Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Bagalkot

I've lived in Bangalore almost all my life. I watched it grow into what it has become now. Despite all it's ills, I still feel pride when when people write and talk about my city like it is the face of progress itself. I know that I'm also in the danger of being fooled into equating Bangalore to the rest of India. Last weekend's trip was, to quote the hideous cliché, a reality check.

Bagalkot is a small town in North Karnataka with not much of a claim to fame except that it is one of the high-profile victims of the Almatti dam. When full, the reservoirs will completely submerge the old town. One of the features that will stay out of water is the Engineering college here. It has 300 students all with the same dreams that any of us had back when we were studying. Not to sound like a pretentious pseudo-self-effacing windbag, but those folks taught me a lot. A lot more than I was chartered to teach them. If nothing, I came back almost feeling guilty for the sinful imbalance in the opportunities that people in Bangalore get as opposed to those outside.

As soon as we arrived on the scene, I figured I had two kinds of colleagues with me. Those that were there to help because they saw a business opportunity that they were going to exploit. Then there were those that were feeding on the cultural cringe and inferiority complex of others in order to boost their own egos. The funny thing however was that despite the lack of any higher ideal or noble cause, it was very tangible that we were helping. So nobody really complained. It wasn't even as serious as I made it sound. At the dinner table while we shared our individual stories and laughed our guts out, we knew we had had a swell time.

What should I use here; the common emitter configuration or the common collector?
first one sir.
Why?
it is better sir.

What's your hobby?
Roaming.
where?
on the road.

What do you read?
books.
Which ones?
Ramayana and Mahabharatha.
Who wrote Ramayana?
Kuvempu

What music do you like?
Silent music.

What is your hobby?
Visiting tourist places.
What's your favourite place?
Belur.
What do you like about it?
The road is very good.

3 comments:

Ravi M said...

Deppe,
Good to see posts on your blog after a while.
While this is how employable fresh engineering graduates are, Govt seems worried about just getting them jobs. Did you know they have got IT companies(infosys in the forefront) to conduct mass interviewing and hiring for 1 lakh positions. It's scary if rookies with no clue about transistor configurations get into designing future chips with the influence of babus!

Sams said...

I'm inclined to think that the candidates didn't answer that way either out of innocence or out of ignorance, but the town earlier must've been graced by the presence of Mr. Gowda and the folks there enlightened by his wisdom. Any chance of that happening, bro?

Deepak said...

Ravi : Solving the wrong problems always, aren't they? How have you been dude?

Sama: Seriously credible hypothesis. I have to ask gowda now.