Talk at SJCE Mysore

It was another not-a-normal morning. Aravind woke me up at 5AM! And we left for the station. 6AM was our train to Mysore, and 5 minutes to 6 we reached the entrance. Till now, chilled out in the awesome Bangalore weather. As usual, we being the last-minute workers, now start hurrying and running to the train (early morning exercise :P).

Well, our second train journey I guess. Though we had promised ourselves to run around once in a while — as usual, an awesome journey, fresh cool breeze through the hair, beautiful sceneries passing by, making me jealous of the people living so close to nature. Not forgetting the Maddur vadas in our hands! (@Aravind: next time we take the Jaipur train :P)

We reached Mysore at around 9:30. Sharan met us there and escorted us to the college. We were given an excellent room on campus. Freshened up in the next 5 minutes and were back on the road. Strolled around the campus for a while and then headed out. Aimlessly walking, we found a bus stand and took the first bus. With no clue about where to go, we got off at the central bus stand and looked at the map — the zoo it was! (Actually Aravind had it all planned, he hadn’t seen the zoo.) We walked towards the zoo, about 2-3 kms or less I guess.

It had been quite some time since my last zoo visit, a lot had changed. The route was now defined — unlike before, we were now forced to take only one way. Many improvements: the cheetah has a glassed window now, and many others too. The place where snakes are kept is now more enclosed, something I did not like.

We walked all around the zoo, almost exhausted by now! But every animal gave a pose for my camera :) — the best of them were the meerkat and the giraffe.

Walking out of the zoo we were now hungry, and with the help of my faint intuition we walked all the way to Dasaprakash to enjoy an excellent meal and the best badam milk I have had in ages!

Walk, no more we could — so we took a rickshaw back to campus. Relaxed for a while. We then started discussing with the students, finding out what activities were conducted, etc. Quite impressive, it was! We then attended a talk on LaTeX followed by an intro to Scilab, conducted by a faculty member and a student respectively.

It was now time for us to start thinking about our own talk (yes, last-minute guys that we are, we had still not prepared anything). Started working on our projects at 7pm and were ready with only 2 small demos by 9. Aravind dozed off, leaving me all to myself :(

Day 2:

We woke up at 9 I guess, started putting things together for another demo. We then went out for breakfast accompanied by Rakesh. Hot dosas and coffee under the burning hot sun! Quite an experience.

Back to the room, we started deciding what to talk about and also checked out the other demos. Varun met us and started writing his code in full tension. Unfortunately we missed attending the other talks conducted due to our last-minute preparations. Finally we were ready at 4pm! Our talk was scheduled at 4:30 :D

As usual, another completely ad-hoc talk by us. Nothing was how we planned it. Yet it went smooth — for the first time we had all our demos working without an issue. Another successful talk, I must say!

The funny part was, we were referred to as “sir” — thinking of it, it’s not funny, it makes me feel old :P

Heading back to namma Bengaluru late night, enjoying the peace, joy, and a deep satisfaction.

All in all, one of the best student-organised events I have seen till date. Hats off to the IEEE student chapter of SJCE Mysore!