Quiz funda

Help wanted from all the quizzing freaks. The annual Tech quiz is supposed to be held on 5th of October. Any relevant links, files, etc. will be appreciated.
Mail me for a sample of last year's quiz -- ravihanda@gmail.com
Is anyone of you familiar with the yahoo id : novia_jm

Fourteen Month Old Question

I have an idea, a concept or whatever you would like to call it. When I told this to one of my friends his immidiate reaction was, "Handa, you are sick." This idea was part of the story-line of a play which I was writing, the play never got completed and I personally find this idea to be incredibly romantic.

Guy meets girl. Guy falls in love with her. Proposes. Girl is not interested. Girl is dating someone else from the same batch. Guy sees both of them. Guys kills the girl and then commits suicide. Reason, atleast together in death and the third person wont be able to disturb them. They meet in heaven. Other guy did nothing. Guy proposes again. CURTAINS.

Given above is the rough summary of the plot of a play that was never completed. My friend, now working in IBM kolkata, who was the co-author and was supposed to play the lead, turned this idea down because the protagonist had a lot of negative shades. So here is my attempt to search the answer to a fourteen month old question "Was the protagonist sick or incredibly romantic?" If its not obvious enough yet, I belong to the group which would say "Incredibly romantic"

I admire Sam Mendes's work to such an extent that you can't even fathom but I think he made a mistake with the cast of Road To Perdition. Do you concur?

PS. I know this post sucks... Not in the mood

A Night To Remember

When I joined Computer Science And Engineering Department, Indian Institute Of Technology, Kharagpur (tired of writing CSE, KGP) I realized pretty soon that this is not going to be easy and the tragedy is that I was right but it never seizes to amaze me with the newfangled subjects that it puts infront of me and one of such subjects is Selected Topics In Algorithms (we call it STA). 24 students had to go through the ordeal of giving an examination and I am quite sure that no one understood a single question in the paper. I am not going to get technical about it or tell you about how the exam was. The attractive part was the night before the exam.

Five of the so called intellectuals, Dengu(Robin Dangwal), Pappu(Sumit Thakkar), Tikli(Anirudh Bhatt), Rakesh and Handa sat down to study for the paper around 11 hours before the exam was supposed to begin(0900 hrs) but within the next 48 minutes they realized that there is no way out. It was an open-book exam which makes it a bit tougher. We narrowed down the course to the so called easy portions and thought that if we do get some easy questions in the paper atleast we won’t flunk. It’s around 0230 hrs and Tikli spots something which keeps us occupied for nearly half an hour. Take your guess about what it could be:

No, it wasn’t a supernova or any other kind of interstellar phenomenon.
No, it wasn’t a pornographic movie.
No, it wasn’t a F.R.I.E.N.D.S episode.
No, it wasn’t a female who had wandered inside the boys hostel by mistake.
No, it wasn’t a ghost (ISI seems to be facing that problem these days)

But it was a grasshopper caught in a spider’s web. It’s hard to believe but all of us sat down, talked about it, discussed about it for more than half an hour and that also at a time where every minute counts. I am not going to talk about what happened in the examination hall but I am quite sure that all of us will pass the subject. The grasshoppers fighting spirit was more than good enough to cheer us up.

Special thanks to the special someone who talked to me during the study breaks which were quite frequent throughout the night. She also called me at around 4 – 4:30 (on Tikli’s phone when he was out _____ing. You people are free to assume whatever you want) and I am quite sure that it was one of the reasons why I was all charged up for the exam. I am one of those people who believe in saying Thank You and Sorry. So, THANK YOU

Edited after Suhail's comment: The spidey won.

Its not blogging, its personal

Couple of days back I was having a stimulating and interesting conversation (another name we have given to blah blah) with my friend about the concept of blogging. He started attacking me about how I never talk about personal stuff and my daily life in my blog His argument was that a blog should also serve as a diary but I did not concur with him and proved my point on the basis of statistics which as usual were in my favor . I feel extremely proud about the drive I have for collecting and analysing statistics, meaningless fact and redundant data. Even then I decided to write some stuff about me which I consider is extremely personal. Here it is:

1. I dont eat kitkats by breaking them in the middle, I eat them like any other chocolate without breaking them.
2. I dont like to mix anything in my drinks other than ice and i also avoid that if the weather permits.
3. If I like a movie I can watch it any number of times. There are atleast 10 movies which I have seen more than 25 times like Fight Club, Natural Born Killers, Pyasa, etc.
4. If I like a song I put it in repeat mode and listen to it for couple of days non-stop and for the past couple of days its Ankhiyan by Fuzon.
5. The name of my first crush was Namrata Sharma who is doing her medical studies in Manipal and I haven’t seen her for the past 7 years. She still lives in the same place which is around 180 meters from my house but both of us never have holidays at the same time. Any help in locating her will be appreciated.
6. All my knowledge about women and relationships is derived from FRIENDS and SEINFELD.
7. I think the best time to be born is September 1958 so that I am 16 when Stairway To Heaven is released.
8. My dream job is that of a movie critic.
9. I want to write my autobiography someday.
10. The first time I proposed to a girl was because of a bet.
11. I cant talk to a girl if she is good looking (on a relative scale, better than my ex) and is smarter than me.
12. I believe that there is no act of selflessness in this world and everyone has a selfish motive behind what he does.
13. I read the ending of the book beforehand if I like the book. (I picked this habit after I saw When Harry Met Sally)
14. I hate Jane Austen, Toni Morrison, Herman Hesse, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte and Michael Ondaatje because I read their books from cover to cover and then realised what a waste of time they were.
15. I used to think that I came up with "It’s not you, it’s me" routine.
16. Things I thought that would fail for sure: Mobiles, Jenifer Lopez, Salman Khan, Abhishek Bachchan, Congress, hunt for Saddam, Five Point Someone.

Ode To A Lost Weekend

The frequency of my posts as well as my poems has gone down and I think this will up the counter in both those fields. I think this time more than one person knows who this is for.

Leaded sky opened doors of frozen hell above,
Rushing through the noise of bells and wheels,
Had a reason to wait for words from a dove,
After the worst is over, its good that God reveals,
Only to know

Meandering through those rye fields of mine,
Dreams learnt newfangled mannerisms from the birds,
When the moment of truth confronted father time,
Silence spoke so much louder than words,
Of promises broken

Soul Mountain

I got this quote by Alfred Lord Tennyson memorized, “The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions.” but contrary to many I find this quote more depressing than in the positive tone because in the society we live in, few get the opportunity to follow their dreams and passions as reason and judgment always stand in the way and wage a war against the former two which they win more often than not because they got the deadliest weapon in the world known as appetite as a part of their ammunition and losing in the war is the one thing that most of us, at least I cannot afford.
Everyone from Paulo Coelho to Robin Williams tells me to “Follow my dreams” but is it that easy? There are always two paths I can go by but in the long run will I get the opportunity to change the road I am on. Everyone who has talked to me knows that I don’t want to become an engineer and is quite easily convinced when I tell him about my poor grades, my pathetic academic record, my history of flunking in exams and a few other things which I won’t like to mention in here. It would be better if I was in the US where I could flip burgers and have a decent life while I moved on the road I wanted to be, but a college dropout in India has absolutely no value whatsoever. At least I have not met many people who dropped out of college and did something without getting a degree unless his parents were already multi millionaires.

Dream dies.
Passion burns out.
Reason jubilates.
Judgment gags.
A soul in the quoin ponders,
Why do I... exist?

The 10000th Visitor

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9th September 2004	15:28:23	No referring link
9th September 2004	16:07:52	http://holdensays.blogspot.com

My Pink Page

For the uninitiated, Pink Pages are written by fellow students when they pass out of college. Given below is an unexpurgated copy of mine.

C-305 Nehru Hall is not only home to certain rare tropicana spiders,rain insects,Entomologists and Palaentologists running after the creatures mentiones above,but is also inhabited by a creature of an undiscovered species, and needs to be worked upon by a few taxonomists.We on our part have tried our best to do justice to Handa and his evolution line,but in vain. We are therefore proud to present to you,Handa,uncut,uncensored ...and whats more with lots of scope for Evolutionary Research.
1. Size does matter ...and Handa made most of it, V A was his better half ( frankly,wudnt the fraction be indeterminate ???) during his first year.
2. Took game theory too seriously,ended up with a girl, A B who faces the same predicament as he. ( Her majesty hasnt found the proper Phylum she belongs to either)
3. A Quizzard "par" excellence , Handa ne ek baar quizzing ki saari hadh "par" kar di when he plagiarised from kcircle.com to handa.cjb.net . Quiz captain of Nehru, he got the Quizmaster flabbergasted when he started walking in out and around the stage during SF in search of greener pastures right in the middle of the quiz. Claim to fame in the quizzing world was correcting Motz and Adi on the name of a porn movie. We hope you are reading this Siddhartha Basu.
4. Governor of ETDS(English Technological Dramatics Society), he took acting a bit too seriously . Life is the theatre of the fool ...or is it that life is full of theatres ??? Handa was always in his Drams mode. A form of Dramatics of his own , he would respond to a surprise of any form on the part of his co-actors (well ...the world's a stage ...)with " THO KYA HUA ???!!!! " So much so that when Handa was once caught cleansing his legs in the wash basin in a strange posture which only ballet dancers would comprehend, his immediate reaction was "What's so strange about it ??!!! " " How foolish of you to raise such a meaningless query ??!!!"
Handa came close to molestation in a play directed by him when he kissed the female lead without her approval, and shrugged it off peacefully by claiming that it was just the necessity of the role !!
5. A chalta firta movie encyclopedia , we beleive he is a clone of imdb.com , which is his home page as well. If there ever was a movie buff in Kharagpur, thy name is Handa.
6.Understandably, an ardent follower of psychopathic serial-killers, on a boring afternoon he would like to dip a person in sugar solution, tie him up and abandon him in a desert.
7. A creative Writing stud , his shayaris have added to the woes of most of our Wingies. So much so that people were forced to go through his shayari sessions to get a CD written by him.
8. Although he is a Gold-Flake fan, he always kept a stock of bidis in his room for emergency or would borrow bidis from anyone ranging from Rickshawalas to the Canteen workers.His treat at Billoos was reduced to the same standards as well when the invitees were almost the entire campus and the budget per invitee came down to 3.75 bidis per person to be precise.
9. Academics wasnt for him and we beleive his guide still regrets having given him the project.
We wish to end the free copy of our research work here. For the complete information please come with a few bidis to CTW.The inconvenience caused is deeply regretted.

I hate everything

The blogger didnt allow me to publish any post today... So people join me in "I HATE BLOGGER" campaign. Ideas welcome.
The blogroll has been updated. Please tell me if I missed out anyone or any of the links are not working properly.

My only published work.... YET

Dainik Bhaskar. Sunday Magazine, somewhere in September 2001