A Few Things That I Remember - Chapter 4

Well.. As time passed by... Last semester..Need to score good marks.. Need to get a good job.. Good Future...blah blah blah....all these thoughts made everyone very very busy...I still didn’t have any idea whats after B Tech. Dad used to read all The Hindu Opportunities and often asked me to apply for all of those posts. He wanted his son to get a job just like his colleague’s sons. 8th semester we had to do a major project as per our syllabus.

Oh yeah Projects..funny and stupid things.. Projects and seminars were very tough assignments for us. We got to do 3 minor projects from S5 to S7 and a Major one in S8. At first we thought, oh god we are not gonna make it and we are gonna loose all our marks (plural) in projects. So to improve ourselves, we visited SSi, NIIT, Universal and CDAC institute time by time based on our project needs. SSi and NIIT are very close to our heart. Lot of memories are sleeping over there. SSi only taught us the ABCD of coding in C ,C++ and also in Java (even though I didn’t understand anything). In the beginning I was bit sceptical about those classes but nodded my head all the time as others were able to understand. For 5th semester I and Adarsh did the project together... I is silent over here.. We have to do a project in Visual Basic. I think Adarsh came up with Gas Agency automation project ( :P). Not sure. So we started visiting all Gas agencies to know what exactly we are gonna do. I still remember a guy who happily invited us to his shop when we said we wanted to know about his agency business. We thought “God at last we got it. This is it”. We were expecting Hi5 computers and followed him. Then he showed us a Gas cylinder and said he wants Rs.500 for us to take it. I pinched myself to make sure am not dreaming. We nearly escaped from him saying will come back later. This was Adarsh’s idea as this place was close to his house and he can leave home easily.

After a long search I got a new place, neutral, neither near to mine nor his house, where we can get sufficient information. We actually thought for a while, do we really need to go that far (45 mins from college) for a project? A last we decided to sacrifice our precious time for this project. We got some ideas from this place and based on that I prepared around 30 forms in VB. Adarsh didn't even bother to look at it and rejected all of em. He became very good in coding and started coding for the project. I tell ya.. In a project, you should always be worried about the comfort of your project mate. So I became very cautious to not to disturb him. I played cricket when he was designing. I listen to music and played Maxpayne game when he was coding. Because of all this kind of effort he finished the project with ease. There were some issues here and there but Adarsh nicely hid all of them and we (singular) submitted the project. But there comes another problem; we need to give a presentation while submitting the project.damn.. None of us (our gang) were good at presentation, though we were very good at Smalltalk.. Aah good old college days..Oops.. Focus.. Focus..Shimith!!Oh Yeah, So we started preparing for the presentation. I was more nervous coz whole project was done by Adarsh..one man show. I just suggested which and all colours we can use for the VB forms.. thats all . My role ended there.. Adarsh said he wants to take the Ist part about the project. I had no problem. Ist or Last.. both same for me. He had written all those stuffs in a piece of paper that hes gonna present. So we entered the room for our Big presentation. Some 3 -4 lecturers were seated there to review our Janaganamana. “Ready whenever you are” Lectures said like Judge Simon from American Idol. After hearing this, Adarsh started reading his paper without looking at anyone. He was reading like " Hi..my name is Adarsh.I am from S5 IT ..My role number is 2. Our project is Gas agency automation....etc at a single stretch !! By seeing this I started laughing.. I couldn’t control it and wondered how did our lectures keep calm and listen to him. All lectures were staring at me so I kept my face down under the desk and laughed. I think Adarsh was also laughing by seeing this. Don’t remember exactly. Then my turn came. As I was so refreshed by Adarsh’s presentation, I drew some diagrams and said something which were not related to the project. Some basic DB and VB stuffs and finished my presentation..!! When they announced the results, I got more than Adarsh. Poor guy. seriously. The same repeated in the next semester as well. So Adarsh said this won’t work out and I have to find a new partner for 7th semester project. Damn you Adarsh..!! I think Unni tricked him to his team.

So, I started searching for a new project mate. After a long audition process found my Ideal project mate. Vigilkumar. Our Partial output guy. I think ours were the worst team among all in 7th semester. Because Vigil also didn’t have prior experience of coding and no plans to do in the future just like me. 7th sem project was about some web design and all. I came up with an Idea of VIvaham.com so that we can copy all functionalities of Shaadhi.com. So we joined NIIT for this. Our Teacher over there was a very knowledgeable guy. As I mentioned earlier I am no good at coding, we didn’t do anything at the initial stage of the project. Adarsh paired up with Unni and Jijin and were busy coding some Auction WebSite. Prabin and Varun were also there doing some web design called Mock (if I remember correctly). As I was good at animation (not sooo good), I did a small animation about my project title and showed it to our Teacher. He got very impressed and rest is history. I will create some page, add a button and literally ask him “can I do this way or that way”. He used to sit and do everything for us. Myself and Vigil kumar presented the project successfully in college and lecturers got impressed and told us to maintain it as online. Of course they weren’t aware of Shaadhi.com.

By seeing my huge success in project, Adarsh wants to join my team again for the Major project in 8th sem. So I, Adarsh and rival Rasheed formed a team and joined CDAC Calicut for our Major project. We each paid Rs. 4000. Damn I don’t remember name of the project and what was it for. I only remember that, the application is being used by one of the private firm in Kerala. Our instructor over there gave us that incomplete project and asked us to modify it to add more functionality. Then only we realized that he was expecting something from us. Because of this we had to pretend that we were doing something, everyday.. Damn sitting idle in front of the system was horrible. From there only we came to know about gmail and created our own accounts. We (except Rasheed) had breakfast, lunch and dinner every day but no coding. Poor guy Rasheed used to sit and do the coding or we thought he was coding. When we were asked to submit the project by CDAC, we told Rasheed to present it as he was the only one who did (or modified) it. When our instructor reviewed the project, he got angry as it was at the same stage when we got it, with only the colour of forms changed in black (or violet). We scolded Rasheed for not doing it properly as if we didn’t get a chance to do it and we definitely would have applied a different colour than black (or violet). Luckily we got sign off from CDAC and submitted the project.