College is over.

Last Friday was the last working day, and the semester examinations starting from the 25th of this month will be the last nail in the coffin.

If there was anything called a carefree life, it had to be this. Apart from the obvious things that I shall miss, like friends, freedom and fun, one thing that I shall really lament will be the absence of cheap Internet access.

True, we had to beg with stupid system administrators, deal with brain dead rules made by the institute Director and his sycophants, and be satisfied with an occasionally overloaded 2Mbps connection, but it was still a costly resource which we received at a throwaway price of Rs. 1250 per semester and thanks to Razorblade many of these limitations were no more there for the better part of the last academic year.

Once I reach home sometime in mid May, I will be left with a dial-up connection through one of Reliance's WLL telephones. It is not the speed that is my major concern. It is the cost. Gone would be the days when we would happily download ISOs after ISOs and stay logged into IRC for 2 to 3 days in a row. No more mirrored Fedora repositories on the local network and it would be back to manually downloading and suffering in dependency hell with RPM.

What would I not give for a cheap, unlimited, broadband connection at home? Oh yes, the initial $500 from Google washes away all financial issues. But sadly money was the least of all obstacles I ever was going to had. My folks at home are given to believe that the Internet is one of the best ways to while away your time, while any form of instant messaging is the most useless enterprise in the world. The presence of self-styled computer experts within family circles aggravate the situation even further. How do I blame them when so-called knowledgeable professors know no better?

But why should I give a damn anyway? So let us see how good I am in showing the world the middle finger and do what should be done.

This summer has turned out to be a really eventful one for me. We arrived in Mumbai on the 1st of June for our (Rakesh + me) internship under Dr. Nagarjuna in Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, which is a national level centre run by Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. We were supposed to work on GNOWSYS, and eventually found ourselves inducted into the core development team, which comprises of Dr. Nagarjuna and Prasanta Baruah apart from Rakesh and myself.

One good thing followed another, and we had a pleasant surprise when we found our project proposal in Red Hat Scholarships was accepted. However there were a few strange events associated with programme that I would like to write about here.

We received a couple of messages from the Eklavya team, which co-ordinates with Red Hat regarding the scholarships, asking us to provide further details about our college and the project itself. Things like 'official college email ID', 'college address', 'number of hours per week to be spent on the project', and so on. However the funny thing was, no matter how hard we tried, the 'official college email ID' field would never accept the value entered by us. No error messages nothing. It simply erased the value once the 'Accept' button was pressed on the HTML form. Moreover there was (and is still) no means to upload the scanned copy of the bona-fide certificate issued to me by my college, as was stated on the Red Hat Scholarships page (http://in.redhat.com/community/rhscholarship.php). Repeated mails to the co-coordinators and the organizers yielded nothing more than the occasional stunted reply.

The matter came to a head when we received a mail threatening to block our candidature, since we have failed to supply the necessary details. Goodness me! Just imagine the irony of the situation. The organizers finally relented and apparently another team from our college had given a different value in the 'official college email ID' field which caused the conflict. Very very strange in my opinion.

In the meanwhile our stay in HBCSE is turning out to be a wonderful experience. The weekly treks, sometimes to the hills (Lohagadh, Maholi) and sometimes to the jungles (Borivli National Park), alongwith the occasional afternoon cricket and soccer sessions can be pointed out as the high points. Prasanta and Shrikant turned out to be good friends, while we developed a good rapport with some of the other staff members and research scholars as well. The adage that any institution is judged by the people it harbours can be aptly attached to HBCSE.

Each session with Dr. Nagarjuna is an experience worth its weight in gold. I must admit that till the time I first stepped into his office, I simply thought GNOWSYS to be this strange thing developed by very strange people. However thanks to the regular sittings with Dr. Nagarjuna (or GN as he is fondly called) that has been transferred to a sound understanding of the GNOWSYS architecture, and a firm belief in its virtues. I had never dreamt in my wildest dreams that I would be here in HBCSE working under the President of FSF India, and have him as my mentor.

Bombay as always has been extremely lucky for me this time too. I got a chance to participate in a pop-science quiz show produced by UTV Productions. The chance arose mainly due to the fact that the Mumbai blasts had caused a number of representatives of the various zones to drop out from the event. Although I was neither within the age limit of 25-40 years, nor was I a resident of North India, the fact that I have spent the last 3 years of my life there made me eligible to participate. With Sachin Kwarekar, the guy who played Netaji in The Lost Hero, as the quiz master it was a wonderful evening spent in Aram Studios in Goregaon. The fun was in no way diminished by the fact that I could not qualify for the second round.

A day before our sixth semester exams were about to commence, we (Rohit + myself) got ourselves in a nice spot of bother. We had gone to Ekta Cafe to grab some food, and had locked the door of our room without bothering to take the keys with us. Yeah! It is possible to engage the lock without the key since this one had a push-down mechanism. And there we were looking hopelessly stupid, trying to break into our own room.

Now the most interesting thing is that when we started to cut through the lock using a hack-saw, it opened up by itself just after we had cut through half the iron. Could you believe it? It was as if a magical key had been used to open it. Only that the only keys to it were inside the locked room.

This surely was one of the strangest incidents I have been involved in.

Not often do you get to see a hat-trick, and if its one by an Indian bowler then the phenomenon is even rarer. Hence when I lazily strolled into the Dhauladhar Boys' Hostel common room to watch the Karachi Test between India and Pakistan, I barely expected to see one. But what a moment it was, when Irfan Pathan scalped Salman Butt, Younis Khan and Mohammed Yousuf with the fourth, fifth and sixth ball of the match. Three perfect outswingers (inswingers for the right-handed Younis and Yousuf) had produced the first hat-trick in the history of Test cricket to be taken in the first over of a match.

It was indeed an hour of glory, and I had a glimpse of history!