Acedip

The real has no existance,
     and the un-real ceases to be,
the reality of both has
     thus perceived by the seers of truth.
voices have no answers,
     neither do I,
voices hear the presence,
     without any essence,
the sounds of sorrow,
neither the sounds of joy,
     do I here,
Its presence lingering somewhere,
with the deep blue essence of the meadows,
     cant see through my painted window.

–Dated: Aug 2004.

Its about wanting something from a very long time and when you are finally at that point, you feel lost. You no longer seem happy or sad . There is certainly no sense of achievement. It does give a feeling of looking through a long dark tunnel but not wanting to reach for the light, the darkness and the stillness no longer scares. Sometimes its just best to drift.
The picture fetched from my flickr

Benjamin Franklin said, to do it today if you are to do it tomorrow. We have to sweep today’s possibility under tomorrow rug, until we cant anymore, until we finally understand for ourselves, that knowing is better than wondering, that waking is better than sleeping. and that even the biggest failure, even the worst,most intractable mistake beats the hell out of never trying.

I’m trying to get into this habit of posting a few lines if I dont have a few hundred lines to write. Because earlier if a post wasn’t a atleast a few hundred lines, I never considered it to be a blog. That should change now.

How does it feel, sweat dripping down your chin, slowly rolling around from the back of your ear and at times in your mouth but you fight to hold on. You are having a nice time with a bollywood damsel or the girl next door whom you watch reading the newspaper outside her room every morning and wish she would just lookup to find you reading poetry out loud or sticking your head into the view finder of your camera and clicking everything except her, maybe that would make her jealous. But no, you are having a nice time in this world, late night poetry readings in her room which you climbed through a tree in her house, intentional brushing of hands on her legs soft as feather, But wait, where is this sweat coming from, you dont remember doing something which result in this. And you fight to open your eyes which too evade you, but you are able to get a glimpse and you find yourself in your room while your mother ponder on you as if she heard everything you spoke to the girl in your dream, but no that dint happen. She simply switched off the cooling to get you off the bed and ruin the perfect sunday morning. You gather some energy, make a face or two, and go for the loo. There you close your eyes and try to go back to the room of pure bliss, the world of heartly laughter to your stupid jokes, the smell of that perfect perfume which, out of all the things have got you hooked to this human being. A little shake and you grab for balance while sitting in loo and look around why am I even here and mumble some random things or two.

While you wash your face, a sudden blast of music draws your attention, you know exactly what it is and now the morning has taken a dive into the deep ocean and there is no reprise. You dress up and come out of your room and find your grandparents sitting in front of the TV in the dinning hall and watching Ramayana at full blast because the grandmother cant hear properly, and on top of that, despite of the high volume your grandfather has to narrate what all is happening, where is Rama in the quest to get his wife back from Ravana. I have seen people talk about how intelligent, a great brahmin he was. Why do people always have to insist on Ravana being a good guy but succumbed to his wrong doings. Anyway you wish them and briskly walk to the terrace overlooking the park outside your house, where sunlight had difficulty touching the grounds pertaining to the huge growth of Neem trees.

Anyway, now is your moment, you grab the morning paper. First page is always depressing, filled with gang rapes, murders, political agitations, scandals, bollywood celebrity complaining of the heat blah blah blah. So you skip a few pages and reach the middle of the paper, where you find your favorite writers and hope that, atleast they have got something for you, to save the day. And as most of the time, they do save your day. Short laughs, interesting facts, and so brilliantly written articles that for a few hours you forget where you are. Though the maid comes along with the breakfast to remind you of the existence of human beings around you, the fact you loath all the time.

here are a few of them which gave me the sunday laughs today. karan thapar , and Indrajit hazra (he’s really amazing) , though occasionally funny but this one was good by Manas Chakravarty. And I think you should just simply order HT on sundays and forget the pain of me reminding you again that how good they all are.

So who are my heroes who saved the day for me, some literary geeks. At times you envy them, on how beautifully they write and bring joy to you. How they make you feel that you are missing onto better things in life which are far away and waiting for you, though most of these dreams only make you feel terrible rather than encourage.

You are lost again, after this momentary high which even proves ecstasy better, giving you a longer high and enveloping you away from the world around you.

Sun gets hotter after a while and you get back to your room hoping to get inspired soon and get back to your work. You know the world awaits you but when you have lost the inspiration the fire which runs the whole show, you cant do anything other than just sit and wait and maybe if got lucky then get invited to a party to take your mind of things around you. Most of your friends think that you are busy doing something good which you always were but least that they know you are sulking in your room doing nothing but watching your ceiling fan move in a motion if you never realized it ever did, that your bed is slightly bent over the edges, that while pressing the navigational keys on the keypad of your laptop for like a hundred times, produces a unique stutter in yakuake ( the drop down KDE konsole) while your fedora is doing a yum update. Watching yum update is probably one of the lamest of things one can do but you dont mind doing it. And people think you are giving too much of your time to photographing world around you, when those n00bs least know that, it doesnt take long to click a picture, picture clicking is alien to what you might be feeling at that time, you see something, the moment, and it all just looks perfect, so you take out the camera and click it. And while you are at it clicking you click more than one picture. As time goes by you are having a pile of pictures to upload to flickr, but you only upload one or two each day, so the process of uploading goes on for a long time and almost everyday. So the moral of the lame photography story to all the lame people who should give more time indulging in their own affair than poking their noses in other’s business that you dont click everyday.

Well I’m going a bit over board in calling it the great indian marriage, first of all, I’m calling it a marriage because it will take some time to become a wedding yet. Anyway, it brings me to the real question, what is marriage? There was no concept of marriage in biblical times and certainly not until some thousand years back, The oldest marriage mentions could be dated to the mesopotamian civilization, which was by far, way too different in practice than what it is today. In my opinion it originated as a legal way to mate and have children and eventually to lead your family (because the concept of generations came later), gather food, protection and all the basic things one need everyday to live your life, Thats it, nothing dramatic about two persons bonding or falling in love so much that they dance around in the rain and finally mate under a shed, water dripping through their bodies, that sounds very apt for a typical tollywood movie (I’d have said bollywood but bollywood seemed to have grown out of that generation to a more serious cinema these days ). So the kind of married life we have would make no sense at all to someone travelling through time machine from 4000 yrs back, he’d probably die laughing at us that how we have managed to turn such a simple thing into something so complex, infact that would be his comments on our whole society structure which again makes no sense at all. He would probably go back and tell his friends about what he saw and they’ll all have a nice laugh about it and probably even their so called wives would have a laugh too and eventually the whole some god forsaken town in the middle of no where would be laughing at us. Well this is where our society have come to, you marry, have fun for a little while, have kids, then fight a lot and die while still passing sarcastic remarks over one’s eating habits, how cant they control there bodily fluids and gases anymore..blah blah and more blah.

Well all said and done, but how does the marriage today happen, well, this is how its done in a conservative rajasthani rajput family. No matter what all female activists might say about women right and how women have come a long way today and yet again proved their mental to be more than just produce and make home, but still today a daughter’s father starts worrying about his daughter’s prospects for getting married, no matter how well she might be doing professionally or what her ambitions and aspirations be, she “must” marry early and to a good, successful and rich boy (best if he’s the only son to his parents, and even better if either of his parents are dead, because then that would give much more freedom to their daughter after marriage, no matter how much all these facts bite one, but this is what happens in this hypocritical world). So now the next step, girl’s 6″X4″ picture along with her biodata (resume for being considered apt for your son) is sent to a boy’s family with whom they have had a little chat and said that they are interested in their son and would like them to consider their girl for him. At times this does not so happen directly but through a no. of crisscrossed relatives in between who are commonly known to both parties interested in the deal we are talking about. So now the picture makes round to a lot many households, and through strict scrutiny of half aged,married women and older women too, its like an xray from which nothing can be hidden, no matter how hard has the photographer had tried the lights, the makeup, or a subtle smile, nothing can be hidden from these relentless women whose opinion is invaluable in making or breaking it. After some time now, the so called picture finally reaches its destination and goes into the hands our precious big boy. The boy may not have a good look at it and phone calls start pouring in from all the relatives who saw the picture first and want to know what does he think, and one can imagine what might go through his mind looking at all this, I’m sure he’d be screaming out. “people!! gimme a break, stfu.lemme think” and anyways even if he did that, I’m also pretty sure some aunt would shut him up and prolly declare that he’s agreed to it and the he’s getting married on the next auspicious date declared by the pandit (now thats an another story whole together, how pundits make business in india and how the brahmins manipulated the people for their own interest, well lets not get too political here and leave it for some other occasion).

So lets say for here that the boy has totally agreed to the marriage but the girl’s family wants to  meet the boy. So now this is one of those when people like me should be locked up in rooms and not let near to the room where the meeting might be taking place, because its not one of those rooms where you would like to be, the atmosphere is funnier than watching jerry seinfeld doing a live act and what makes it difficult is holding your self from laughing at such stupid remarks and conversation.

A shreek brought me back to the world and to eventually to the room where I was sitting, it turned out that the shreek came out from the very smiley mouth of very lovely and happy mother of the girl, and she was laughing at a joke (which I dint find remotely funny) made by the sister of the boy and if all goes well, would be sister in-law of the girl and mind you, girl is not even present here, infact, she’s may not even know that her parents are here and is working hard at some multi-national corporate company in one of the biggest cities in india. Well also it becomes very confusing for my little head to concentrate on any the conversations going around here,and  if this is to happen at a G-8 meeting or a press conference, I’m sure no matter how many journalists might be present there it will be utterly difficult for all of them to even listen to any of it, forget me being a part of this fool’s paradise. But I get a relief we I look at the boy’s face, no expression ever made in english language can express what he might be going through. Men in the room are asking him to listen to what they are talking and so do the women, but it all falls apart when any one of them asks his opinion on the matter, and we all drop to a dead silence and now his phone rings, and jolly good if he has the music from the “kill bill” and that too the “hohhu hohhu”, ‘twisted nerve’ song and he smiles and leaves for a while, and since the conversation was brought to a halt, we need a fresh fire to start it again, so I give the fresh fire by asking the father of the girl about the economic integrity of the country and he sprung back again. Out of the talking about probably everything the world has and also girl’s mother bragging about how wonderful and good their daughter is, she is so intelligent, how she doesnt like to watch movies (and i said “wot”) and how we sent her to an all girl’s school and how she is not interested in men (and i held back my breath).

The most important part of the whole get-together is the exchanging of all the common family contacts and people both of them know. One would ask do you know this guy and the other would say “oh, yes i do” and then go about in length how good he’s done for himself and how much he has earned to much in such a short while and that he got married to recently and how they also know the family to which he has married and then the point of discussion would shift to that family and by the end of an hour or two they would probably cover half the rajput community and come back to the world we are sitting in. The strange part of all this is that how women in the room get drawn to the same discussion and join men and everyone is talking about the same. Someone who has not even spoken even once all this time even jumps into it, the only ones who are watching and not talking and looking at each other’s faces are me and the boy. In all this hoopla hoo, I get lost again in my thoughts only to remind me back of my presence by some loud laugh or cracking of snack bowls. And thank goodness the meeting is coming to an end, what marks the end of the big social mind boggling heart pounding meet is the silent which lasts for a little longer than usual is the end of it.

Note:- I do not intend to offend anyone, the events described maybe a little exaggerated.

“don’t be afraid
it’s only love
love is simple
don’t be afraid
you’re already dead
love is simple” A very beautiful song by Akron Family called love is simple. what is most beautiful about the song that it reminds of a lot of things, its like all the snapshots of those moments which I cherish or regret or sad go by in  a second. I had always wondered how will a dead person might feel, because when you are alive, you are a life form in your self, bursting with liveliness and either making people around you happy or sad by your actions. But once you are dead, how would that feel, how would you feel when you cant see the world like you did when you were alive from your own eyes, its like a real time role playing game of which you are an integrate part of. How you feel happiness, the sadness and all those things which make one happy. And once dead, there is nothing which can effect you, you cant enjoy the pleasure of a smoke in chilly windy night, you cant enjoy seeing the sun set in the horizon, and the nature around you.

And I think death is easy, its more difficult to live, tough is to handle things every day, which give you so much pain that you feel this strong urge to end it, but you feel another strong will to go on with it, you somehow feel that you cant loose this battle against life. I also dont blame those people who take the easy way out and end all this, because suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem because you can never comprehend the pain a human being can take, there are only personal limits and the reference point. The hypocrite world says its a crime to end the life “god” has given you, I want to ask those people, if you care so much for that life then why do you let your actions add up to all that pain, do something to resolve the pain. And also first of all I think the right to take ones life should solely lie with that person whose life we are talking about, he has every right to do whatever he likes  himself, why do doctors fillup the consent form from the patient only, and the patient has to tell what he’d like to be done with his body after he’s dead, why dont we let the law-makers decide then too what should be done with the patient.

Human brain is such a complex array of circuits, no other person can every know what might be going inside it. At times life takes such complex terns, you hardly believe this is happening to you, because you had never imagined yourself into this mess and now you are stuck inside it with no way to get out. you feel so helpless when there are changes in your life far beyond your control. You desperately want things to get normal but they dont, and you know that they wont, but still you want to believe that they should, because the changes which are coming are killing you inside out.  you dont want to imagine yourself waking up tomorrow and that change so visible and evident that you cant revert back, that fear of the worst hurts like anything. And you question yourself, what wrong did you do, why only you and there is no answer. But some people are so strong and I wonder how can they still be, they never let out how they feel inside. They come out with a lovely smile on their faces as if nothing is wrong, and go about talking about things which are really important for others, I think the only thing that makes them do this is their strong ideals, their strong back bone which makes them even stand up right for even the worst things. They will do anything to go by their standard, no matter how high they are and how much they might go through to swore by it but still they would do it. And this is what gives them the strength to take on the world by the stride and do what they do best, fight with it.

There are so many things which can be said about the same matter and ofcourse with different view points but I guess some other time when I know exactly how these intricacies of life are taken care of. I myself finds my self from time to time tangled in such situations and behaviour of humans. But what more can one say about that, we are only human.

Chill in the air, a foggy morning, dew drops sparkling on flower petals, asking for anything more from a morning would only be greed i my opinion. And that was the kind of morning when I started out from my home to awakening the mortals in my college, and the event was aptly named JAGRITI ( जाग्रति ), which means awakening in sanskrit, and that is exactly what I had intended to do.

lab ready with fedora machines

And soon enough I was waiting for all lug-jaipur members to arrive and help me in the workshop, infact more than just helping me, speak at the workshop. We had intended to take the workshop for teachers but were also given the permission to take a workshop for students as well. so we have invited steve to take teacher’s workshop and jai, udit and pranav to help us with students one, along with out college gang comprising of mukul, anuj and some juniors which to my surprise were very interested. And everyone seemed to have arrived at almost the right and steve started his session at the lab running over 30 fedora machines. And he soon started his session on linux basics, making them feel at home on fedora so that those teachers can in return go and do the same to their students, atleast that was is our plan, thankful to our comp science HOD he made it mandatory for all teachers to make their students work on open source technologies, which eventually brought us in.

steve talking to teachers and teaches listening intently

So after leaving steve with teachers I went to see start the students session. And I was amazed at the seminar hall we were given, I had seen it for the first time in my college and it was awesome, with 2 screens and a seating capacity of over 300 students, and fully air conditioned, it surely felt so good to even get onto that stage and talk.

So pranav started talking about a little introduction to foss and then I took a few more minutes asking for some queries and talking a little bit more about foss and in general why linux. And we soon went to jai to talk about web development. Which seemed like an interesting topic for students and they thoroughly enjoyed getting to know intricacies of web, which they were all new to.

A view of the students seminar

I could now leave the seminar hall to fellow hackers and see what is happening around and also talk to nandeep who had just arrived, and was being told the interesting things sarai is doing and there are some possibilities of sarai working with some colleges in jaipur to spread foss. After an hour of talk we moved onto the snacks, and there again, my college surprised me and swept me off my feet. Or it can be that, this is the first time I have organized/done something in my college that I came to know that my college can be a very wonderful host to its visitors. Steve had also come there on a break from his teachers workshop and the response was quite good, some of them were really interested to know what he was talking about. While we were having snacks students had already started moving out, partly because, audience always decreases after the first talk and only the interested ones are left, so its kind of good for the organisers. And udit sharma was sent to hold the crowd in place with his expected to be mesmerizing talk on drupal and advance web technologies (but it proved otherwise ). Well so now we were only left with people who were interested in learning.It seemed they were so interested that some of the guys ended up on stage taking drupal setup from udit and udit soon got swamped by the crowd. So we had to step in between and take the control and move the house back in rest.

Though we had planned for a BoF session, but it dint come out as one instead jai ended up going on stage and talking about stuff from mailing lists, IRC and we also showed them how to get there, community contribution etc etc. And more over I was amazed to see such a wonderful seminar hall in my college.

The whole session was so good and interactive that all of us lost track of time and we had far exceeded our limits but the audience was still in place and wanted us to carry on, but after promising them that we will return soon with more interesting things we parted.

To call it a day, we sat in college lawns to reflect on the day, Also discussed plans for the sarai workshop at MNIT on 14th and 15th, though its already done now and was a success too.

So it seems like lug-jaipur is out again in the socially active world and a spree of workshops to welcome its coming back.Will soon write about the MNIT workshops and the first full-day out with lug members, doing loads of stuff.

Bone chilling cold, a night full of aspirations, talk of the future to come, paths to light up, a great journey to embark on with a group of friends,young at heart and destined to change the world around them. Well this is just a little wave of thoughts which fill your heart and
mind, partly because of the sense of travelling and being a vagabond overpowers your perfect little monotonous life and the other being to meet the fellow revolutionaries.
With all those feeling we reached jaipur station after an install fest which turned into an introductory talk on foss which jai very energetically handled and I was sitting behind and exploring the N810 which udit recently acquired to take his linux love to the masses, and trying to recover from the sleepless 36 hrs which not much later turned into 48hrs, all thanks to jai and his plan to take a train from jaipur to ajmer which apparently turned out to be very late and so waiting for it could eventually mean to miss our train from ajmer to bangalore.

Our seat in the bogy 57,59,61 (by jai)

Anyways all said and done, I now write this sitting in the comforts of an AC compartment of Indian Railways and on the first day of our journey which actually takes almost 42hrs, but time losses its significance looking at the fact that we’d be crossing half of the country, from western part of india to the southern, crossing four states and an opportunity to look at India more closely.

mirror trains by jai

For some facts, languages in India changes every 100 KM, though the change would depend on the location but still there are sure enough noticeable changes which actually fills your heart with a sense of the unkown, going through your own country and wondering at what exactly peolpe are trying to say gives a deep sense of belonging and the urge to get to know fellow country men. From changes to lagnuage to clothing to food to even playing cards, which was the most fun part of day 1 of the 2 day train journey. We had the company of two girls and two other boys who were going to pune and on top of that they were all engineering graduates which took the toll to 7 engineers in our bogy, we became friends instatnly and were chatting and eating Indian Railways grub tog, until the moment came at round dusk that a little boy selling playing cards came around, reclusive to goods he was selling but looked like the train man, one who not only travels but live in it, anyways we bought them not knowing how would it effect our journey.

Remains of the day&night well spent by jai

It was 1 AM, with sleep in some eyes, some still wide awake to de-board the train at their respective stops, some still trying to get a hang of the whole thing that just happened there, and some utterly happy and some sublime after being called a many great things, this was now the end of our journey together and also the end of the last game we played. The people whom we met were Ankit, Khushbo, Sunita and Viral with whom I spent a lot of time at the bogy door looking out in the open, at the cloudless skies and the moonlight night whose beauty couldn’t be subdued by the noise of chaging tracks, rolling over bridges, and the gaps in the fish plates, they all seem to add to the little moment of freshness from the bogy filled of people from all walks and parts of india, where some husbands were still clueless about why on earth are they going to meet this distant relative, in whom they have no interest in meeting or some wives were disgrunteled with the train food and the washrooms and telling other women how they just missed the flight they were intended to take and how much gold she owns and blah. While sunita had to get down at valsad and the rest of our new friends were going to pune, they had 3 more hours to sleep and then a morning of office and their damn bosses waiting for them, so we slept after a day full of life. At around 4AM train arrived at pune station and it was time for our fellow travelers to get down, though there was still an important task for Viral to do before he could go home, which was to get something for me from outside the station, which we had earlier used together, and now it was pay back time becuase the train halt was 10min and he had to run and get it, and to my utter surprise, while I was asleep he came, woke me up and handed it over to me and said goodbye before I could say anything to him, he was gone, and I lay there awake for a few more minutes trying to figure what had actually happened, I met a stranger and just after a few hours he dint feel like an staranger anymore. And I slept with a smile on my face, though I could also hear some sarcasm for me and praise for viral

well rest of the journey went quite smoothly and boring, since we had nothing else to do than to try out different snacks and salads which used to come our way in the train and listen to some music once in a while and sleep. But the anticipation to attend foss.in for the first time was growing.

And the rest of them were clicked by me from jai’s camera when he was not around and with a little help from aniket with holding my laptop (mainly in front of his face)

Everyone feared IBM in the good old days, when guys in black suits and tie would either make you go out of business or buy you off the hook. IBM guys were considered evil big brothers, who were ruthless and sung company songs. So anyways IBM seemed to have changed quite a lot in recent years and we all know its open support towards free and open source mentality, and anyways I am here to talk about what is it doing right now which actually violates that very philosophy.

There is a very popular competition which IBM runs in india called TGMC (The great mind challenge) for students. Well that is all good but the tricky part comes here. IBM only accepts projects made using its technology i.e. the tools which only IBM provides to the educational institute you are in and yes, they dont give these tools to individuals, they can only be acquired once your institute is in the program and it so happens that IBM after sending its big boys to your institute and, your college will soon will make it compulsory for everyone in the final year to make their major projects for IBM, and my college is one of them and we are stuck with making our major projects in TGMC if we want or not.

The tools to be used are : Rational Rose/RSA
RAD/Eclipse/WSAD/ WebSphere Portal
WAS/WAS CE
DB2 Express – ‘C’ or DB2 UDB

and as it seems that you cant do this project without IBM’s help. But what is more important are the Terms and Conditions, what it has imposed on all student developers working on it, here is an interesting one :-

“By submitting entries, entrant grants IBM and their agents of the program the right to publish, use, adapt, sell, edit and/or modify such entry in any way, in commerce and in any and all media worldwide, including but not limited to the Internet, without limitation and without compensation to the entrants. Entrant also grants IBM worldwide irrevocable, nonexclusive and royalty-free right and license to use, have used, copy, reproduce, transfer, modify and/or display any information contained in their entry in whole or part and in any form without compensation.” for a complete set of Terms and Conditions

Woah!! So that means you dont own your work, it just does not belong to you. I wonder what is this giant teaching young students on this country. And what is this policy where, on one hand its promoting open source and on the other its doing this.

And this is not limited to my college alone, I know a lot many college in jaipur, rajasthan, india which have fallen for this and have made it mandatory for their students to work on it.

So finally the wait is over now, and we have a brand new release of our lovely fedora. Though it took me a few days to download but it was done today morning and I had planned to upgrade my machines in the evening. One of my machines was already running fedora 11 and the other one could never actually see the face of fedora due to this bug (ATI device drivers) but has seen faces of all other linux flavors. But I had high hopes from constantine since there has been considerable work done in the field of ATI video drives.

Machine one (laptop):- Well this was easy and had more chances of success as it already was running fedora 11 and had no issues at all. So I put in the fedora 12 DVD and upgraded fedora 11 to fedora 12, it was running the default i.e. gnome, but my main working installation runs kde so after gnome’s upgrade I upgraded the kde one too. Though the upgrade process is quite long and time consuming but the upgrade was worth the wait.

The login screen is so beautiful.

And so is the plasma desktop, this is why I love kde, it gives you immense functionality to work.

And I have found this application called “digiKam” which I have totally fallen in love with, those I could not install the plugin which lets you export pictures to flickr and facebook as one of the dependencies of that plugin does not even exist on the site , the libkexif-0.2.5.tar.bz2 does not even exist on the download link. fail!!

Machine two (desktop):- Now this is a weird one, and I feel cheated because this machine which has an ATI board and everything else on the chipset by ATI was sold in the market as an intel product as a 3rd party product, but I was stupid enough to understand any of that to not to buy it, so anyways, now I’m stuck with it, and thanks to closed ATI drivers I could never install fedora on it, I’ve been trying fc6 but never, well finally filed a bug and after some work by some people on it, its pending, mainly because of my non-interest, but would now like ot revoke it back and hopefully fix it by f13, though, there have been some improvements and will update the bug report ASAP. So finally I couldn’t install f12 on this machine.

Well even after not a normal boot, I could install fedora on my desktop which is a new milestone in the bug, because I could never even run the install media properly, so this is a very joyful image. My desktop with a kernel option and my laptop being upgraded to f12.yuppy!!

Well, apart from this, there is a f12 install fest lined up in my college on 25th Nov and also another one on 28th in another college in jaipur, seems like lug-jaipur is up for an active week Will report on it soon.

# JAGRITI
well all this started a few months ago when i saw fedora 9 in many computer labs in my college and i was pretty astonished and awed at the very sight of it, there was this feeling that i have an another option to work at other than windows(which is non existent anyways) which is very difficult to putout in words and i could see a new beginning and a fresh air was all around which only spoke of freedom..well many days passed and i was waiting for some news to come on its own from the college front about the new gained freedom in its machines but nothing happened a few more months passed.
This campaign was called Jagriti, as it looked as an apt name for it since, its an awakening from the darkness which has for so long prevailed that, is not confused by light by all the mortals who don’t have a mind of their own
And at last i thought it was time to take an initiative to start the freedom movement afresh where it had lots its steam. So now it was the time. This is exactly what i have started along with another lugj member mukul gupta, also skit-osum leader of my college, which also is an enthralling community of over 500 members which also makes it one of the seven such communities the world over. The project is well supported by our IT-Head of the department who is willing to do anything for it, he is even willing to change the whole infrastructure of few labs who have computers from the times of Adam, and would get some new sleek machines and you can imagine the joy of installing fedora 11 on them.

That is just a notice which had to be circulated around the college to inform all the teachers and students what is going around. According to it, all the programming work will be done on linux and we are to assist the concerned teachers to implement it in their respective labs. This becomes so necessary pertaining to the wide spread use of turbo C which sensible people all around the world have even forgotten about but for some god knows what reason it happens to be the most popular IDE in india for c/c++. Though when we were planning our shift to fedora a guy also suggested to use another IDE for windows instead and i remember giving him some strange sort of looks and he knew what was coming and he shut up, but later i also explained him a few things and made that strange thought to go away. Everything seems to have been falling into place and we are about to start with our labs from monday, assisting teachers to write their c/c++ code on fedora.
The project is witnessing a mild start but the whole picture will get clear by end of the next week and how have we performed in the coming week, and there-after we would be too glad to involve lugj and the indian foss community and take the initiative to a whole new level.
keeping fingers crossed