Hacked

Pratik stared wildly – even feeling slightly awkward about it – at the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, and the first who had set his heart thumping at such a frightful pace, and instantly taken his heart away, without facing any protest from him.

Pratik’s friend Hassan, who was standing close beside him, looked into the direction of Pratik’s gaze, and smiled, which eventually gave way to a low laugh. Pratik looked at Hassan; suddenly his face turned scarlet, and he lowered his head.

“What are you laughing at?”, he said.

“No. I don’t blame you”, he chuckled. “This sort of reaction is too frequent to be surprised at.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh nothing. She draws that sort of attention from many. You are not alone. By the way, she is my cousin”

“Who?”

“Don’t fool yourself, Pratik. You know very well that you were staring at her”, Hassan said, forcing a morsel into his mouth and pointing his tiny finger at the girl.

Pratik frowned, and Hassan burst into a fresh spell of snickering.

Pratik could not sleep that night. That wasn’t too unnatural: he did it quite a few times, thinking of a new element to incorporate into the social networking service he was designing, along with Hassan, for their project at college. That night was different, though. He could not stop himself from ideating about the girl he had seen in the wedding that day. Her name was Alisha, Hassan had said. She was in the town for a couple of weeks, and was staying at Hassan’s home. A flash iterated unremittingly in his head of her eyes meeting his for a fraction of tiniest moments, when she had seen him looking at her, and had walked away.

“What happened? Did someone punch you in the eyes?”, said Hassan the next day at college, commenting upon Pratik’s puffy red eyes, and then with a sly eye, “Or in your heart?”

Pratik slept through the computer lecture, dreaming. He was lost somewhere amidst thick fog, made even menacing by the faint moonlight that penetrated through. Suddenly, a sound was heard; a sound of loud clicking footsteps, growing in intensity with every second. His heart beat at a maddened pace, with a combined feeling of anticipation and fear. A faint form was gradually discernable through the haze, a familiar silhouette. As the form came nearer, he recognized it as of Alisha. Her perfectly sculpted lips were shaped into a smile. She now stood a clear foot from Pratik. She extended her right hand towards Pratik’s face, then went further, and gave him a resounding smack on his head.

Pratik rubbed his eyes, wondering why he was an object of such intricate attention. Everyone had their eyes hooked to him. Some were smiling, half pityingly, half amusedly. He suddenly felt the presence of something beside him, a smell that reminded him of a familiar oil. He looked up, and saw the half-bald, bespectacled and furious aspect of professor Rao, who was aiming another thwack on Pratik’s head.

The professor left for the dais, without bestowing the proposed smack on Pratik. He excitedly made some remarks about someone who was going to be the guest lecturer the next day, supposedly a network security at Harvard.

“I am coming over to your place, I just can’t stay now without another glimpse of her”, said Pratik, abruptly when he and Hassan were in the auto-rickshaw, on the way home. Hassan looked up from his phone, and said, “Yes? Yes, yes, okay.”

“It was your idea, and I am not going to bear the blame for it”, said Hassan, alarmed.

“If we are caught”, Pratik smirked.

Pratik was ransacking Alisha’s laptop. The idea had occurred to him, when they had reached Hassan’s home and found themselves alone. The idea was that they would obtain the internet access address of Alisha’s laptop. Pratik would then hack her laptop, and shut it down remotely, and the only person who could fix it was himself.

Pratik saw Hassan’s slightly appalled and warning face. He laughed and said, “Oh, don’t worry. We are not going to get caught.”

“You, you save yourself from getting caught, I am not getting involved in this.”

“Do you doubt my capabilities? Have I ever gotten caught? I didn’t, even when I had hacked our university’s server. What’s this? It’s a mere laptop.”

“We’ll see”, Hassan said, slowly shaking his head.

Footsteps were heard outside the door, and presently, a loud click of the turning of the latch. Pratik and Hassan put the laptop back hurriedly in place, grabbed a magazine each, and jumped on the couch and stared into the meaningless words, badly hoping that nothing was left out of place.

Alisha walked in. The furious beating of his heart made Pratik rock back and forth. He tried but couldn’t help but follow her with his eyes. She was about to enter the guest room, when she caught Pratik gaping at her. She walked towards him, surveyed him from top to bottom, then said with unassuming indifference, “It’s upside down”

Pratik threw a puzzled look.

“The magazine”, she said. “You are reading it upside down.”

Pratik spent an insomniac night again. This time, he was banging buttons away on his laptop. He finally finished making the hacking program at four in the morning. He stretched himself out, thinking about the great day that was to follow.

The first lecture the next day was of professor Rao. He arrived late, and was followed by an oddly familiar face. Pratik was sleeping in the last row, and woke up when all of a sudden the noisy class quietened, into a silence that would have made death shudder.

Pratik squinted at the newcomer, and realized that he didn’t have his glasses on. He pulled them out from his shirt pocket, and the professor spoke, “This is the young professor I was talking about yesterday. She is Alisha, the head of network security department at Harvard.”

Eventful days part 2

my mum was writing a hindi essay for me, and she was doing that at one in the morning, too slowly. two pages of fine print in english, and she was done translating only one half. my eyes seemed so heavy i was certain they would drop out of their sockets, but i had to stay awake. it wouldn’t have looked good if i’d gone to sleep and she was there, laptop on her lap and a bunch of yellowed papers in hand.

“where are you, now?”, i asked.

“here”, she pointed to a position very close to the one she had pointed to ten minutes ago.

i let out a very loud sigh. “its one in the night. for god’s sake mummy, do it fast!”

she stared at me with an open mouth, was just to utter something, but didn’t. she turned to the heavily canceled yellow sheets.

ten minutes by the clock, i asked the same question, again.

she did the same thing again – stared with an open mouth. this time, she said, “you want this done, don’t you?”

i couldn’t hold myself anymore. “why are you going so slow? i told you, only translate a summary of everything that’s written. i don’t want it in so much detail!”

“go to sleep, you’ll get the essay ready before you go to school”, that was six in the morning.

i seriously considered this option this time.

after a long, purposely hurtful sigh, i grabbed the fine print and said, “translate. i’ll dictate.”

she slightly nodded her head, trying to contain the anger.

thereon, i dictated a short summary of every point in english, she would put the heavy words in google translate, and write down the translated version on the sheet. what i did wasn’t wrong. it made me cover the remaining one and half page in only an hour, while she was on the same line for two hours.

at the end of it, i said,”is there anyone whom i can trust in this house? last time, i gave this to dadi, and she did it in a short while, but the output was horrible. and today, i gave it to you, you took a lot of time, and the output is doubtful.”, i paused.”perhaps i should have done this myself. at least, i wouldn’t have to stay awake for so long.”

the most natural reply was “then do it yourself from the next time.” but what came was “i’ll do the conclusion tomorrow morning. go to sleep now”. she even planted a small kiss on my cheek, and whispered ‘good night’.

“Aaaahhhhhh”, i said. it was a horrible dream. a bald man, potentially insane, with teleportation powers, was wrecking havoc in my house, breaking stuff up, but still retaining the smoothness of a chauffeur. he came and went. at one of his magical arrivals, he threw my laptop out of the window, saying, ‘what would you like in breakfast today, Aman?”, that’s when i woke up.

my mother came running in. “what happened? what happened?”

“nothing. it was just a bad dream.”

“ok. go to sleep. its still time for school.” she went back into the bedroom.

i felt thirsty. i got up and went to the kitchen door. at the end of the corridor was the bedroom. my mother was there, in the dark, laptop on her lap and the yellowed sheets on the laptop. she didnt notice me. i drank some water and went to sleep. it was four thirty in the morning, by my watch.

i stared at the yellowed sheets, unbelievably. “whats the matter”, my partner said.

i looked at him. “nothing.”

he grabbed my sheets and began reading. then he smiled. “you havent written this”

“my mother”

“i knew it. how can a failure in hindi write such a spectacular first line as this?”, he said. i smiled slightly.i then opened my moth to speak, but the voice didnt come.

“it must have taken a lot of time to write this. when did your mum start?”

i told him everything. i had told mother about this at ten in the night. she immediately started away. by twelve, she had only reached till a quarter of a page. i was sitting beside her, letting out a sigh periodically. she would look at me, but say nothing and go on. how had i grabbed the english written sheets and started dictating, and how had she meekly given in.

at the end, he said, “you didnt do good with your mother.” i felt the same way while narrating the story. he continued, “she was up until two just for you, and what did you give her? an angry bark. was she meant to write the essay for you? you could have written it yourself using google translate. you did not need your mother.” he was right. “then you said she woke up at four thirty in the morning to finish the thing.”

“earlier. i had seen her at four thirty on the laptop.”

“did you thank her?”

i stared at him. fighting guilt and supporting ego, i said, “why are you lecturing me about how should i behave with my mother?”

“because i lost the privilege of behaving well with mine, years ago.”

i fell silent and lowered my head. when i looked up again, his eyes were overflowing, and before long, mine too, but subtly.

Interpretation of girls’ profile pics…

1. If she is very beautiful with 1000′s of
friends , its fake.
2. Her profile pic has lovely Katrina on it, she is
shy , ugly or both.
3. There is a guy in the pic along with her,… she
is already booked.
4. There are more than one girl in the pic,…. she
is most probably the ugliest one.
5. The pic is taken from a side angle of her
face…. she is most probably fat.
6. The pic is taken from far away…. definitely
not a fake profile, just try to zoom in with your
eye lenses to figure out more of her.
7. The pic is of a baby, cake, heart or any other
stupid thing,… most probably a teen who needs
to grow up.
8. A pic with a ugly face…. click the back button
as soon as you can before anyone catches you
red handed…:)
9. A pic with a beautiful face and all profile info
hidden,… she is probably the one for you … but
don’t be so excited, she wont accept your friend
request.

By the way, this isnt my creation. i got it from a friend, whose name is

better not shown here. i dont donw where he got this from,

but i dont want any undue credit for it.

misery from disconnection

the internet connection is disconnecting again and again. I know that, because firefox’s google home page isnt loading. The blogger home page isnt loading. i want to complain to the operator, but…

… let me tell how how the whole typical procedure goes in India

connection fails again and again

you call up to complain.

Some lady speaking some indiscernible language picks up the phone. You can almost hear the splat of the betel she spits again and again out of the spittoon that’s near the telephone they have

the phone disconnects abruptly just when she seemed to be stopped talking to someone else about a hawker that came to sell bangles in the train real cheap.

You dial again

some other lady is on the phone. She tells you to ping the dns server address. Then you ask what is it. Then she explains the whole procedure accurately, till the main part of typing in the dns server address. She gives you the wrong address and disconnects, and you keep dashing your head against the wall, because the output, no matter what is done, is always – destination host unreachable.

You call up again, this time, with a tone of threat in your throat. A man with a heavy voice picks up the phone. He cant understand what you speak, and you cant understand what he speaks, because you have accidentally dialled the tamil nadu helpline, staying in mumbai (come on, use google maps).

Then you open firefox, intending to write an email to the appellate, but you suddenly realize that the connection is not working at all.

The next day, you go to the regional office of the operator. Nobody, except the watchman is there. Its a public holiday.

you get home, the internet’s still not working. you dig out your phone, type an email to the appellate. you get response the next hour, telling you that you’ll get response after two months, because the appellate’s inbox is filled with similar emails like mine.
ranting and raving, you throw the modem and the telephone out, and get a new line from another operator the same day.

in the evening, a problem-fixer from the previous operator come by. you yell at him, and tell him to yell back at the office when he gets back.

you pick up the newspaper, turn to the tech section, and read the headlines ‘google conked out yesterday ‘.

Eventful days part 1

days like the past two have never been in my life before. oh, so many events, so many discoveries, unveiling of hidden talents, tragedies, unexpected endings, emotional drama, and much more has happened.
i would like to start from the events that happened in school. we had our projects, so we had to carry a lot of stuff to school. it was the english literature project, and we had to write summaries of two plays by william shakespeare. i’d got a lot of cool photos to go with my ugly handwriting. among them were two of the best, and i intended to use them in the starting pages of the project. one was a large pic of shakespeare, page size, and another was a collage of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (a great play if you read only the summary). needless to say, as tragedy befalls a man to test him, when i had removed my file from the bag, those two papers fell out, and were left in the paper thin and light plastic bag, that floated around without my knowledge, dropping its precious contents around.
i realized that only when it was time to paste the pics. the supervisor in the class, fortunately, was revered everywhere and well disposed towards me, and helped me find one of the papers, the collage of the night’s dream. the shakespeare was still missing.
suddenly, i remembered a guy from another division looting around for a pic of shakespeare. i had seen him run out of our class with something waving in his right hand. i told the supervisor, and she immediately took me to his class. i felt a little awkward, searching someone’s things like that, but what could i do? twenty marks were at stake. i didn’t find it there anyways. a thought flitted through my mind that he must have hidden it somewhere, but i didn’t want to trouble that poor guy anymore.
i went back to the class and to my bench, forlorn. a while later, somewhere behind me, a shrill sound said, “eh, you idiot! its lying here!”
no one can comprehend the amount of relief and thankfulness to god i felt at that moment. the supervisor suggested that i should go to the suspect’s class and apologize. i agreed with her.
i returned to the class, and the supervisor asked, “did you say sorry?”
i said yes.
i returned to my bench, and asked my partner, “where’s the shakespeare? give it here, i’ll keep it safely somewhere.”
the guy just stared at me. i had lost the thing again.
this incident was put to light, and the whole class guffawed their lives out, no one caring about my feelings. i also put up a light front, pretending that i’ll find it again. but in my head, a hurricane raged. on top of it, the supervisor said that i had taken the paper with me when i had gone to apologize to the suspect, and it must have fallen somewhere in the corridor. i couldnt remember clearly, but she was reliable enough.
she made us all say a prayer (it was meant out of fun) for the paper, that may it be found. i resumed writing, trying to convince myself that bygones were bygones.
after a while, she got up and went around the class. when she reached behind me, she cried, “see, its here!”. i turned, and surely, there it was, in her hands.
i thanked her, and the bell rang. she went out of the class. it suddenly struck me.
“You guys set me up!”, i yelled to my friends around me, who were smiling suspiciously ever since the supervisor had left.
they broke out into hearty laughs, and i just kept looking at them, smiling gently.
at length, one of them said, “We didnt! the supervisor did!”

Hello world!

 

Hello world!

now there are three ways to write this

1st the programmer style

class helloworld{

public static void main(String arg[])

{

System.out.println(“Hello World!”);

}

}

then the writer style

“The world welcomes me with open arms, i just have to reach out and fill myself in”

then the scientist style

“God threw me down from outside the universe to make a theory of everything. and i will do it”

actually, there is also a human (best) way of writing hello world, and that is

“Hello world!”