Hmmm.. how do i start. As i started to write this post “walk away” starts playing on my winamp. Co-incidence or fate, the first few words say “As this masquerade is finally over….”, i start to get nostalgic.
When i took my first steps into my engineering so many things changed. People, subjects (as though it mattered 
), teachers, the whole environment where i would next spend my 4 years of education. I thought i could turn my back on these things and just concentrate on what i was here for “EXCEL IN THE FIELD OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING”. The first couple of months went really well without any glitch in my concentration.
Things got a little more interesting when i first started squash on the stage with the other guys. Well i can proudly say i was o.k at it. Then came the exams and i did well. FCD, well thats something as elusive as the black hole to the naked eye. Second semester started off in all its splendor, superb trigonometric and calculus problems, ‘C’ programming, i thought “i was in baby”, buy my glory as budding programmer was short-lived as i found myself in the fathomless black ocean of pointers and address variables, occasionally destroying my memory locations. But thats o.k i was good at math 
.
The turning point in my engg life came when i was invited to join a “friendly” game of football. I play primarily defence (pretty good at it ). The friendly game of football soon turned out a routine thing after college hours till the buses left. First we guys played on the surface where we now have the “famous RNSIT gundi”, if used properly can be used to harvest rain water which i think is still a dream. I play a little rough and thoroughly agree with anybody who says i’m aggressive. Well sometimes you gotta be aggressive, play on the minds on attacker, u know psychological advantage, he he. Anyways criticism always came and i was at the receiving end, no matter whether i saved a goal or tried saving it. No one bothered and as always i continued my nonchalant ways of resolutely defending my net. Much of the criticism i received was because of my leg lifting maneuvers. All ballet dancers would be going green if they saw me playing football 
. I used to get very very angry, only on the field, outside the field its a different thing.
I better not elaborate about my 2nd year, except saying that it was kinda fine.
3rd year was completely a ruckus with me having no idea what so ever. That was the year when my torrent downloads started, which is another long story . Anyways, we were in for a pleasant shock when MPS and me had to design a lexical analyser for linux platform. First we started out writing all the characters that our brains could assimilate, then came the key words and other random stuff which were added later. It took us approx. 2 weeks to complete it. Thanks to some very important help on the code by our friend basha we did get it to run on linux. It ran totally awesome till the previous day of the exam. Precisely on the day of practical exam it didn’t work. 2 weeks of churning our heads and this, man that was bad. Also the external accused us of stealing the code. MPS was furious, i had never seen his face like that, the always cheerful MPS was blazing, still he managed to keep himself calm and composed. That’s MPS, never lets his anger spoil the day (even though that day was total disaster) and he seldom get angry. You guys might be thinking why i did not fly into rage, well MPS was the brain and i was the brawn. Its always the brain thats takes the beating, not the brawn, that’s my view. If the reader has any contradictory views please leave a comment. 6th semester project was the funniest of all. Again MPS and me created our own header files to make the project run. Before that i had already started off with the GUI leaving MPS in the dark. I’m sorry dude. Without you our project was no where close to where it is right now. Anyways, it worked very well, with some minor glitches, we are not Gosling or Ritchie right. Luck went totally bad for MPS again as our project did not execute properly on his computer while it worked like a charm on mine. Again the brain took the beating and brawn went unscathed. I still feel sorry for MPS.
But we had our own share of fun. Trekking to rocky hill behind our college, climbing up the sides of the NICE road bridge etc. One fall and the end of our life. The risks were worth it. 3 weeks of fun and programming, the unforgettable experience.
7th semester was just a rush, with so many of the footballing gang going into total frenzy over GRE. It was fun watching them rack their brains over english words. BOY THOSE ARE TOUGH. Believe it. Most of them came out with superb scores, with my class averaging around 1150. That’s good right ??? 
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8th semester was a total nasty business for me. I got project from IBM. On my first review it was unanimously rejected by the panel. Reason : The project is completely DB project, we cannot allow CS student to do any project which is completely based on DB. I was PISSED. Since i was committed to IBM project for 4 months till April. (Those IBM fellas dint gimme a paisa for my share of hardwork. Kall nan maklu duddu kodade puksaate kelsa maaduskondru.) I had to think of another project that could possibly catch the eyes of the panel. Not a surprise, i came up with none. Well i was finally relieved to find Dr. RS was my guide. I thought the ray of hope had not disappeared into a super-massive black hole. He guided me through the initial stages of the project and its requirements and i was delighted. Mr. KH helped a lot in completely designing the blue-print of my project, from where i could launch myself into the heart of the project. It was a painstaking task to work alone and code 3800 lines of code. But the hardwork was worth it. I found myself beaming on the day of the finals. Except some minor problems everything went fine and i got 241/250. Now i don’t have to lose sleep over any project
In these 4 years of playing football the main strike came just after my theory exams, lateral ligaments and muscles in my right foot got pretty severly cramped in a particular aggressive tackling to save the goal. Thanks to some initial help by basha (got me some ice pack) and a good load of help by vik and venky, and driver uncle (collectively dropped me home), i could walk after 2 days. Thanks again dudes and uncle. But its fine now. Till today i am happy that i played bellicose football, but never hurt anybody in a very bad way.
As i break from nostalgia, “whispers in the dark…” is playing on winamp. And adios to MPS, Basha, Z-Man, Chopper and Topper. Have a nice time in the US ppl.
