Books ,books and books

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
Copy into a new note Put an X next to the ones you've read. Include the number you have read in the headline and tag your friends!

X 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
x 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
x 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
X 6 The Bible
x7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 1984 - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
x10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
x14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
x18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
x21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
X24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
x25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
x29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
x30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
x31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
x32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
x33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
x34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
x40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
x42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
x43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
x51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel - never got past ch1
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
x54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
x55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
x57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
x59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
x60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
x65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
x68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
x69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
x70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
x71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
x72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
x81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
x89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
x90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
x97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
x98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
x99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Salsa with the devil

You reap what you sow. The demons that one creates for others will one day come back and haunt you too.

So Pakistan has made peace with elements of the Taliban in SWAT valley in exchange of enforcing Shariah law. As a neighbouring country whose existence appears rooted many times in anti-India rheoteric and also a country which has the nuclear bomb, this signals a dengerous development. Is Pakistan a failing state?

The shariah law in SWAT is atavistic in many aspects. Women testimony will not be equivalent to men, no more girl eductaion(over 500 girl schools have been destroyed by the Taliban in the region),compulsory purdah and a general repression of freedom.

There were about 3000 taliban fighters in SWAT. Why is it the Pakistani army could not defeat them. Or was it just that the generals dont want to.

I end with this quote of Winston Chuchill,"If you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival. There may even be a worse case: you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves."

It would be well if the Pakistani establishment was to remember this. Because one can't win in a negotiation with the devil. Pakistan created the Afghanistan Taliban and all the offshoots of the same in their country com from there only.

"
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety--Benjamin Franklin
"
The above quote remains as true today as anyday in the past.

LOVE

Love

Once upon a time, there was an island where all the feelings lived:

Happiness, Sadness, Knowledge, and all of the others including Love.

once day it was announced to the feelings that the island would sink, so all repaired their boats and left.

Love wanted to persevere until the last possible moment.

when the island was almost sinking, Love decided to ask for help.

 

Sichness was passing by Love in a grand boat. Love said "Sichness, can you take me with you?"

Sichness answered, "no, I can't. there is a lot of gold and silver in my boat. there is no place here for you."

 

Love decided to ask Vanity who was also passing by in a beautiful vessel, "Vanity, please help me!"

"I can't help you Love. you are all wet and might damage my boat." Vanity answered.

Sadness was close by so Love asked for help, "Sadness, let me go with you."

"oh...Love, I am so sad that I need to be by myself!"

Happiness passed by Love too, but she was so happy that she did not even hear when Love called her!

Suddenly, there was a voice, "come Love, I will take you." it was an elder.

Love felt so blessed and overjoyed that he even forgot to ask the elder his name.

when they arrived at dry land, the elder went his own way.

 

Love realized how much he owed the elder and asked Knowledge, another elder, "who helped me?"

"it was Time," Knowledge answered. "Time?" asked Love. "but why did Time help me?"

Knowledge smiled with deep wisdom and answered,

"because, only Time is capable of understanding how great Love is."

 

Musings from beyond the pale

Its  been five straight years since I have been writing for "Srijna". Five years!! Some may wonder as to how this is possible. Was I forced to repeat a year or something similar? Naa, but if I was to give a hint, it would be to tell you that I cannot call myself a student of AIT anymore. I am now an alumnus.

Nearly eight months back I bid goodbye to AIT. And this article is about the journey since. I have now been working with Infosys for nearly seven months and am presently working out of Mysore. It's been a strange shift from a student to a working professional. At times it now appears nothing has changed, at other times I wonder if even something of the past survives.

I have learnt that we will loose touch with a lot of friend once a person starts working. Its not about contact numbers and e-mail ids. I am online every night and I see so many batchmates online. The tragedy is I seldom have the time or the will to say hello. And neither do they. Only a few friendships survive and even those time keeps corroding, like an animal gnawing at the edges. The best of friends however stay in touch because they miss each other.

Of course now I get paid at the end of every month but that changes few things. The kind of fun I had in college seems impossible now and feels like a distant hallucination. Its only when one start working that one realizes the importance of a weekend. I savour it, dwell in it ,mourn its passing and then wait for another return. In life and career, a lot also depends on luck. Fate as someone said is a seductive idea. However while its critical to have fun in college, I suggest that one must always put in the minimum amount of hardwork. Play it safe.

Also presently we are going through the worst economic crises in a long long time. Recession scares everybody. Should we really panic? I agree that recession has affected the IT industry. Clients are short of cash and projects are tough to retain. Many companies are firing people-left, right and center. It does appear to be a bad time.

While this may be the first recession of us as adults, we would be fools to forget that this is not the first recession. This is also not the last. The business phases come in regular cycles.There will always be recessions every couple years. These are the risks of working in the corporate sector. The rewards are also manifold.

Even in a recession opportunities exist. Its up to us if we have the will to search for them. Many of my friends have got job offers even in this recession. Fear is good when it makes us aware of the surroundings and work harder. On the other hand fear which cripples us and does not allow us to do a thing is bad.

So enjoy your time at AIT because these days will never return. Work hard and party harder still. Adios.

Syed Ashraf Husain

Proud part of the AIT Comp batch of 08

 

This is my article for the latest issue of my college magazine. I did not intend to write but the present secretary requested and I just could not say no. Maybe I have a hard time letting go.

 

Battlestar Gallactica-Review

When I was in my final year of engineer a classmates brother who was also on my friend list had a status message that read like "Battlestar Gallactica rocks". It kind of stayed with me, and so about a month back when I decided to download a new series the choice was a bit easy.

I did a bit of research and found Battlestar Gallactica has won a lot of awards. So I started watching the series with a lot of expectations. However the first lot of episodes soundly disappointed me and I wondered if I should download more. However I decided to persevere and it paid off.

It became interesting and I was hooked. Battlestar Gallactica is a science fiction series about a scenario where human population living on a planet system of twelve colonies(planets) including Caprica get attacked and nearly annhilated by cylons. Cylons were machines that humans had created who when they had rebelled had been banished to another planetary system. In 40 years the robots designed better models who perfectly even in physiology resembled humans.

A single battleship and some civilian transport escaped and made a run for it. However they kept getting pursued by cylons. Also cylons had sleeper agents within the humans.

On this canvas the story unfolds. The beauty about battlestar gallactica is its a sort of deep introspection into human behaviour. Humans and cylons becomes us versus them. It shows the cruelty of those who praise piety because its the 'other.'

The science fiction stuff and special effects are not that great. Indeed effort on such things is minimal. So much of the things used and habits are identical to present day. I would say in a 100 years humanity wont recognize itself much less a 1000. It seems as if authors dont want to distract us from the deeper stuff.

BSG is a great series to watch because it makes us think. I would say download the torrents and watch it.

Toastmasters Club: Project 1 , The icebreaker

"Strengthen your strengths and weaken your weaknesses." I know I can speak very well and people shower me with praises for being confident and great at speaking. However I am also aware that I am at times a little too rough at the edges. The possibility of a devastating blowup on stage always remains. Probablity could be my big enemy with each successful meeting that chance of that big embarrassing performance on stage.

So I joined this club called “The Toastmasters International ” at my company. I get to give 10 speeches over a period of time with various themes and aims. My intention is to firm up a strength. If I am a good speaker there is no reason why I can’t be better.

The first speech is an ice-breaker. I am supposed to introduce myself on stage and try to identify with the audience. I gave it on this Wednesday. It was a decent effort though I think people praised me more than I deserved. I did not memeorize the whole speech and it caused some issues. Also a major fact was that my eye contact with the audience was poor.

Anyway here is my speech.Its titled 'hope'.

“Good Evening Toastmaster ,fellow toast masters and honored guests. Today on my first meeting as a toastmaster, I have the pleasure of welcoming among us a writer, poet, debater, blogger as well as a budding singer.

Would any of you like to guess who he is ?Don’t look around. That person is occupying the stage right now.

Let me tell you a little secret about my name,”My middle name is actually my first name.” And I can assure you it causes innumerable problems. In school and college where people only normally knew me by my name middle name, the presence of Syed used to cause a lot of confusion . I would get a lot of comments like “ where did this Syed suddenly come from?” As if people change their names everyday.

In Infosys on the other hand the display name is so widely used that, people generally ask “If you are Ashraf, who the hell is Syed? “

But enough of the banter. Let me tell you something about myself. I come from Allahabad, the land of Sangam and the Kumbh mela. My father is an army officer and my mother is a lecturer in English. I have been brought up in a lot of places. In fact in my first school, we used to have snow days. Rain the joke went , we could handle any day.

Anyway after a certain time my dad decided changing schools too frequently would harm me academically. So he asked for a posting to our hometown where I joined to Boys High School. Our most famous alumnus is someone who has choosen acting as his profession. We know him as the Big B or Amitabh Bacchan.

Later while dad would get posted to literally the other end of India, I would stay put in Allahabad.

I have always read quite indiscriminately since childhood and my favourite book is Midnights Children. I am also a big fan of Urdu poetry. There is a line in Urdu poetry which translates something like “Sufficient heartache will make even a person with a heart of stone pen poetry”. After class tenth, I started writing poetry. What I can tell you is that there were girls and heartache. Neither in limited quantities.

In that period I also was part of my school magazine board and also worked with the Times of India as a freelance writer. I was the youngest freelance writer by a very big margin.

I say that where I am is the result of a series of accidents and conscious decisions. I was quite enthusiastic about being a until I realized in class 12^th that being a doctor required too long a commitment.

So I switched to engineering. Having just missed the cut for IIT, I decided to join NIT Warrangal through AIEEE. However man proposes God disposes. My parents had never heard of Warrangal. The day after I was allotted NIT warrangal, Naxals killed 6 policeman in the district. That was nearly 4.5 years ago when Naxalite violence was rare. My mom thought I was going to Somalia for engineering and would never return. Nit Warrangal was over.

So dejected I joined computer science engineering at Army Institute of Technology , Pune. But I would later be surprised because AIT turned out to be a great experience.

AIT is a fully residential college & hostel life turned out to be a great eye-opener. Only those who have been in a hostel can appreciate the experience. There were people willing to borrow anything and everything. And of course later forget to return the stuff.

With no mom and dad around ,everyone had to stand up for himself /herself(I will be politically correct). There is an incident I remember vividly. Earlier I used to pride myself over the fact that I did not get into conflicts. No one had told me what a big fool I was. I had a roommate in SE who had a habit of suddenly screaming at you in your face for no reason. First time he did it, I waited two days to tell him, that Varun my parents don’t shout at me and neither can you. But within a month he repeated it again. This time I waited two hours to express my disapproval. Then before another month had passed he repeated it again. This time even as he started shouting, I took one more step in his face and screamed back even louder. He never shouted again.

In my first year of college I was accepted into the Magazine Board at AIT. With one written test and three exhaustive and gruellling rounds of interview, the joke goes went that it is easier to crack a job interview than get into the magazine board. Publishing the magazine was just one of our tasks. We arranged treasure hunts, notice boards, started juicy rumours, set college dress codes for Valentines day and even had a betting organized on results of certain events. The Mag Board and AIT gave me opportunities to hone my talents.

From someone who wanted to do his M.Tech and be in research and development roles, I realized I absolutely relished leadership roles. So I became an MBA aspirant. I have written CAT two times but my performance has still not got me that dream call I desire.

Infosys is another step in the journey called life. While I had another offer ,I choose Infosys because of the tremendous learning possibility. I had hoped to be posted to Pune but man proposes, and Infosys disposes.

Mysore while tragically not being the hip and cool city like Pune allows me time to pursue my passions. I read on a regular basis every night. I have learnt how to cook. My French classes started yesterday and I now learn hindustaani classical musical every weekend.

From life I have learnt the lesson that not everything works out the way we want it to. Even after a month, my Saa (the music tone) is still not firm. But I and my teacher see progress. And I find hope.

Over to you Mr. Toastmaster.

”

Tales from Mysore

What do three IT engineers trapped in a city that sleeps at nine with only the fact that they are just two minutes from their office for consolation, do?

They cook their dinner!!

More details later. Its a grand story.

Getting late for work. Have my first french class today. :)

Adios