TCS ILP Ahmadabad

This is our third week here in gandhinagar. Weather here is very beautiful (except for the latest cyclone warning). There are a couple of things that summarize this week:

In college, I couldn’t mingle much with most of the people, including the Bakwaas group. But here, the lack of essential things like TV variety, continuous internet connection and news papers made me socialize a lot. I had nice chance to know many people whom I actually knew from college, but didn’t know much about them. We talked many things about c2d’s outings, various pathshala practices and many more things.

A nice group has been formed here which has 13 people in it. The list goes like this: me, Shawn, pankit, kunal, mitesh, kalpesh, chintan, falguni, anjali, madhura, ruchi, shweta, aastha. I and Shawn are from bakwaas gang; pankit, kunal, chintan, falguni, anjali and madhura belong to pathshala; and mitesh and kalpesh hail from c2d. We had a couple of outings to movies and restaurants, and people seem comfortable with each other. This is the first time that I have been in a non-boys-exclusive group. Main difference between a normal group and a boys group is in behaviour. People automatically behave at a particular decency level when girls are around.

Here I understood why people value weekends so much. I anyways got bored in two long days of weekend. I had nothing to do and I didn’t feel like reading (ILP or otherwise). Then we saw a movie in theatre (ajab prem ki gajab kahani, pathetic movie btw). We did a lot of time pass, chitchatting, playing mafia and stuff.

Having a music phone in such a situation is a blessing. I sincerely don’t know what I would have done if I had carried my nokia 2600 here. At least in my free time I can listen to various classical performances!

We found two derasars in the vicinity. One is in sector seven and other is in sector three of gandhinagar. Both are small derasars with not more than 50 Jain families residing nearby. I and kalpesh prayed there and we plan to keep doing that in upcoming weekends also.

Tomorrow we have our EC1. Its the first evaluation of ILP and we all are excited about it. I however felt that there were too many self study sessions for us. Most people completed studying various topics in the syllabus well in advance. So some of the last few days were not too interesting. I felt that they could have accelerated the process a little bit. But other people also felt that they still need some more days for preparation. This was absolute paranoid behaviour of them. I didn’t understand what all the hype about scheme syntax and SMI and testing was.

Yesterday it rained a lot in Mumbai. A cyclone was expected to hit Mumbai, but I think after seeing all the war-level preparations by the BMC, it changed its route to Gujarat. Today the whole of Gujarat is on high alert and we were asked to vacate our office at 6 pm itself. It seemed a little windier and slightly rainy here, but I don’t think there is anything that we should worry about.

During ILP, it is very difficult to maintain the hobby of reading books. Only in initial days I could keep reading the books that I brought. Shawn has a Holy Bible with him in the room, along with some more small sized books which explain a particular part of bible. He pointed out some verses of the Bible which I liked very much. They are very simple and understandable. We can easily use them in our day to day life. Most of them overlapped with many other concepts of Jainism (or with the basics of any religion that I know for that matter). I would love to read bible in Hindi/Guajarati in future if I can find enough time to do so. This is obviously along with the various Jainism books that I already read. BTW if you are wondering about how Shawn could find time to read bible, then I would like to say that he wakes up at around 5.30 and then reads the Bible every day! This was one thing that I never expected him to do.

While typing one of the Guajarati posts on the Shawn’s laptop, I realized that Unicode characters are combined automatically when they should be. Now through this I can experiment and easily learn the Urdu script. I tried learning it before from books, but due to various combinations of letters, I could never form a clear understanding of the Urdu script. But now it’s easy, once again due to computers! Thanks Unicode!

I saw a Tata nano yesterday in infocity. It was parked near the shop where we ate. It seems like a simple car. Its design and size is very similar to daewoo matiz.

signing off at TCS studio apartments, gandhinagar infocity.

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