Land Of Coconuts II

A Follow up from the second week in TCS-TVM.. Oct 4, 2004

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Well, it's going gr8 after 2nd week, the sad part being we were working on sat till 6...

Small tests, lots of group activities, and time pass form the whole of day everyday. 2 breaks of half hr each plus a rushing 45 min lunch are the only times we people from Aurangabad meet in office. But we do meet almost everyday to have our dinner. The MATC which places us to base stations may be coming on 19th Oct to give its presentation and then we will have our mid semester exams, then posting. We are going to be released on 19th Nov and are expected to report at place of posting on 23rd Nov. So NO Going Home....

Abt people from all the places coming here, well, I am enjoying it completely. I learn bit of Tamil, bit of Bengali and teach them a bit of Marathi. Everyone gets amazed and confused at each others way of speaking. On top of this we have one more common language with us now, French! The French facilitator is very good and I have already learned 4 q's and apt answers! They are going to emphasize on effective communication rather than grammar n language, so it's fun, specially those sounds which we don't have in English.

The style of doing project is very professional. We do the projects in our college in such a crude manner na? Our project has been decided. Not the topic but front end is JSP and HTML. Core java for backend and MySQL as database. Only 5 days for coding and rest is development. Imagine this at college level!

We get fed up of the food in a restaurant every two days. So keep on changing. Actually the food at TCS is good but that's only lunch and seeing it everyday is again boring. We have faculty coming from various base branches that aren't actually good at teaching but their exp with project helps a lot.

Kanyakumari is excellent! The merger of three sees is more of a perception rather than anything real but I had that perception... so that's it. Vivekananda Smarak is also good; have to go by a ferry there. Today we went to Kovalam beach about 15 km from here which was an easy ride by the city bus. Enjoyed in the water for about 2-3 hours and came back. It's a beautiful sea there and you never feel like going away from it. We were just the 6 of us from Aurangabad for today's trip.

Ok, bye now. I am tired after the Kovalam masti and tomorrow its 6 am wake up time again. :-)

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Land Of Coconuts

This is a email post of mine from Trivandrum some 8 months back... Sep 29, 2004

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Hello there from Trivandrum... well thiruvananthapuram but no one calls it that way here. TCS is great and going all out. Its 6 AM wake up time, bus at 7:30, and office from 9 to 6. A hectic schedule especially after waking up at 9 for 3 months!

The land is full of coconuts. I had never seen so many coconut trees at the same time, they are everywhere. TCS is located at 'technopark' similar to STPI and in between dense forest of coconuts! It’s a great atmosphere with even a sea view far off.There is strict adherence to dress code. A Cool building, good subsidized canteen, excellent faculty, sufficient library and the computer labs they say are good, I haven't seen them yet. They will give us some email id soon and yahoo etc are blocked so will mail you from that id when I do get access.

Our course contents are basically S/w engg, Java, personality dev(soft skills including dining, talking on phone, manners, etc)a 5 day java project and 2 exams. Emphasis is more on grooming us to Professionals (I don’t know if they would be able toJ). There is lot of talk abt TATA code of conduct, TATA group, Ethics, etc.

Abt rest of the life here, it's a scenario of national integration. It feels really nice seeing people from all over India coming in for a common goal. My room partners are one from Trichi who knows only Tamil and English, while the other Bengali who understands little Hindi.There are people from Jammu, UP, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Bombay, Bengal and Gujarat. I have even started talking in malayali style English!

About Trivandrum, it’s a slow city; you can't see a capital city in it. The rates are pretty down may be like Aurangabad and unlike Pune or Bombay. There is a great language problem, people don't know Hindi at all and English in a very fantastic way that you tend to forget your own. I found this internet cafe after great difficulty. Had no time in the last week, and won't be having for at least for a week more.

We had a surprise coding test and one SE test. Not for evaluation purpose I suppose because the way was pretty crude but you never know! I am feeling very happy until now to be in a different environment, a nice exp for 2 months time.

Abt food, you don't get chapattis easily and even if you do get, there is something that they do which makes it very horrible. In TCS too we get chapattis, better than outside but still not up to the mark. Rice is in ample amounts and people go on eating loads of it!TCS canteen has everything we need, veg. and non veg, breakfast, lunch with a decent variety all the time and very cheap.

Tomorrow I am going to kanyakumari. The whole lot of us, and will come back in the night. Ok then, hope to see you soon.

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On Your Mark, Get Set, BLOG...

Hi Everybody!

Starting off today to try my hand at blogging. Let's see what I can do about this :o)
Read some facinating articles from Hrishi and Vijay Kaka and am all inspired to start doing it myself.

Keep your eye at this site... I may have something to offer :-)