A life reflection in twenties ... Part 2

As the first semester ended, I realized that it was the time for Hiren to leave the campus. My mini-project also ended. So I did not have to access the Instrumentation lab any more. However I would never forget the radio program "Bela-ke-phool", which played all old melodies ... And I will also not forget our common friend Ashish ... Who also was an admirer of those melodies ... Days passed ... When it comes to formal course-work, except DSP,  I did not do any exercises in the books on my own ... only heard what is taught in the class ... taken down some notes ... no extra preparation after the class about the subject ... just used to read my notes before the surprise test ... I only used to understand (that too mostly 40 to 50% of what the professor is teaching) ... i did not try to get an understanding of the subject after the class ... spent most of the time on the computer (maintenance - formatting/partitioning), internet issues, NIS/NFS, setting up and maintain lab network, maintain mailing service etc ... rarely used the books or journals in the library ... If I retrospect a little here, I would have developed a liking to see "how things work" or "getting things working", than to read books  ... However that is not an excuse to not read books during Masters ... A few months passed ... Hiren used to call regularly... But they used to be planned calls ... A couple of times I mentioned to him "Hiren, why don't you give me a surprise call sometimes" ... He said, he was not sure whether I will be there in the lab when he calls. He feels a little disappointed if I am not present when he calls. Secondly, he used to call from a telephone booth outside of his home ... So it's hard for him to give a surprise call ... I did not insist then ... My final-year project started ... I had an initial few interactions with my guide ... It was a networking project ... It was about finding the network packet-loss issue with the routers, based on the passive observations of packet-flow pattern at the network ends  ... So that we do not have to "inject" the test packages in the network and change the state of the network to find the packet-loss issue ... I had to use TCL/TK Network Simulator for my project ... I set it up and started performing certain experiments with it ... But not with exact goals or tests in mind ... I was just running some pre-defined tests with pre-defined set of parameters ... Which will just ensure the Simulator setup is right ... I got stuck without a direction to proceed further on my own ... However based on my understanding of my discussions with my guide, I could write the half yearly thesis ... As per my guide, the "introduction" part turned out well ... Days passed ... Many new students joined after the new semester began ... Zain, Pratibha, Shrinivas, Surendu ... Shriniwas was from Solapur, Maharashtra ... Surendu was from Rajkot, Gujrat ... Many students stay far from their homes ... They used to visit our lab regularly ... Some of them appreciated the old melodies that I played in the lab at night ... Surendu even commented on my cross-legged sitting position on the chair ... According to him, it looks quite relaxed, yet authoritative ... This time Hiren wished to visit me on the IIT campus ... And I thought it is better to inform my parents and sisters about Hiren before Hiren's visit ... So I penned down my thoughts about Hiren on paper ... Letting them know how Hiren is ... For his friends, colleagues, his job and me ... and left it on my father's bedside to read ... He read it and replied to me in his writing ... It's the same like any other marriage ... The cast issues, The concern about his parents being deaf (based on his experience with the deaf ... It is very hard to communicate with them and there are a lot of misunderstandings when there is a lack of communication) ... I informed ... Life moved on ... My sisters had no issues about Hiren ... My mother was in a dilemma because my father had concerns with Hiren ... I received Hiren at the railway station ... I gave him a rose ... It must be rare that, the girl gave a rose to the guy first ... Hiren got a toy for me ... A joker ... A symbol of hiding all the pain behind the smile ... So precious ... So thoughtful ... I still have it ... He also gifted me a bracelet ... I rarely wore it ... I told him, I am not a big fan of jewellery ... Hiren stayed for a couple of days and he left ... We shared the same room for the first time during that visit ... Hiren also told his parents about me on that visit ... Just to give them an idea ... Informing them ... And then I started learning Gujrati ... Got some books ... I learned the script on my own ... Gujrati is very similar to Marathi and Hindi ... It is a mixture of both these languages plus some flavour of its own ... I started writing letters to Hiren's parents and sister ... Some in Hindi and some in Gujrati ... Since Hiren's parents are deaf, I could not give them a call ... However they appreciated my handwriting ... They could understand what I have written ... Hiren had told me, his mother always complains about his bad handwriting ... I wonder why he never improved his handwriting ... Days passed ... one day I had an interpersonal issue with another co-worker in the lab ... it was something related to the lab work ... I do not remember the exact issue ... I said something to the co-worker which I regretted later ... I felt so guilty about it ... I was literally in tears in the whole lab ... I wrote an email to Hiren ... I am not a good person ... I do not behave well ... I just have empathy for you ... I don't want this relationship ... etc ... etc ... Hiren was shocked ... we both talked over the call and email ... and resolved that issue ... but yes, inter-personal conflicts at work have always been an issue since then ... One day, unfortunately I misplaced the key for my lab ... The faculty who were in charge of the lab was furious ... He fired me and permanently handed over the new key to Zain ... I was in tears even on that day ... I had lost the trust of people faculty and students ... Days passed ...  I fondly remember Shubha Maam ... Extremely pleasant personality ... She was a faculty of Sardar Patel College of Engineering at that time ... She was doing her PhD in IIT Bombay ... She was associated with the Controls lab ... When I did not have the responsibility of the computer lab anymore, I used to get a lot of free time ... Sometimes I used to spend that free time with senior students like Shubha Maam, Ila Bhat and Pallavi ... Shubha Maam had seen rough childhood days, when their house got destroyed due to a flood in Pune rivers ... But she was still in very high spirits ... Her daughter's name was "Gargi" ... What a thoughtful name ! ... It's the name of a "learned woman" in Hindu scriptures ... I used to accompany her to her lab (the control's lab) a few times ... Though I was not formally associated with the lab, she did not have any objection about me accessing the lab and playing music there ... Very liberal, open-minded personality ...   However, because of Ila, I came to know that something like "post-doc" exists ... Till then, I used to think "PhD" is the highest qualification we can get ... I had high regards for her doing post-doc ... Very soft-spoken lady ... Thoughtful lady ... Pallavi was also another PhD student whom I used to meet ... Most probably during snack time in the evening ... We are still in touch... I think it is very common to find PhD students very thoughtful ... Very soft-spoken ... Very serious towards life ... Pallavi was also the same ... I came to know that she was doing her PhD in Micro-Electronics ... Semiconductors ... I found these ladies in the technical world very inspiring ... Today, I am wondering about the reason why I didn't pursue my PhD in the same timeframe ... There were two reasons ... One was, I got in a relationship and the other was, I always wanted to do a technical job in the Industry ... Get an exposure of Industry work ... Along with all the above highly technical women, I would like to name one more lady, Bhavna ... She was my colleague/peer/a masters student ... M.Sc in Physics and now working on her Masters in Micro-Electronics ... We all ladies were living in the same hostel ... Sharing the same mess ... Working in the same department ... The Electrical department ... So we used to meet sometimes ... Somewhere in these locations ... Bhavna had gifted me Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam's Auto-biography in Marathi ... Agni-Pankh ... अग्निपंख ... I read it ... Very thoughtful gift ... Days passed ... I found myself stuck in my master's project ... One day I went to meet my guide at regular meetings and I had nothing to say about what I have worked upon ... My guide got a little annoyed ... Then he guided me ... I can monitor the throughput over the network ends by varying the network parameters like buffer-size, number of routers to the destination, topology, packet-loss rate and packet transit time ... Plot these readings ... And analyse how the graph looks ... I understood it ... I realized that I was only focusing on how to get the Simulator working ... But once I get it working, how to use it for our own purpose? ... How to define our purpose? ... How to visualise the results? ... Once we get the results, how to get it in the format in which we can present them? ... My guide answered all the questions ... And I started working on it ... Days passed ... It was the time for our campus interviews for jobs ... I did not know exactly what and how to prepare for it? ... Some companies used to conduct interviews to know the "aptitude" ... Some companies used to conduct "technical" interviews ... "Technical" interviews used to be divided into two parts, "knowledge gathered during education" and "knowledge of the latest computer language (C, C++)" ... To prepare for "educational knowledge", I read all my class notes during my master's related to telecom (because the companies used to be telecom companies) ... But I was less knowledgeable over the "computer languages" part ... The interviews used to be at syntax level ... And I found myself less equipped to handle it ... One reason might be because, my project required the knowledge of TCL/TK and not C, C++ ... Any ways ... I could have prepared for C, C++ separately ... parallelly ... However, unfortunately I did not prepare ! ... So, I could not pass many of the technical exams conducted by the companies ... At the end there was a company Hughes Software Systems ... I received the some of the leaked questions of that company ... And I could clear the test ... In the interview, I was literally trembling ... Because, I found myself very "unprepared" to answer the questions of this "day and age" ... Again the interview was a combination of "current telecom domain knowledge" and "latest computer language knowledge" ... For some reason, the company selected me ... I don't know why? ... I remember, that company was among the last few companies which visited the campus ... If I was not selected by this company, I could have remained "job-less", coming out of IIT ... And then it would have been a challenge to find a job out of campus ... It was the last semester of the course ... I told at home that I got the job ... But nobody except my sister Swapna, that I told under which circumstances I got the job ... I found, accessing the leaked questions was very un-ethical and I did that ...  Anyways .. Since I truly became financially independent (let me keep it aside, how?), my parents were happy ... My father asked me whether you still want to marry the same guy? ... I said "Yes" ... Then he told me to call him at home ... I said "Ok" ... I informed Hiren to plan to visit our home when he visits Mumbai next time ... He agreed ... In Hiren's next planned visit, he visited our home ... My parents and my sisters interacted with him ... The meeting went fine ... Hiren further went ahead to his home ... He shared some photos with his parents and his sister ... His mother's feedback was "her teeth are out" ... His parents asked Hiren to talk to his uncles in Mumbai ... So Hiren came back to Mumbai ... He unfortunately shared his mother's feedback about my look to me ... (Which was hard for me to forget in a lifespan) ... We visited his uncles ... Both his uncles knew Marathi very well ... And me being a Maharashtrian, it was easy for me to talk to them ... They asked a few questions ... The usual ones about the cast, family background ... They already knew that I was studying with Hiren ... The meetings ended ... They did not have much concern about the marriage ... Days passed ... And I started writing my final year thesis ... From the results those I got, I could not exactly conclude whether we can "predict" the network loss-location by monitoring the traffic at the network end ... But I published each graph and it's related conclusion ... My guide was ok with it ... He then asked me to perform a spell-check, rearranged the paragraphs, chapters ... And the thesis was approved for presentation ... The presentation was in presence of my guide and another supervising faculty ... The presentation went fine ... As usual, my nervousness while presenting was obvious ... And my master's ended ...