Diary Post: The longest vacation

Today I am officially a post graduate! MMS is the title I can use now (Indian equivalent of MBA). The wait for the final semester result was like a Roller Coaster ride...a long rise to the peak followed by a swift drop and a ride that seemed to never end. This post is about what I did during these vacations, mostly for the purpose that I may recall this post somewhere in the future and feel nostalgic about it, especially after going for a few months without a holiday.

At the onset, this vacation is not technically the longest break I have had from Professional life. The longest one was from September 2007 to August 2008, which was when I was preparing for MBA. But that was a self imposed break (as I had quit TCS) whereas this was a break due to external factors. My employers, BoB, like other PSUs, wanted to be absolutely sure that we cleared the course and would offer us a joining letter only after we hand them over our marksheets. And our beloved Mumbai University took a whole 113 days to declare the result. But as they say, all's well that ends well.

Our last exam was on May 3. About 12 of my batchmates had nothing to do but to wait for the result. The companies who made the batch of 2010 do this are HPCL, BoB, SBI Caps and BoI. The wait produced some expected and some hilarious reactions from the "stakeholders". While we students were left pondering if this is the fault of our employer or the University, there were some events reported in the newspapers. The first one was about the self appointed law breakers..err..makers of India...err...Mumbai, MNS, taking up the matter with the university, in their way, about the delay in the results of MCom and MMS. The other one elicited a chuckle. It was about the vice chancellor justifying the delay with a reason that they would have declared the result if the students had approached him. Without it, they probably had no idea that it was "urgently required" by anyone. Well after a lot of coaxing around by a lot of students, they finally declared ours today.

The honeymoon phase began early May. The party began the night of 3rd May itself. And it got extended due to the motormen's strike. What a taxi ride it was from Colaba to Vashi, being stuck in traffic, making all of us realise that there is no alternate to train travel in Mumbai, and that the city is pretty much dependent on it for its working.

After a few days I went to 2 big trips with Mom. I had no difficulty in convincing her that these destinations were the destinations to go. Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh. Ladakh trip is summarised very well in my Photos on Picassa, facebook and on my review on mouthshut.com. Arunachal Pradesh trip brought many wild and first time experiences (postponing a flight twice, facing the real risk of running out of cash, staying in the same place doing nothing for 4-5 days, not finding any hotel for overnight stay at Guwahati etc). It is also preserved well on my post in Indiamike.com and in my photos on the 2 sites.

Then came the dreary but necessary work of pending documentation related to our house. Something that should have been 6 years was now being put into place, after a lot of running around, trying to learn specific bureaucratic setups and processes, spending money, all to put the rightful owner's name in the right place.

Meanwhile I finished the manager mode of Fifa 09 and following the crazy addiction episode, just uninstalled it.

Saw a lot of movies. Both the home version and the theater version. At one point of time, when my other PSU employee friend heard that the result is going to be delayed for another 10-15 days, we decided to make the most of the time by watching some great movies on at that time, and I ended up watching some 6 movies in theaters in 8 days with 3 different sets of people, including Inception, Lamhaa, Udaan, SALT.

Finished the fantastic Bartimaeus trilogy, even after trying to postpone it to the training period, thinking about the loneliness in an alien city and not many things to do. Well, like one of my friends said, there are a lot of other things to do TP with. So I have another fantasy fiction "the riddlemaster trilogy", that I had to order online, and the site had to order it from USA. And of course many movies, all of whose backups I had made thanks to reinstalling Windows on my laptop. No matter how many versions of Windows does Microsoft make, the basic problems never change.

Wrote a few blogs and poems, including the epic memory log for the 2 years of MBA at JBIMS and a die hard romantic poem.

Thanks to the small push from mom and me harbouring my lifelong dream, learnt swimming. According to many people in the earlier batches, the 3 of us (guys) learnt a hell lot in just 16 days. I could manage my first full fledged 25 meters freestyle lap without any supporting equipment or without stopping on the last lap of the last day.

Finished a small certification in banking. NCFM's commercial banking beginner's module. It didn't take too much effort and I did it because I didn't want to have absolutely zero knowledge on banking before starting my career.

Finally spent a LOT of time with friends. Friends from all walks of life, from the ever increasing list of institutions where I made such good friends, school, college, work etc. Lots of get togethers, one that even had us shaking a leg at a pub. Hope to make good friends in my new workplace as well.

Lucid Dreaming

Just yesterday I read an article (it was an advertisement for the page "how to" on facebook which had many wikihows on their wall) on how to dream a lucid dream.

What interested apart from the obvious reference to the movie Inception (they were riding the popularity wave really), was relating to one such experience that I have had for sure in my childhood. It was like I was aware that I was dreaming, and to an extent controlling the dream, once.

The article was more or less a repetitive instruction on how to force simple realities so that your mind becomes conditioned and you become aware of your dream and in the further levels you can control your dreams. It also mentioned a little about sleep cycles and that a dream is best remembered when interrupted during the REM cycle (when you are dreaming) and even recommended one to wake up at certain intervals (4.5 hours, 6 hours etc) so that you can interrupt your dreaming. Interrupting helps you remember it the best.

Now I didn't do it consciously but I was indeed interrupted at a time when I was dreaming by my neighbour. Then when I went to sleep, I had a dream and I vividly remembered that.
It was like a typical hollywood action movie. We were a bunch of guys in black gear (presumably navy seals or deltas) somehow trapped in the top floor of a small tower in the middle of the sea (or right next to the sea). The room's walls were circular as well as bowl shaped and made of glass. At this time there was no question asked by my sub conscious. It was like I was there in the present and it was happening for real.

To get out, our leader (let's assume that he looked like a slightly younger Morgan Freeman) took out a device so often used in hollywood (including a series like Prison Break), which is in the shape of a pen. It is like a swiss knife which can cut the glass. He started cutting a large circular hole in the glass to take it out.

This is the point when I became aware that this is a dream. Seriously. I didn't wake up with a start, in fact I didn't wake up at all. But I suddenly became very happy and satisfied that this is indeed my dream. Then came the control part. I could somehow make the leader use that glass piece as a sort of a boat/slide board on the water.

Then I climbed a device that could run very fast in the water, and it felt like I was flying on it, somewhat like a very fast hover craft. Now that I was in control of the dream, I wished to turn to the nearest river and go back the river's way. Maybe this was one of my fantasies hidden deep in my subconscious.

I could fly very fast to the nearest river mouth, which was wide. Then went back the river's path, it became narrower. It became high. The scenery changed. I could vividly see the trees around, the soil around. The texture, the colour changing from Red to Brown.

I don't remember what I saw after that, but somehow I drifted into the dream in an unconscious mode. Now I wasn't in control of the dream.
I was shortly interrupted again. Maybe this interruption is the reason why I remember the dream so vividly.