Over and out

Times change.
And so do people.
They say one can't change their nature. I want to verify. Can I stop being an extrovert? Maybe... maybe not. I can try.

Also, this marks a four-year transform ;)
27 May 2011 was the first post, today I take leave.

This was my blog.
There are many like it, but this one was mine. (Reference)

Sujeet over and out.

It hurts

I am Snehal Gholap, a guest author on my Dada’s blog.

Reading the title, you must be feeling, this is gonna be some grim article. (Spoiler alert: It is.) It might seem too much feminist also. It might just seem to be exaggerated or made up. But lemme tell you, these incidents I’m gonna tell you are very much real and not in the least spiced up. The sole purpose of this is to humbly clear the minds of those people who blame it on ‘not knowing that it could hurt’. Okay, so having you warned, let’s just see what I want to tell you…

Innocence, Ingenuity, and Intrigue

This quarter one of the courses I’m taking is “Child psychology: development in early childhood”. As a part of the course, I spend four hours every Thursday in a nursery school observing and taking care of children. Boy, how I like the sound of ‘teacher Sujeet’! The school has children of two to four years of age. So far, it has been really fascinating to look at how they behave, how they interact, how they resolve conflicts, and most importantly, how they learn. Here, I’m going to share a few incidents which I found funny, intriguing, or thought provoking.

Darkness that nourished

While reading Mary Kom’s autobiography ‘Unbreakable’, I came across a passage where she described, when she was a child, how she studied and what her home was like. Her home didn’t have electricity. They used to put cotton wicks inside a glass bottle and use them as lamps with kerosene. That reminded me of the lamps we used to use at home when electricity went off…

When I met my hero

Just a couple of days ago, I met with Praveen Gedam, a medical doctor, who has chosen to nurse more than just diseases. Dr. Praveen Gedam, an IAS officer of 2002 batch is Maharashtra Government’s famous troubleshooter with an interesting history. Few years ago, a businessman donated Rs. 1500 crores to the Vitthal temple of Pandharpur on the condition that the government must come up with a rock-solid plan for development of Pandharpur, where every penny is accounted for. The way he was assured of transparency and efficiency was: Dr. Gedam was transferred to the district as the collector!

It was Dr. Gedam’s bulletproof paperwork and intolerance of corruption that saw powerful Maharashtra politicians behind bars for Gharkul Housing Scam involving 216 crore rupees. Usually, when most of the scams are exposed, and the accused escape through some loophole or the other. Here was an example, a politician, whose party was in power, couldn’t avoid jail because he was so thoroughly exposed with impeccably detailed evidence and paperwork.

You know how exams used to be held at and around my place? Students didn’t study for exams, they copied. There was an elaborate system in place for copying. Invigilators would turn a blind eye, peons would carry printed answers to the candidates. “Anti-copy squad” was a joke. Exam centers would know beforehand that the squad is going to visit the center, just before the visit of the squad, chits, notes, and whole books would be collected from the copying students in sackfuls and thrown away, making the center ‘clean’. Boy! How I hated it! When Dr. Gedam came to my district as the District Collector, he put an end to it. He showed that all it takes to do away with most of the filth in our society is one strong-willed officer!

When I was a kid, a very small kid, I used to say “I want to become a scientist when I grow up”. When I grew up a slight bit more, it changed to “I want to become an IAS officer!”. Dr. Gedam made me change that to “I want to become an IAS officer like Dr. Praveen Gedam!”. That hasn’t changed till date.

I had a lot of questions about IAS as a career option. Friends and relatives alike have told me that I shouldn’t be a starry eyed kid gung-ho about IAS. I should actually try to find the ground truth. I should try to find out how it is like to be an IAS officer for real, because they feared it is something I won’t actually like. Who better to ask these questions to than Dr. Gedam himself! And that’s how, on a fine Saturday morning, a government holiday, I ended up in his office, 350 km away from my home.

The grade hypocrisy

Because finding faults with others is so much easier!

You, keep on telling me, “grades don’t matter [to me]”. You know what, you look like a hypocrite. Do you even understand the meaning of “something not mattering”? I doubt it.

I’ve seen you fret over assignment submission deadlines, pulling all-nighters to avoid late-submission penalty. Yet, you say ‘grades don’t matter’.

Ranting is venting

Introspection is hard. I’ve found so many faults with myself, I’ve pretty much completely lost my self-esteem. More importantly, my introspection has hardly been productive. I find faults, blame myself, mark out areas of improvement and change, and then I give up.

वो बचपन!

हेमा-रेखा-जया संग डोलें,

शक्तिमान से सॉरी बोलें,

वो बचपन!

टूटीं खिड़कियाँ, चौके-छक्के,

माँ की मदद से वादे पक्के,

वो बचपन!

Rain: An engineer's take

He heard thunder. It’s going to rain! He and rain — they went way back.

He would come back from classes, fold his umbrella, fling his backpack on the bed. That stupid little bag full of books! It always forced him to use the umbrella. Now he was free. Free to soak in the rain. Free to run, free to splash, free to dance!

Rain was freedom.

Teacher that once mattered

Dear reader,

I’m confused. I feel clueless, untethered, like a boat without a compass, in the midst of a storm. I’m thinking in circles, and boy it’s tiring! Will you help me?

This is about a teacher, and how I feel about him.

Shattered remembrall

MemNet loading… [####...... 42%]

Akshata was intently staring at her phone screen. “Come on, I haven’t got all day!” she remarked impatiently. The 128 cores in her phone, whizzing at a blazing 4 GHz were sweating under MemNet’s strain.

An hour passed. MemNet’s welcome screen didn’t look particularly welcoming to Dr. Akshata. It had now been almost a year since she got the Turing award for her work in neuroinformatics and just this morning she had sniffed-in her last dose of pico-bots. She could never quite get rid of the tiny panic the pico-bots induced in her brain, but she was quick to get used to that minor inconvenience.

Start scan? [yes] [no]

I am a coward

Actually, this post could as well be empty, the title should suffice.

I changed my name a few days ago. I had good reasons to do it. Bulletproof argument, right? Oh I forgot what a fucking coward I am! That’s where things go wrong, you see…

I changed my name

Till a few days back, I went by the name Sujeet Gokul Gholap. Now, I’m Sujeet Kausallya Gholap.

A few days back, on the occasion of teachers’ day, I wrote about how my mother is the most influential teacher that I’ve had. It got me thinking… My mother (Aai) has contributed to me, my personality and my views as much as my father (Pappa). When Pappa took me to science exhibitions, Aai taught me household science. When Pappa imbued my childhood with a strong sense of morality and idealism, Aai exemplified how to be caring and loving. When Pappa made me interested in history, Aai made me like poetry.

It struck me odd that having played equal roles in shaping me, my name has two words from Pappa’s name, and no words from Aai’s name! “Let’s fix that!” I thought.

But it runs deeper than that…

Teacher that matters the most

“Wow! It looks, so… nice!” marveled a boy of four, standing on the terrace’s parapet, wide-eyed, taking in all the beauty of the sunrise. He did not know the word ‘beautiful’ then. Things were just ‘nice’, some were ‘cool’. His Aai (mother), stood by, smiling… Had he been observant, surely he would’ve seen her eyes crinkling too.

“Listen to the birds chirping.”

“Yeah! Sooo nice, Aai!”

“See that mist?”

“Oh! Wow!”

She taught him to appreciate the beautiful world they lived in.

Engineering a Quora answer for 4k+ upvotes

Upvotes have almost stopped trickling in, and I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t share the experience now.

A few friends and I were discussing Anonymity on Quora and veracity of anonymous answers. That discussion still fresh in my mind, I saw a lot of my programmer friends upvoting an answer to “How did you meet your first girlfriend/boyfriend?”. What makes this answer get a 1000+ uvotes, I wondered. If you look at the ridiculous number of “IITians and girls” questions on Quora, you’ll realize what made that answer so popular.

“Hmm… the answer appeals to all those hardcore computer science students for whom, a girlfriend is just the stuff of dreams. When they see someone finding his girlfriend in a programming contest, surely the answer’s gonna sell like hotcakes. Further, true to the typical Indian mindset, quite a few readers would find ‘we are going to marry soon’ very aww-inspiring.”

“Can I come up with a formula, which takes such factors actively into account? I want to beat this answer in number of upvotes. I want to engineer an answer which will be the highest voted answer for this question!”