Apartment 2 Room #105

I shall always remember that kiss. Oh! What a moment that was. It was raining and there was sweet fragrance all around and someone was playing a violin as if to serenade us. As IF. It was in a theatre, old and ramshackle. But the ambience didn’t make it less magical for us. We were young, and we were spellbound. Me, more so. I realized that she will be the first and the last girl I shall ever give this kind of kiss. And she is.

So I know that you have been running around taking a measure of the residents of this building. Well good for you! But I don’t understand what you are looking for, what you hope to find? I mean you don’t see journalist-You are a journalist aren’t you? So I was saying that you don’t see journalists running around talking to senile old men, even if they have some juicy tidbits to share.  You know I don’t think that anyone in this building knows my name. They know me by moniker – the wifeless guy. The guy whose wife left him, left him for another man.

If you ask me they have a gist of that sorry affair.  These are not my words. I never felt sorry for myself, If you ask me that thing was a reprieve.  You can’t keep on looking at the face of person you love and see that she is unhappy with you.  No you better let her go. And let her go, I did. 

You know our eye see about three hundred frames per second. Of this the brain is capable of drawing information from only two hundred. The rest of its ability goes in supervising our movements. This is the reason you stop, like a deer  caught in headlights, when there is a sudden movement somewhere near you. Because then the body thinks that it’s necessary to analyze every bit of information relayed by your eyes.  And this indecision is often the end of you.  A predator won’t give you the time to stop and look around for a threat. He will pounce upon you during the moment of your weakness.

I decided that I won’t be weak. I won’t let that indecision be the end of me. So, I decided to leave her.  Yes! I left her.I moved out. Surprised? Why won’t you be? People don’t call her husband less, do they? The only thing that earned me that moniker was my decision to never marry again. How could I? I am still in love with her. I was in love with her and always will be. Leaving her was the most difficult thing that I did but I am happy now that she is happy. I became a villain, a monster so that she could live her life.

I have lived 55 summers and shall live many more.  I run, I work, I eat and I sleep, I have friends, I travel a lot, I earn, and I spend. I do crave for companionship, but then I always remember that kiss. In that old and ramshackle theatre.

Adios.

PS:this is the second in the apartment 2 series. Now you can be sure that the first one was not an autobiographical account. 

Modeling and Simulation, Or how I lost sleep for a night and missed classes in the morning.

 
(The following is a recipe of destroying your life in the final year of your study. Those who want to try this out please beware that you have been forewarned of the consequences and the author won’t be held liable for any losses of sleep, mental faculty or life as you know it. )

• Start towards the end of third year by getting an ambitious project as a Btech. final year project .
• Choose project guides who are enthusiastic, intelligent and hardworking, who in turn expect you to share their enthusiasm, intelligence and most important of all - the capacity to work hard.
• In the summer after the third year of your studies go on an intern to a European country- so that you won’t like the life, food or the humid and hot weather when you get back here.
• Resolve to get a good job or a PHD in some foreign university.
• Screw your CGPA over the three years of your studies so that you don’t have an alternative other than to work on the BTP if you want to get what you resolved for.
• Clear your courses and enter the ‘final year’ (otherwise everything on this list is redundant).
• Take up an additional to cover for the scratched course even after acing it, due to some obscure rule that says you cheated “academically” by taking the said course in your second year.
• Meet your BTP guide and promise him that you will share his enthusiasm and the capacity to work hard.( You can’t share the intelligence because frankly speaking it’s not in your control)
• End up getting a task too onerous for the limited mental faculty you possess. Promise him that you will complete the task in one week. 

Sometime during this register yourself for a GRE and start taking coaching classes for CAT

• Start preparing for GRE. Procrastinate. Start preparing for CAT. Procrastinate. Leave preparation for both. Start the background study of the Project assigned to you.
• Get bored.
• Download a new TV series. Promise yourself that you will watch only one episode per day.
• Finish 3 seasons in 4 days.
• One day before the meeting.
• Panic.
• Enter crash mode. Decide to skip meals, sleep, whatever it takes to complete the task given to you.
• Pull an all nighter to complete the background study. 
• Rejoice at completing the background study, before 7:00 am in the morning.
• Decide to treat yourself for an hour of sleep after breakfast. Class starts at 8:30.
• Sleep.
• Wake at 12:30. Panic. Jump up and down. Shout.
• Realize that you have only 2 and a half hours left to come up with a good and solid model. (Remember you chose intelligent guides, you can’t pull wool over their ears.)
• Calm down. Start working. Realize that model was actually easy. The concepts fit in once you understood the background, the sleep actually helped you consolidate the concepts you studied over the night.
• Get stumped again. Start jumping again. Panic again. Again calm down.
• Pull out the mass transfer book, get ideas from it.  
• Sometime during this ordeal make a promise to yourself that you will complete the assignments on that very day on which they are assigned to you. Update on facebook about this resolution of yours.
• Get an epiphany. 

(Ok, this goes here, this goes there, and Einstein says this, Newton this and voila your model is complete.)

• Check once. Find some mistake. Check again, find some more.  Finally have a sigh of relief.
• Check the time. Shit!! Its 2:50. Get dressed up in a hurry.
• Realize that you have had an acid build-up in your stomach due to not eating which has developed a stink in your mouth.
• Brush quickly.
• Find your cycle. Paddle more than one kilometer to get to the department.
• Reach the department. Good news, you are only five minutes late. Move your watch back five minutes. Now you can walk in and claim nonchalantly that your watch was running late.
• Park your cycle. Lock and bolt it. (this is not a figure of speech, I really use a bolt but then again you have to use what not to secure your cycle otherwise it’s very easy to steal it.)
• Receive a phone call from your guide informing you that due to some reasons the meeting won’t take place. It has been postponed to the next week.
• Curse Murphy and cycle back home. Sleep. Forget your resolutions. Watch another 3 seasons in another 4 days. Repeat from top.

Adios