Here goes his incredible story  –

Raju is still asleep in his bed when the alarm goes off at 6 o’clock in the morning, without opening an eyelid and lying perfectly still, Raju hits the snooze button and goes back to sleep peacefully.

10 minutes later, the clock rings again, waking up Raju & reminding him of his worldly duties. Raju wakes up annoyed & sleep deprived but takes pride thinking that if he didn’t turn up for work, the company would lose several million rupees and so would the Indian economy.

Raju gets ready for office, wears branded clothes, tie, shoes; skips breakfast for Indian economy’s sake, says his short prayer & leaves home for office.

Every morning after leaving home, Raju walks a few minutes to the auto-rickshaw stand and today was no exception. He asks a rickshaw-wallah to leave him to the railway station, but the rickshaw-wallah simply refuses. He asks others but they all refuse to take him in. Raju tries to convince them, negotitate, bribe but all in vain. Those free will bastards don’t work for a boss like Raju does, and bluntly refuse to take orders. The rickshaw-wallahs have a definite purpose while working and they simply won’t go to a place that some Raju wants them to go no matter however urgent it is for him. Whereas for Raju, purpose at work is the purpose of his boss.

The clock is ticking and the company is going to lose millions if Raju arrives late and poor Raju is busy struggling trying to find an auto. After a while, Raju gives up on the high hopes of finding an auto and instead walks to the bus stop, hoping to catch a bus this time. The bus arrives 40 minutes late and is overflowing with people from both doors. Even a mouse would hesitate to enter but Raju makes a attempt and fails miserably. But this failure doesn’t deter him and when the next bus arrives, Raju manages to put his foot on someone else’s and with one hand holding the window begins his ride to the railway station.  A series of abuses are exchanged but by now Raju has mastered the art of handling them well.

The company is on the verge of losing millions & Raju is its only hope. Raju is already running late and so when he reaches the railway station, without a thought Raju runs towards the fast train platform to catch the train. And when the train arrives, it seems like the entire world is late today. Raju being a footboard expert holds the train door like a pro and with his other hand holding the roof travels through the fast local.

Raju is still in the moving train when the clouds burst & his already crumpled branded clothes start getting wet. There is not an inch space to move inside and all Raju could do is hope for the rains to stop and for his station to arrive. Amidst all this what also concerns him is the recent terror attack, he hopes for the safety of his life & loved ones, he hopes he doesn’t fall off the running train, he hopes his wife gets well soon after her appendix operation and also hopes that his daughter gets an admission in school.

Finally, the station arrives. Raju gets down and rushes out of the train (rush: which has now become a normal act). But there is a pool of knee deep water saturated outside the station. Raju hesitates for a moment, but arriving at no conclusion, quickly folds his pants and starts walking through it.

Raju finally reaches office and heaves a sigh of relief.

But this isn’t the end of hardship. Now begins the hardship.

Raju quietly listens to all the abuses hurled at him by his boss for coming late, then takes his seat and starts work for the day.

Whatever happened to the lost millions & rising Indian economy, poor Raju is happy being still be able to live another day.

The day doesn’t end here, it begins

The mantal bwoys rocked with their performance & the movie made sense.

It ends beautifully with -

Dilon mein tum apni betaabiyan leke chal rahe ho, toh zinda ho tum
Nazar mein khwaabon ki bijliyan leke chal rahe ho, toh zinda ho tum
Hawa ke jhokon ke jaise aazad rehna seekho
Tum ek dariya ke jaise lehron mein behna seekho
Har ek lamhe se tum milo khole apni baahein
Har ek pal ek naya samaa dekhe yeh nigaahein
Jo apni aankhon mein hayraniyan leke chal rahe ho, toh zinda ho tum
Dilon mein tum apni betaabiyan leke chal rahe ho, toh zinda ho tum

My all-time favourite poem from school

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare—

No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows—

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass—

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night—

No time to turn at beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance—

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began—

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

It all started with curiosity.

I was a FE(First year Engineering) sitting in my classroom attending a lecture when a bunch of seniors barged in, asked the teacher’s permission and started making an announcement. They were a group of students from the college IEEE committee who had organized a seminar on Robotics. It was to be hosted by an Ex-RAITan (RAIT=my college) named Anup and he was going to teach us ‘How to make robots?’.

 Till then I had only known of robots like the Asimos being made by Japanese researchers. Never had I thought that it was something which could be made by us in college. I was definitely excited for the seminar and attended it. Over there, I came to know about the three levels of robots: Level 1 – manually controlled, Level 2 – computer controlled and Level 3 – autonomous. Anup told us how to make Level 1 robots and operate them. I thought we should definitely give it a try and Prashant, Rajat & me decided to make a robot.

In the college basement, IEEE committee members were busy making the circuit track for Robotics competition which was to be held a few days later. We went there and approached a senior to help us with the start. Being FEs we were dead scared to approach seniors for help, as RAIT had a reputation in Mumbai University for its ragging; but here we didn’t had an option. Fortunately for us the senior turned out to be a very decent guy and explained everything very nicely. He told us about the gears in motors and their use while ascending and descending the slope, length of wires, sockets, the stabilizer, etc. He also showed us a sample robot and gave names of some shops on Lamington Road, Mumbai where we could find the robot parts.

So that day itself we bunked the after-recess practicals and headed straight to Lamington Road. By the time we reached there, everything was shut. But still, we tried to locate the shops whose names we had so that we could find it easy when we come again. So there we were on Lamington Road at night searching for Bombay Electronics. We tried asking a few people on the road about the address but it turned out that majority of them were pimps and had completely different things on their minds. And we did not dare to ask the address to any woman.

The next day we went to Lamington Road again, this time at morning We were scanning through the shops, bargaining with the costs and making a budget for our robot. We met a few seniors who had also come there and they helped us to get motors and wires at the cheapest rates available. But there was a shortage of tyres at Lamington Road and we could see groups of boys searching for tyres everywhere, even the seniors we met were having a tough time getting the tyres for their robots. As we were passing by a shop searching for tyres I spotted a few rubber materials being displayed on the first floor of a very old building. We went there and it turned out to be a hardware shop that sold raw materials for stoves, pumps, etc. As God would have it, we located our tyres over there. There were a few circular hollow rubber bands which were meant for wrapping some part of some pump or whatever. We decided to take them with us and use it if we didn’t get any decent tyres. Our seniors had settled for toy cars and were going to use those tyres. So after a hard day we finally descended home and troubled the fellow passengers on the train with our expert plan of making the robot. The next day, two girls joined our group – Supriya & Ruhi. So now we were a group of five.

We understood the circuit track, took its measurements and started analyzing. It was a two layered circuit track, which meant the robot would run on ground tyres on an inclined slope and on upper tyres on declined slope. So our robot needed 8 tyres, 4 up and 4 down. After college hours we used to go to any of our team member’s home and work on the robot. Having girls in the team proved to be an advantage in the sense that they managed to convince the carpenters working nearby to do certain cuttings for free. We were ready with a working model of our robot in a week.

We now needed to test it on the circuit track. When we went for testing, we found out that the robot would always topple after coming down from the track. This was because the weight on the top was greater than the weight at bottom. So that meant our robot wasn’t suited to the race track. We were in deep shit. Solving the problem meant replacing the entire upper body and we had only two days before the main event. We bought a few light weight materials and sat down to work on replacing the upper body. Just then, I got an idea!! Instead of replacing the entire upper body we decided to cut the centre of upper body, that will naturally reduce the weight. We gave it a shot. The friendly carpenters came to our rescue again in cutting the wood very precisely from the centre. That day itself we took the track test again, And it worked!!! Yes, our robot did not topple.

We registered ourselves for the competition and named our robot as “Enzo”. Enzo was the fastest model of Ferrari till that date. We entered the competition, got short listed in the time-trail selection round, and reached till the second round in the main event. A reporter from Times of India had come for the event and we had our picture in the newspaper the next day. Though we did not win the competition, making a robot was in itself a great experience.

Team: Kunal Alshi, Prashant Bhosale, Rajat Tiwari, Supriya Tapase & Ruhi Karim

Thanks for reading this.

I have started this blog basically to share my interests and work.

In this blog I will try to focus on topics of web applications since that is my field of work.  But along with that I will also try to post *whatever* i feel like.

A read a couple of blogs once in a while on the internet, since that is how I spend most of the time (‘working’ on computer)

So after finding solutions to many of my technical problems through personal blogs written by others, I thought ‘Why not start a blog of my own and post stuff that might be a solution/*when you have nothing else to do* for others.

I am not really hoping to be regular, since I know that is not possible. But I will try to write interesting stuff.

Thanks & regards

Kunal