As a prey

[Our first attempt at Kasen writing (collaborative poetry) as part of Creative Writing course. Collaborators: Sachin and a third guy (whose name I forgot to ask). 1st stanza is the given prompt (aka hokku). The poem flows in alternating 3-line and 2-line stanzas; we took turns to write them. Everything was done in less than 45 minutes. So, yes, it's a rushed up piece of work with hardly any rhyme or meter. But it was so much fun! Each of us picking up where the other collaborator had left and trying our best to move the story forward. I think we did a good job. :D Collaborative poetry can be _very_ random (each poet writing about totally different stuff, and then piecing it together) but we took Ma'am's suggestion to write with a theme in mind. Enjoy and comment!]

****

As a prey

Curving up, then down
Meeting blue sky and green earth
Melding sun and rain

Below it, he crawls ahead
Slow, with care, no sound is made

Visions of a lonely mind

"... in fiction, the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself." -- Jim Rohn.

****

"I need to talk to you. Alone." I said, trying to look as determined as possible and without losing eye contact.

"Now?! Class is about to start! Also, she doesn't want to talk to you." Her friend retorted.

"Please..." I reiterated, ignoring her friend, maintaining eye contact all throughout. Reluctantly, silently, her lizard eyes heeded. She had to! After all, she wanted to talk to me too. She did, right?

My placement experience

[Cross-posted, as it is, from my answer to this Quora question. Go upvote it! Why else do you think I have given you the link!]

Feline crisis

I come back to my room after my CSD class gets cancelled. I find her standing in front of my room. She looks at me in helplessness. Her eyes do the talking, "I have been waiting for so long. I have urgent needs. Where have you all been?" I don't pay heed to her. As soon as I unlock the door, she tries to enter the room, but using my ninja skills I don't allow her. I try to chase her away from my sight since I am not at all in the mood to think about her problems, but she has other plans. She is pregnant.

The curious case of Mug-buddies

Disclaimer: This post is written recklessly, without any effort to maintain sanity or to preserve a good-boy image, although considerable fight has been put to make it funny. References to real-life characters, though maybe true, are not meant to insult anyone. I am just having fun, my way. (Waise bhi kya ukhaad loge!?) Views presented are mostly mine but, as usual, I have taken opinion of several of my like-minded friends. They _totally_ agree with me. :D

     Since my childhood -- okay, fine... since 2nd year in IIT -- I have always wondered why people go to the library/dcf so enthusiastically and frequently. I didn't pay much attention to it until some of my CAT-enthu friends (no, not bestiality... the MBA-thingy) started going to Lib in the summer vacation for taking mock tests. They raped some, got raped in some. I used to join them, thinking I will also mug. LOL, I know. Result: lots of Anime and the beginning of my-fav-english-songs collection *sigh*. But knowledge comes in many forms. There, I got to see the bigger picture: answer to my childhood question.

latex-beamer + emacs-org-mode

The what? 

"You set the learning curve depending on your needs" -- Bastien Guerry, org-mode maintainer since 2011

     In this post, I am going to describe how to use org-mode in the awesome emacs to write reports/papers and create presentations as swiftly as writing plain text. Naaah, you will be writing plain text only! Rest of the shebang -- generating the tex file, producing the pdf, and even opening it for preview! --  is taken care by a shortcut in Emacs: C-c C-e d. Peace in life. Especially useful when you start writing the report at 2345 and the submission deadline is 2359 :D.
    We will be using the following tools/technologies: Beamer (it's just a Latex class), and Emacs* (org-mode in specific). I have written this post in haste so a few things may have slipped my mind. Put off in comments if you have any problems and/or tips.

The Hyd trip

Last Sunday I took my TOEFL exam. The test centre was in Hyderabad which gave me a chance to visit the city of Chicken Biryani and factories catering to IIT-crazy "students" who, not-so-surprisingly, form a larger chunk of the IITM populace, or for that matter, any IT-related populace. :D It was a hectic visit: reached Hyd at 6am, exam at 10, lunch at 2, sleep + Anime till 6, snack, return train at 7. Nonetheless, it had its moments.

Flash and other things Firefox

Firefox Firefox

Good ol' Firefox!

Flashing its awesomeness

Open Source, out of the box!

Tons of add-ons; take your pick

Slisha slow? Don't be a prick

Of features, there is no dearth

Caring for users since it's birth

This post is mainly about installing Flash for Firefox on a Linux-based machine (especially when you don't have admin privileges) and a few other things personal to my Firefox experience. Usually, in these kind of posts, we first have to write how to go about installing the concerned software. But there is no such thing as "installing" Firefox anyway -- Download. Extract. Browse! :P :D

I am sure there are several posts out there which explain the same. The heck with them!

Precious taste buds

Brunchinner!

I have a habit of having a heavy brunch  -- breakfast plus lunch, literally -- whenever I feel hungry at around 10am, the mess is closed, I am not in the comforts of my room, and when I know I am too lazy to come back to the mess from wherever I would be after filling my tummy. But brunchinner... that's on a completely different level! Fine, I am exaggerating.

    That day, all the gods, the old and the new, the sheep god, the light god, the horse god, all of them decided to torture me in the 4th level of library (which sounds like the 4th level of hell... I know, right?). First my earphones ditched me. Then my nakama deserted me. Heck, even my nokia embraced martyrdom! How do I know that the gods had conspired against me, you ask? Well, the dark omens were pellucid right from the moment I placed my order at Tifanys.

How to prepare for IIT-JEE

Couple of weeks back, an IIT enthusiast, named Adhithya, pinged me on Facebook and asked me the enigmatic question that has probably crossed tens of millions of Indian minds in the past: how to crack JEE? Of course, many have asked me this question ever since I cleared JEE, but never before had I devised an answer so thoughtfully and, looking back at my reply, meticulously. Somehow, I felt the need to record this conversation on my blog for helping similarly ambitious brains in the future, or just to look back at what kind of a person I was in my youth. :-)