Sorry to my meagre cadre of online fans who have been vociferously complaining about my inability to put together a paragraph to grace this cobweb-ridden page of mine. I sincerely apologize to those brave souls who are still trying to get me off my sorry ass and long to tell them to live their own life and let me be. Seriously, the last 2 months have been so hectic and lively that I never felt the need to waste a few precious minutes to put my life on screen and tell the world what I'm doing. That doesn't mean I'm jobless now...

My vacations started off with preparations for the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) and off I went to Bangalore, troubling my good friends Raghuram and Dorai and their families in the process. The exam was on May 2nd, and I performed well, to my surprise, scoring 1460 (Thank you, Thank you...). Considering that my preparation time was exactly 13 days, I consider it my good luck that my performance was on an appreciable level.

Came back, dozed around for a week at home, and again went to attend Industrial Training at Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, Bangalore. The training was quite interesting and informative. Of course, the fact that it was in Bangalore came as an added bonus. I've never had so much fun as I had in the month I was there. Going out and roaming around everyday became a force of habit. So did mouthing hard-to-digest aeronautical terms... Adour, Artouste... anyone?

Came to know of an interesting robotics workshop at Delhi, decided to attend it, and here I am, at the Indian capital, during the romantic transition between oven-hot summer and cool wet rains... writing to my hearts content. For a history buff, there are few places as fulfilling as Delhi. Wait a minute, why am I here? There's a bazaar outside, and things to buy, and places to see...

Back from another day of fun. I am at Bangalore now, with five of my friends, for an Industrial Training at The Engine Division, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), Bangalore. We have been here for almost a month from the 14th of May.

The experience has been fruitful. We learned a lot about the design, manufacturing, assembly and testing of various aircraft engines like Adour, Artouste, Orpheus, DART etc. Hey, its not often that you're let into a highly protected defense establishment and get to study it from top to bottom. Sadly though, no pictures, as no electronic devices of any sort are allowed on the premises.

The aircraft manufacturing industry is set for a leap, with the demand vastly outweighing the supply all over the world. Walchand Hirachand, the visionary Indian businessman, saw the revolution in the aerospace industry and set up Hindustan Aeronautics as early as 1940. The Indian Government later took up the venture, and HAL began licensed production of aircraft from many famous names: including Rolls Royce, GE and TurboMeca.

Sadly though, thats all they're doing now also. Though the equipment and personnel are world-class, almost no new development takes place there, from what we could see in the few days that we were there. There are manufacturing equipment in the engine division which can rival any aircraft manufacturing plant worldwide. But the development of the Kaveri engine, India's first truly indigenous Jet Engine, has been going on for over 15 years now.

On the bright side, I saw in this plant the practical implementation of almost all the Engineering principles I had learnt in my three years of study. Heat Treatment, Machining, Material Testing, Metrology, Quality Control, Process flow... it had everything I hoped for. Its quite a treat to see an aircraft engine being tested from maybe 15 meters away !! What impressed me most was the precise system that was in place to ensure the flow of the raw materials to the manufacturing positions, and the manufactured parts to assembly, and the assembled engine to testing. Every movement of a block of lead or steel, from the raw materials depot to the tested engine, was tracked on its very own process chart.

Apart from manufacturing new aircraft engines, they do overhauling also. Overhauling, in aircraft engines, have to be done more often, and extensively. Each and every bolt, nut and washer in an engine is taken out and checked for a number of quality parameters, and the rejection criteria are very strict. And this is repeated as often as every 150 flying hours for some engines !! Of course, it is not like you can park a stalled aircraft on the edge of the cloud and call a mechanic. So they have to be that thourough I guess...

I'm off to Delhi on 9th, for a workshop on Robotics...

Ragam 07: Where the Lime costs 5Oops... my bad... it was actually Nokia Ragam 07... where the die rolls 7... the annual cultural extravaganza at my college, National Institute of Technology Calicut (NITC). This fest, our fest, which is reputed to be among the top college cultural fests in the country, was from March 14th to 17th of this year. This year, we had performances from none other than Shaan, and a rock show by Evergreen.

But why the title? I wanted to write on the phenomenon by which food items magically increase in price during the days of Ragam in NITC. A harmless glass of lime juice, which would have cost you Rs. 3 on any normal day, sunny or rainy, suddenly turns into this gun-totting film-noir gangster who robs you of Rs. 5. A burger becomes the typical mafia godfather, to seek an audience with whom you have to shell out in excess of Rs 25. All this is with the hope of raising a few extra bucks to fund the fest. Not a criticism from me, mind you, but I hope in future years we can hope to rise to such a level that we can provide refreshments to the participants, organisers and audience at a much more reasonable rate.

At any rate, this was the largest Ragam NITC has ever hosted... a 50% increase in budget (Over 25 lakhs!), a 200% increase in sponsorship, and a 25% increase in participation from the previous year. Not to mention flawlessly co-ordinated proshows. The three nights were colourful and vibrant, featuring Group Dance, Shaan, and Evergreen and Fashion Show on the last night respectively. The event was pulled off without a hitch, thanks to the sponsors, esp. Nokia, and the entire organising team of Ragam, who worked day and night for months to pull off this mega event.

Where was I in all of this? Yours truly was in charge of maintaining the website and making horrendously hilarious videos for Ragam '07. Website maintenance has a physical component as well, especially in NITC. First you painstakingly put together all the crap into a presentable form, and put it up on the web. Then people come to you at odd hours, demanding that increasingly tiny changes be done, maybe a single page, maybe just a typo... I'm only too happy to do it. But over here, it means running to the Computer Centre each time you have to make even the smallest of changes... that does not impress me much since the moment I get back, there will be the next bugger sitting in my room, telling me to change something else. Late night marathons to the CC becomes a regular part of my life during the days preceding Ragam.

Check out the website http://ragam.nitc.ac.in/
(Credits go out to my fellow webmasters Girish R Varma and Anukool junnarkar, who did most of the HTML part. My work constituted the flash site)
The ragam blog... late to start, but featuring some excellent blogs.

The videos were the better part... a team of us gets together just two days (48 hours, dammit!!) before Ragam and decide that we need to air some goofy videos during the nights, when our Open Air Theatre will be packed with a crowd of around 3000. Plans were made in a jiffy, our minds clashing together to make the stupidest of ideas sound 'cool'... The next step... to hire a professional videographer for a day and shoot videos of people on campus singing an all-time favourite.. Shaan's 'Tanha Dil'. That part went quite smoothly. Next part... mastering video editing softwares within a span of hours and edit the raw videos into a presentable form. My roommate Anantharaman (Takla) also pitched in and made an AutoCAD Video (AutoCAD 2007 can make path-based animations... COOL!!) and in-house animator Nikhil John Kurien (JohnKu) made a beautiful 3dsMAX video. Thus, by the night of day one of Ragam, we had four videos up and running to awe the audience.
The team: Myself, Chutney, Venki, Vivek, Virus, JohnKu, Takla, Mayank, Saket.

Am returning from a 2pm - 5pm extra class in Dynamics of Machinery (DOM)... The post-lunch drowsiness, the arrangement by the helpful professor to have the class air-conditioned for the lecture, and, invariably, the 'dynamic' nature of the subject, combined to create an atmosphere in which even the most hardened insomniac would fall face-first in an instant. I watched helplessly as my friends fell all around me, quicker than US soldiers on Omaha beach. I strove, I persevered, I fought back the demon who was trying so desperately to close my eyes and get me thrown out of class. A shot of caffeine during a 10-minute break did more than its part in keeping me up. The professor, bless him, did everything he could to keep the students' attention on himself than on blurred images of their own desks. He showed videos, animations, and even cracked jokes. Still men fell everywhere... good men... valorous men. Finally, he decided to stop the carnage at 4:20, and we were let out. I am a survivor... yeah!!

The past weekend marked the culmination of months of effort, to organise and execute the fourth largest FOSS community event in India: FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Meet @ NITC 2007. Being a part of the coreTeam, I was there.. all the slogging, all the sleepless nights, and all the excitement. The event featured more than 40 speakers from across the country, speaking on such varied topics as 'FOSS in Life: How to get a girlfriend through FOSS' to 'Read copy update mutual exclusion locking in Linux' (??) .. Featured were heavyweights such as Atul Chitnis (VP, Geodesic) (no pun intended) and Dr. CN Krishnan, Project Manager, NRCFOSS, Anna University, Chennai.

All in all, it ended up being not just an expression of the open source software community, but of the much more general community who believe that all information, whether programs, science, technology or knowledge must be made free and available to all. To that end, we had a workshop on wiki editing, and unconferences by the most powerful names in blogging in India, Kiruba Shankar, and Kiran Jace.

Above everything, it was a fun-filled atmosphere, where each person who attended the event felt that he/she could achieve anything. Just watching these amazing people, and what they have been able to accomplish so far, is truly inspiring.

For details of the individual talks, speakers and schedule, visit http://foss.nitc.ac.in/

The last year has been good for yours truly... a sense of accomplishment, of relief, washes over me as I sit down to relish the moments that meant a lot to me over the course of the previous year. I have achieved, among other things, a sense of direction, of commitment to a cause, and of the vastness of the world at large compared to the world I live in. And as I spent the moment of arrival of 2007, sharing the moment with a truly wonderful person, looking at the stars, I thanked God on how lucky I am.