In Calcutta

I spent most of the early days of my life in West Bengal, India. In fact I lived about 12 years in the city of Calcutta. (For those who are more geographically motivated, Calcutta is at 82 degrees East and 27 degrees North). To say, I love this city is an understatement ! Calcutta is located on the right bank of river Hooghly, which is a distributary of the river Ganges ( I could have spared you these gory details, but then what the hell ... it is my home page! ). If you ask me the reason why I love Calcutta, it will take a very long time to answer. Truly speaking there are lots of things that are wrong with Calcutta which are very easy to point out, and there are a few things that are right with the city, which are difficult to explain. The best comment that captures Calcutta in a beautiful way, is, "If you want to see Bombay [now written Mumbai, -ed.] go to New York, if you want to see Delhi, go to DC; if you want to see India, go to Calcutta" (actually I picked it up somewhere on the web).

School Days -- DBPC
It was at Calcutta that I spent most of my school days. I studied at Don Bosco School, which is a Christian missionary school run by the Salesians of Don Bosco. If you want to meet some of my schoolmates, here they are.

As would be for most people, school days were real fun. I was an avid participant in school fests, particularly during the last two years. School fests in Calcutta used to be (I am sure it still is) exciting stuff. People used to turn up for these mega events to win the competitions, to socialise with the opposite sex, or to just bunk classes.

My favourite event was quizzes -- general, sports or any other kind. But, I found it more fun to participate in skits, plays and other such interesting stuff. Once it happened that the school skit team was running short of members and I was drafted in at the last minute. An hour before the skit was supposed to be staged, the team sat down to prepare the first skit. There was a lot of tension around, as nobody had any clue of what to put up. Desperate times bring about desperate measures. So the only idea that came forth was somewhat raunchy (that's what the audience and the judges thought, not us). When the skit was put up for the viewing pleasure of the audience, there was a lot of hooting. We went on unperturbed, and also managed to overshoot the time limit by 15 minutes. We had expected the audience to view the skit with suitable maturity, but I guess we made the mistake of comparing their maturity with ours (Well, at least that's our official excuse). So, to say that the crowd did not enjoy our show is an under-statement and the next day in school we found out that the organisers had put in a complaint about our skit to the Principal. The school authorities found nothing objectionable with the skit as we had expected (that we had presented a very different version of the skit was another matter) !

Days at IIT Kanpur (College life)
After completing my school life, I managed to land up at IIT Kanpur. IIT Kanpur has a lot of great, and some not so great memories for me. But on the whole it was fun. Once, I arrange my IITK photoalbum, you can see some pictures from my IITK life.

Some of the most exciting times at IITK were my escapades with my wing-mates to some beautiful resorts of tourist interest at Nainital, Khajuraho and Agra. The trip to Nainital was possibly the best of the lot, since it was totally unplanned and unexpected. In fact, the decision to go to Nainital was made on the morning of the day we left for it.

This was followed by a lull lasting about a couple of semesters (my 3rd year), when life at IITK gets very hectic academically. But it is the final year which carries some of my fondest memories from my days at this institute in Kanpur.

To make a long story short, it might be sufficient to inform the readers that after three overworked and one underworked year, I majored in Computer Science and Engineering in May 1996 (in May 20, 1996 to be precise).

To meet my batchmates, visit the IITK class of 1996 home page. To locate my department mates from IITK, link to the IITKCS '96 page.

At UMCP
Finally to satisfy my passion for higher studies in Computer Science, I joined the University of Maryland at College Park in Fall 1996. As of now, I am working (hard ?) towards a PhD degree here. In the process, I was able to spend the summer of 1997 in this research lab. California is a fun place in general, lots of sun and all the rest that comes with it :). It gave me a good opportunity to see a lot of the Pacific coast. The long promised photo album is not yet ready, so you have to be mor patient to satisfy your visual instincts.

Since then, I have returned back to the niceties of grad student life at Maryland and trying to get done with courses for good. And when I get a chance, I will definitely try to add some more to this page.

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