the e^xponential stress

This is in continuation of part one - How I Messed Up My First Interviews: Chapter I It was December 1st, the 'Day 1' of the 2015 placements, and Honda R&D happened to be the second company to have come after Microsoft. We were 4 students from the batch who opted for the Honda interviews. After a hiatus from my previous interview experience during engineering, I thought that this time I was prepared and would have learned something. I was excited for the interview although not much excited because I wasn't into two-wheelers as much as I was into cars. In a batch of 20 M.Des students at IIT Delhi, I too was amongst the 5 people who wanted to become an automobile designer. In our multi-disciplinary course, we studied product design for both tangible products as well as for digital products. We worked closely with Maruti Suzuki India R&D for more than 6 months and learned the entire process of car design right from research to clay modelling, but despite our efforts an...

As it can be figured from my previous posts that I have been learning to play the ukulele and guitar for quite some time now.  I had started learning guitar in August 2020 while I had started learning the ukulele in September 2019. The journey has been nothing but amazing and rewarding. While I was sure of myself learning the instruments but what I had misjudged about myself is the capability to learn them in a limited time. I was able to learn ukulele in less than 9 months and guitar in even lesser than 3 months. The rest of the period went into becoming just the better version of myself. Just like any other skill, learning instruments is also about practice. As of today, I can definitely count myself in the intermediate category of players. I can play any strumming pattern, know all the chords, and can play them without having to look at the fretboard, can play all the barre chords of the guitar without hurting fingers, and sometimes can find chords of some of the songs. Early t...

I have messed up my first interviews in both colleges that I attended. Today, I will speak of the first one that I gave. I have written about this in two of my earlier posts- Engineering is a state of mind , and Group discussions and introversion . I wasn't sure earlier if I should write this or not but I do feel that failures are an important part of life and I sport them confidently. And, for the past 2.5 years of my career, I have been sitting on the other side of the table, hiring others for my company and I have grown a lot since then so, this post wouldn't hurt my career. Here it is- My interview experience with Wipro. This story dates back to December 2012. Wipro was one of the first few companies that visited our campus and like I always do, I cleared all the prelims and was amongst the few who got qualified for the interview pushing back many ECE, IT, and CSE grads despite I being from the mechanical branch.  I got my formals stitched for the first time in life, clean...

Short answer - Learning guitar is very easy. I learned to play the guitar in 30 days. But, there is a catch. Read below to learn more. And, before I actually start answering how I did it, I think it is important to lay down a brief background of music in my life. I haven't gone under any formal music training but during primary school days in DAV, we had a compulsory class of vocal music and classical dance. I was in awe of my music teacher mimicking the sound of running horses on his pair of Tabla, and I had learnt a bit of Kathak. I was part of various school functions either singing in choir or dancing in the group. I didn't pursue dance much but I did become a permanent member of the choir group for 6+ years. Growing up, I tried instrumental music too as my ECA and, learnt to play a bit of the banjo. Banjo was considerably easier than the Tabla. I tried my hands at the drums and xylophone too but failed to learn them. Keyboard and guitar always gave me goosebumps so never t...

"My hobby is to pick new hobbies" My creative brain requires rewiring every now and then. In simple words, I like to learn new things, read new topics, build habits...I am always on my toes striving to be a better man, a kinder person who does good deeds. Ah! a tough goal, I know! But, I'll keep at it.  While we were doing our M.Des, our profs gave us a lot of different materials, assignments, theories, designing practices to shape our brain to become better in the creative and research process so that we could think differently, do something unique, build new designs...and more. But, it's not since the M.Des, my brain has been trained to be creative ever since my primary school, DAV where I learnt new art techniques from my drawing and clay modelling teachers. Actually, I believe that I was born as a creative soul thus leading me to like the art classes. I have always been good at drawing since childhood. Sadly, my explorations lie mainly in the creative side of min...

This year, I completed my second-longest stint with a deactivated Facebook account, a complete 3.5 years while I write this post in July 2020.  I have had my Facebook account since December 2009 which apparently was created by my college friend Alok who couldn't see me as the only person without a Facebook account in a batch of 60 engineers :D. One day while we were sitting in the computer lab, Alok scraped my education details from LinkedIn and created a Facebook account with my name, and started adding my school mates too. For a complete month of December, Alok acted as Chetan on Facebook until I accepted to take over the account and maintain it. I had to give in before he did anything more in the name of Chetan :D though Alok was my best buddy so he wouldn't have done something funny with my account yet to be square, I took over the account. He had kept a geeky password 'Efficiency' to start with. From January to February 2010, I added all my mechanical engineering...

This story is in continuation of  Stranger Friends . If you haven't read that, I would recommend reading that first before reading this second part. Bangalore wasn't new anymore. I had obvious friends in the office as well as in Uniworld, my guesthouse. But, there was one unique friend, a stranger friend in Uniworld, the housekeeper! I had been talking to him about random things around me in the city, office, life, and whatnot. Strange but, true; I would talk to him generally during weekend mornings. After completing my stint of four months in Infosys' Bangalore Campus, I had taken a transfer to their Jaipur DC. My transfer is another interesting story highlighting the politics in the corporate world of Infosys; will write an article separately on that. On my last day in Bangalore, I had my bags packed and kept them on the floor near the room's door. The housekeeper did all the cleaning chores and while he was leaving the room, I looked at him. "Sir, ja rahe h...

One crazy guy Left the comfort to explore From center of the land to edge of the shore One crazy guy Who once won the world Lost the trust, got the stones hurled One crazy guy With a thirst to make a dent Surviving the weather without a tent One crazy guy Wanted to remove crisis and poverty Clean the minds that were dirty One crazy guy On a mission to reach the peak Built the journey desirable to seek

These days, I am learning to do portrait sketching...Actually, I already know how portrait sketching is done but I have simply forgotten the tricks as I am doing it after almost 15 years. So, I am picking up new tricks and styles while I am scribbling my pencils and pens on paper. I have messed up with a lot of faces while have successfully created a few. In fact, the primary motto of going away from Facebook 'again' (shall post the article on 1st Jan'18) was to concentrate on things that make me happy. So, here are my sketches of 2017 in reverse chrono order. Actually, I am not adding all the sketches, the ones I messed up shall not get public :) Shall keep updating this post till 31st Dec'17. Tools: Graphite pencils, Colour pencils, Crayons, Sketch-pens, and Ball-point pens.