Hrishikesh Pallod

People appreciating your work is the most awesome feeling. Judges, seniors and juniors. Thank you for the overwhelming response at INC '15. The "most popular project" award is a testament to the 8 months of hard work. The three days days were exhausting. But the satisfaction in the end. Worth it. I could not have asked for a better team and a better guide. Suhel Sir, your advices have always been spot on. Discussions with you have always been interesting. You gave us the freedom any group would want. Glad we got rid of the frustrated developer before INC. Aman, you are the problem solver. I know I can rely on you to take care of any bug. Sidhesh, I'd pay to watch you present again. The responsibilities you took since BITs. We would not have reached here. Abhale, your touch screen laptop got a few judges excited. You are the man of ideas. And Siddhant Patil, great work with the flex and logo. RoloKnow got the face it deserves.  When things didn't work out...

Whiplash is one of the most spellbinding movies I have seen in a long time. JK Simmons! Take a bow. Amazing performance. And a beautiful end.  You may think this is a little lame, but I have to write this. Can you imagine Terence Fletcher as a teacher in an engineering college? What if every college had a Fletcher? That wouldn't help the literacy rate. Would it? Three and a half years in PICT, I can totally picture him as a teacher here.  First lecture. "There are no two words in English language more harmful than "good job". You all are here for a reason. You believe it right? Say it." Answer a question incorrectly on the first day. "Not quite my tempo" Answer a question incorrectly on the second day. *Try and dodge the projector thrown at you* Now, the most dreadful part. The VIVA: *First person comes in, let's call him Johnny Evans* Fletcher: "Do you think you have answered the question correctly?...

6 pm is the time to be alive in Goa. A round orange object drowns into the ocean, coloring the sky magnificently.  There’s this inexplicable thing about sunsets, they take you to some place. Some place where you don’t care about your pending project review or your incomplete assignments or the thought of Johnny Evans defending behind a diamond. Photo Credit: Sagar Navgire   The road trip. Hotel California, Dil Chahta Hai and some Coldplay songs on the loop. And occasionally, the ‘Patli Maggie Noodle’ song. We left Pune at 7 in the morning and had lunch at Kolhapur. We walked into a misal joint. It was over crowded. People inside, especially the women were dressed as if they were running late for a wedding ceremony. But the more interesting part was the bill. The waiter actually forced us to pay 20 bucks less. Amazing place this city is. We reached Goa by around 7 pm. Spent the evening on Candolim beach. This Candolim area is nice and beautiful, li...

There are some beautiful ghats between Lavasa and Pune. On one of those ghats, there is a female dog. What do you call a female dog? A bitch right? She's always with her tiny puppies, around 8 or 9 atleast. That's really adorable. But only as long as they are not around when you're having lunch at a 'dhaaba'.  It gets worse when they start running around. You can't predict what they'll do next. This thought creeps me out. Puppies are cute, but not when there's a possibility, they can sabotage your lunch. It gets even more worse when all of them go into the kitchen, and you have no idea what they are doing inside. For all you know, they are peeing all over the chef or the food. I'm not the only one who gets this paranoid, when its about dogs and food. Or am I? No offence dog lovers! I like dogs. Not all though. Charlie is sweet.  The food was obviously bad. But the most horrible food tastes good when you're with your friends. All those...

The tunnel is dark. You know there's no light at the end of the tunnel. And yet you want to go through it. That's how bad emotions can control a person. It is probably a beautiful thing as long as one stays away from the self-destruct button. I hope I haven't pressed one already. "When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion" - Dale Carnegie Most of my decisions have "emotion" as one of the parameters. I don't know if it's a good thing. But the battle of rational and emotional arguments, is totally one sided. The latter always wins. Unless you're Dhoni. If you are, you don't need to worry about all this. Your "gut" knows better. Every time you come up with a set of reasonable points to back a good practical choice, the damn emotion will sway you towards the other. It drives you away from reality. But again, there's no fun in doing something just fo...

There is always a thin line. There are always two sides. Like the thin line between nice funny and getting-slapped-in-the-face funny, or the thin line between i-am-good confidence and i-am-better-than-you confidence, or the most clich éd  - love and hate.  There is a thin line between the usage of some words in Europe and USA.  The difference is so eccentric, countries like India get confused. For instance, the usage of the words "ma'am" and "madam". "Madam" is actually an offensive word to use in some parts of the world.  The other day I was waiting for the signal to turn green. An old man, probably in his mid-sixties, was standing by his bicycle along the left side of the road. A person behind him on a pulsar wanted to take a left turn, but couldn't as the old man was blocking his path. He started honking and he asked him to move ahead. The person was already on the edge, he ignored. The guy on the bike kept on honking. The old man pani...

Three years ago I joined PICT. Still remember those days, as if all that happened last month. Time flies only when you don't want it to. A lot happened in the these three years. Strangers became friends, friends became strangers. But these friends will remain this way for a long long time. Probably now I'm mature enough to decide where a friend should be - Stack or a Priority Queue. First day in college, some one asked me, "Pallod Creations(a saree shop) tumhara hai kya ?" I said NO. He was hoping for some discount may be. People still ask me this. FE was super strict. More like 5th grade. Wish I could use that attendance now in BE. Those subtle OFF OFF chants which became a regular thing in SE, didn't really have a good start. "You want OFF ? I'll give you permanent OFF" was the exact reply, if I remember correctly. It did become a big issue. Scared as shit, we did not try that for some time. I still don't know why I feel this way, but...