15th Jan 2005!!!

Jai Guru Deva,

On this very day ten years ago, me and my friend Ravi won the prize in paper presentation competition in Vignan Tech Fest, Guntur. This was my first prize in paper presentations. Though I got several prizes for quiz etc in 2004 getting prize in paper presentation was always special. I had a sound sleep that night. Yes, between 2000 and 2005 there were very less days when I had a lengthy sleep. Every minute I lived, every breathe I took, I craved for success. particularly from 2003, nothing seemed important to me than my self development. Perhaps for this reason I got several prizes and awards during this time. However, icing on the cake was my GATE rank. will write later about it.

Coming to our Vignan adventure, it was a typical Karthik-Ravi comic episode. Serious preparation, amazing concept, spectacular missing of some simple but important thing and finally pulling it off with sheer grit and stubborn attitude. The concept of our paper was Computer Integrated Manufacturing Systems(CIMS). This paper is a brain child of my God brother Ashok and then Ravi added some more sections to it. After making our additions it was a paper containing 20 pages and nobody would accept it in these tech fests. There started struggle, we met Subba Rao sir, Raju sir to cut short the paper but their suggestions were not liked by me. Didnt I mention stubborness somehwere above ;-) and finally it was my project guide Mohan Reddy sir whose inputs we took and replaced several paragraphs of content with tables and charts so as to reduce the size of the paper.

As a matter of fact Ravi wanted to send a paper on Hygrogen cell for this competition but I resisted. Because that paper was definitely worth a prize and I want to send it to RGIT Nandyal. For two reasons visiting RGIT is something I was desperately looking for that year. One is reason is that the prize amount in RGIT is way higher than other colleges. In fact I applied for passport using the money I had earned in RGIT and thats why my passport is always a sweet possession for me. Second reason is that I will get a chance to meet one of my childhood friend. Perhaps, that was my only chance to meet my friend and I gave my best to make that happen. There is no place of ifs and buts in life but if I hadnt been to RGIT my life would definitely have some void. A human being is too great to miss, after all.

Once the paper is ready we had sent it to Vignan and it got selected. I was happy for this but not much hopeful for winning a prize. All I was determined was to give my best. we had reached Guntur in the early hours of the day and suddenly I had a bad flu and what I am speaking was hardly audible to others. The competition starts at 9AM and here I am at 6AM with a muted voice. Though I have complete confidence that Ravi can manage the presentation without me but I always wanted to give my contribution and pitch in to support him. So I started eating Vicks candies hoping that my voice will get better.. how stupid of me, but I keep doing that with a fool's hope to get better. Then another strange thing is that the organizing team had allocated us a couple beds and they were right next to ladies toilet!!! Didnt I tell its a comic episode? :-)

And the fun didnt end there, around 11AM the organizing team asked everybody to give their presentations for loading them on to the system. When Ravi opened the CD cover there was no CD in that, it was an empty one!!! Only we can do such spectacularly idiotic things. However, we had another copy in a floppy and we were doubtful whether that would work. It is destiny that the lousy floppy worked and it is divine grace that we had won a prize hands down. Ravi, as usual was unstoppable and I ventured as and when there were queries. I dont remember the names of the judges but they asked a lot of queries about expert systems and I answered them very well. Incidentally two years later, my M.Tech thesis was also to prepare an expert system and building a knowledge base. Strange life!!!

Sarvejana Sukhinobhavantu,

-Karthik