compare the unfair advantage that my batch of test-takers were granted as against the other guys who had nothing more than 2hous and 15 mins - not a morsel of a second more. The idle time just meant one thing - the computers were shut down, the time before these could get restarted provided a luscious window in which we could solve all the half-solved and unresolveable questions which obviously had been attempted on the scrap sheets provided for solving. What a big difference a 0.1 mark could make for a person clearing the cut-offs and not...!

I am not trying to be holy here. Not that i did not utilise the opportunity to solve some treacherous enigma of questions for which i had pressed unwillingly the 'review later' button.... but the problem was i had a flight to catch @ 8.30 pm.....i was on an official assignment and had to be in another part of the country that night on an official project related specifics...
The test starter @ 3.30 pm. The time the crash occurred was somewhere around 5 pm and the test was scheduled to get over at 5.45.... i thought that i had ample time to make it to the airport as i had a window of 2.5 hours and the travel to the chennai airport would eat roughly 1.5 hours of my time.... but this crash.... after prayer after prayer, the system was restored @ 6.40.... an idle window of close to 1.20 hours....!!! any CAT taker will declare this as their best shot at the most coveted IIM brand.
But for me ..... Had it been some other day, i would have turned to be the 'extreme opportunist' (i admire Edge of WWE in this context) and made the maximum use of this idle time...
But the inevitable choice of having to shell out a few thousands of rupees from my pocket for an airticket , in case i missed my normal flight that night kept haunting me like the ghost of an ex president around the white house and prevented me from making use of that idle time to solve some problems that were stored in the meta tables of the oracle system in my brain... (Mind you - the normal airticket was actually on my employer’s expense catalogue aka 'already paid by the company'
My main concern is just one thing - how would you leverage the (i repeat) the UNFAIR AVANTAGE that the people in my cat batch got as against the people of other batches who did not have any extra time to solve the questions? How do you articulate this into the concept of psychometric normalisation (i guess Duckworth Lewis would be more simple when compared against this 'normalisation')...
At the end of the day i dont care. Because i finished my test at around 7.20 and reached my airport @ 8.29 (trust me when i say that the kingfisher boarding closed at 8.30pm...!)
And i choose to call all these as DIVINE PROPHECIES...And i am utterly religious.

And i quote Bob Marley...
Turn your lights down low
And pull your window curtains;
Oh, let Jah moon come shining in -
Into our life again,

P.S. I assume myself as an inventor (among my various other profiles) and have done quite a decent job in inventing a few words over the years (and happy that an org such as 'the royal society for the prevention of cruelty to the English language(!) doesnt exist). In case of any obscure/unacceptable combos in this blog, please ignore.