Memories

For people may come and people may go, but I stay on forever - for I am the memories that make this magical life worthy.


Who are your friends? Are your childhood friends still with you? If so, why are they still with you? How much effort is needed? Who is making the effort? You might see the friends you have right now will be from people near you- physically or mentally. But dear friend, remember that life is uncertain, and nothing materialistic will live forever.

Jacob, a good friend of mine, once told me: Don't be sad for it ended, but be happy for that it happened.

Once, I was depressed and sitting alone in mess. Manohar, a good friend of mine, came near me and sat beside me. He was observing me for some time and noticed that I needed some help. I questioned him about the very basic purpose of our lives, the very basic question that sprouts our existential crisis, to which he gave me a very important life lesson- It cannot be found that what our purpose is but what story we create out of our life will be seen as our purpose. This life of  ours is like a movie we direct and we are the primary stakeholder. All others in our life are mere characters that come and act and go back to their very own stories.

Questioning our purpose is like opening a pandora box of questions. I am not sure about the answer and not sure about the integrity of the answers claimed by others. All the philosophies we see around us are possible explanations to these questions faced by some person who lived before us or with us right now, but those all are possible theories, I believe. People might show some proofs supporting the claims but it could be falsified also. 

Risks? Big question

 When it feels scary to jump in, that is exactly when you should jump. Otherwise, you end up staying in the same place your whole life. This is a dialogue by Oscar Isaac from the movie "A most violent year".

Well, I have a different opinion. I'd rather advise taking calculated risks rather than a naive intuition-based random walk. Maybe, like a Gradient descent where you take each calculated risk to minimize your distance from your target.

What would be an ideal surname?

Surnames have become essential due to the mandates imposed by our society. I do not prefer the idea of a surname, but sadly, that is very much required nowadays to distinguish people by name. But the saddest part is people still bring up their inherent racism to compare and classify people, especially if the surname refers to a particular community, family or profession.
Another common finding in India is when kids are given surnames by their father's name. Why not the name of the mother or both parents? I asked my parents why my surname was only my father's name and not any other name. The answer was just because it was a practice then, and the nurse/attendant who wrote my name wrote it as M. Aravind because the surname was mandatory, and later on, it got expanded in my passport. I am considering changing my name to Aravind Geethamurali to honour my parents for what I am today. 
Waiting for that day when the process of renaming people's names will be very easy, and we can name whatever we want, including numbers. May sound weird to some, but yes, it is indeed a restriction to our other degree of freedom.

I was working till 2 AM today i lab, and then a security bhaiyya peeped outside through the side door and saluted me from there! I also saluted back, reminds me of their dedication., all night, they were checking all labs i everything was okay

IIT life is so privileged

and here I am writing this at 3.25 AM listening to Linkin Park heavy metal

Got into Purdue!

On February 13 2024, I got a mail from ECE dept Purdue, about being selected for TA funding and PhD admission to Purdue! {13-02-2024 3:37 AM}
I also remember the day when I got the mail from IIT Kanpur telling I got admitted to the MS program!
{July 12, 2021, 5:24 PM}
For TKM and KV Pattom, no mails were there however.
TKM was through KEAM portal, I remember we would login with roll number and they'd show the college allotted. School KV Pattom I'm not sure how my father got to know, from my memory I think, the results were put up in front of school notice board

Reminds me of my school front gate, where its written "Go out to serve your country and countrymen" 

Other Blogs

 Hello world!
I am back with lot of news to share! Decided to start it all again!

These are my blogging attempts spread across the years:
(Some of which I created in 2007 are no longer available like in ning.com)

Share Gorilla... (share-gorilla.blogspot.com)
Amnetronix
The Noob's Guide to Everything (thenoobsguide.blogspot.com)
aravindalokam.com
hakcat.github.io
Aravindalokam
https://logicvampire.wordpress.com/ 

and many more which I am not able to recollect and find now ;(

Miss those days of Oracle Thinkquest, Orkut, Picassa, Windows Media player visualizations, Winamp, Windows XP, Blackberry and Nokia Qwerty phones, walkmans, CD Players etc etc and lot more