If that could happen...

Life is a long play and we all are its actors. Our scripts have already been written and our roles pre-defined. We cannot mould the acts as per our wish and all the instances of life cannot go as we want. The irony is: destiny is what we make! This really confuses me. At times I also bang my head in understanding why can’t every situation of our lives execute in exactly the manner we want it to be?

If everything took place the way we desired, then that would simply be an imaginative world. However I do not mind living in imagination!

 

In fact whenever something makes me sad or a situation gets out of my control I dream of the fictitious world where I would have been the boss; where I would have decided what should have happened. I get lost into my parallel universe where everyone is honest, caring, emotional, and helpful. My fictitious world lets me meet my dream friend; it lets me meet Priyanka, Shivani and Mittali daily, share my thoughts with them, crack some non-sense jokes and once again relive the college period. It gives me a chance to change the behavior of people around me for good and then analyze living with them. My imagination knows no bounds. I often visualize myself hanging in the cloud of electrons, swimming in the vast nothingness of space, living inside a black hole, burning in a supernova, and travelling back and forth in time. I close my eyes and find myself in the executable file of linux kernel, in the boot loader partition of NAND flash, at a particular mount point in the UBI file system, in the /drivers/net/Ethernet/ti directory, and sometimes acting like a TFTP server. At times I imagine myself bound in a socket and analyzing each and every network packet passing through me: ARP, ICMP, data, etc. I also imagine what happens after death, how I will be like when I will be 100 and what will I say to God when I’ll meet Him. I dream of the day when I would be astronaut and will travel in space. I turn over to the impossible moment when I would meet Einstein and Newton. I roll over my eyes and figure myself in my past life, meeting dinosaurs, Alexander, Chandra Gupta Maurya, Chanakya, Jesus, Harrapan civilization, and all that we read in history. I jump back in time and imagine meeting Ram-Sita, mostly in western attire! Not only this, I take a leap of 5000 years and imagine what would it be like? Will the magnetic poles of earth have changed positions by then? Will New York be a desert and Sahara an ocean? I even dream of the doomsday- will that be of the type shown in movie “2012” or will it be something totally bizarre?

 

Imagining things gives me immense happiness; though simply for a moment. Some may call it escapism. However I do not mind escaping to a third level. This is because I take care of the fact that this is not reality. I remember whatever I am composing is not going to happen in reality; it is just a figment of imagination. I do not let the process of imagination take control over my conscience, my work, and my daily necessary tasks. However in my busy life, where everything is super fast, imagining out of the world things makes me delighted. The mere thought that I am a meson colliding in the LHC or I am standing beside a graviton enthralls me. Perhaps this is what I really want. But alas! This is not possible. This reminds me I am dreaming! So here I come out of my dreams and end this article!

Two months at work

Today I have successfully completed two months of my first job. As a pre-requisite of becoming a full fledged embedded systems’ engineer i am slowly learning to deal with the monstrous Linux operating system, and steadily beginning to write some pages of kernel code. With the first two salaries in my bank account and my brand new debit card in my hand I feel proud; proud that I am worth something. But the next moment I recall that I am still a probationary engineer and there are still four screwing months to go ahead before I come out of the training state and get absorbed in the company. Nevertheless, I try to enjoy what I have gained in these two busy months.

All the knowledge of microcontrollers and microprocessors which I had gained during my B.Tech degree course is helping me a lot. However Linux was something I had never worked upon before and, until two months ago, was totally alien to me. But now I feel extremely excited about it. I now know a few of its commands and some of the concepts behind it. Kernel and boot loader, what I knew before, were something which really existed in any functional system but I had no idea of how they were framed and what was the concept behind them. But now! Now I am reading more than 2000LOCs of code of boot loader daily and learning about the actual role of kernel in initialization of peripherals. I have given a presentation on interrupt handling and kernel synchronization and its repercussions are I cannot take my mind out of ‘interrupts and interrupt handler’!

My work environment is extremely good and i am fortunate enough to get the best mentor as my boss! He is always on his toes to clarify my doubts and helps me understand some concepts. He is extremely disciplined and sincere towards his work and answers all my silly questions with patience and attention.  In addition to this, my colleagues are also very supportive and co-operative. My family is helping me a lot.  And the most important point is I am enjoying what I am doing!

However in-spite of all the positive fillings, there is some lacunae in my life. It is the loneliness and void created because of absence of my college friends. Like me, they are also busy in their new jobs and courses. However, we try to be in communication with each other through messages and phone calls. We frame plans to meet every weekend but something or the other happens and, needless to say, our plan hardly gets executed. Every alternate day or so I watch the video which I had created with some of the pictures of our beautiful college days. I then get lost in my nostalgic college memories- the outings, the fun, the classes, the bunks, the lunch, the labs, and everything. I miss the minors, the majors, the library, the canteen, the basketball court, the administrative department, and our Sunila madam too. I keep on looping in and endless loop of eternal memories with no handler function designed to help me come out back in the user space. Only my friends can fill lacunae of mine completely and I wish this happens soon.