Finally Free

Starting work on a blog post in the middle of the exams ought to be some indicator of lowered expectations from what I consider the most hectic semester thus far. From getting jobs to scraping through in the exams, from qualifying for the ACM ICPC World Finals to Pragyan and Delta work and Product Design, and a weekend where I managed to be at three geographically far-flung places (several paragraphs on that later), it’d seem I’ve covered a lot of ground and seen and done a lot of things over the last few months.

The semester started off like any other, with a dull auto ride to the campus after getting to Trichy on a train that always runs late by an hour, and a sinking feeling I’ve grown accustomed to, having gone through much the same thing six times previously. Besides, I was probably a little excited about placement tests and interviews. You never know what these things are like, till you’ve done it yourself. People give you advice, sure, but that’s just their opinion, and if you’re like me, you’d prefer to form your own. I was also looking forward to the one legitimate excuse to wear my tie, putting the several hours spent on youtube and in front of a mirror to good use.

Had my first flight ever when I got flown down to Mumbai for, er, business reasons. I did my best to look rich and affluent. Flying became a habit ever since. Oddly enough, every time I flew, I also found myself sitting on the steps of an unreserved train compartment soon after.

Google Codejam was happening parallel to all of this. An Air India strike that put me on an unreserved train from Chennai to Trichy while returning from Mumbai saw me through to missing my second online round.

The Kanpur-Gwalior ACM ICPC onsite regionals came next. Hospitality was managed by IIITM Gwalior, and kudos to them, while IIT Kanpur came out with the problemset, though sadly I can’t say the same for them. Needless to say, an algorithm contest where every problem had to be bruteforced is less than ideal.

Towards the end of October came the Amrita onsite regionals. Amrita’s online contest was free, and saw close to four hundred teams registering, from which, around fifty, including a few foreign teams were selected for the onsite contest. The contest was scheduled for a Sunday morning, and registrations could be done on Friday evening and Saturday morning.

Interestingly, I had to travel to Chennai on Thursday night to collect the circuit for Product Design that we had given for fabrication there. Got to Chennai on Friday morning, got everything we needed, and got back to college by midnight on Friday. My teammates, Akhil and Venkatesh, on the other hand, had left for Amrita on Thursday night.

Even more interestingly, we had our comprehensive viva voce – the grueling test where it’s completely legal for them to question you on anything and everything you ideally would have learnt in your entire life, and force you to redo your whole B.Tech. course if they find you, for lack of a better word, unfit – on Saturday morning.

Hence, I was in college attending a silly viva where they asked me the difference between accuracy and precision, while great storms were brewing at Amrita. Things would’ve been pretty smooth, had the external examiner showed up at 9am that day, as he was supposed to, because I had booked a flight at 1.30pm out of Trichy to try to get to Amrita by that night. Instead, I had around 10 minutes to pack up and leave on a cab when my viva got over, thanks to which I forgot everything from toothpaste to clean underwear. I landed in Chennai a little before 3, followed by a long wait till 6.45 for the connecting flight to Trivandrum, and I must thank one or two resilient colleagues for keeping me entertained over SMS

After reaching Trivandrum at around 7.45, it was a sprint to the railway station, where I already had people (well, not henchmen, just my mom and my grandpa) waiting for me with my ticket to Kayankulam on an 8.45 train. The taxi ran into traffic, backtracked, took another route, and did a few other exciting things before dropping me at the railway station at around 8.35. I got to kayankulam at 11 give or take five minutes, and then to Amrita by 12 in the night. I had to make do with six hours of sleep, and maybe it was just the lack of sleep that kept me sharp during the contest. We finished second to a South Korean team (Team Oasis, Sogang University), and this sufficed to get us a slot in the World Finals.

Three teams from India qualified for the World Finals,

• TheKingsGambit, IIIT Hyderabad, AnshAryan, Garv_Aryan, Rajat
• CounterGambit (slick name, huh?), NIT Trichy, abhilashr, deepfritz01, venkateshb
• Phoenix, DJ Sanghvi College of Engineering, ferrari_purav, krunalmanik, pt1989

The World Finals are to be held at Harbin, China this time around, from 1st to 6th February, 2010. I’m really excited about the trip, ’coz not only is it my first venture abroad, but apparently we’re headed there in the middle of their Ice Festival, and, well, it happens in Harbin for a reason. Average lows in February there are supposed to be in the thirties (degrees Celsius) below freezing, and, being from the Tropical lands down south in India, I’ve never even seen anything less than twenty degrees above zero!

Well, that said, an apology goes out to the Delta and Pragyan CSG folk. I know I haven’t been around too much over the last semester, but I hope you understand how badly I wanted something worth holding on to from college. We’ve got a whole semester ahead, where things will be a whole lot different, I promise

In any case now I’m finally free, for one full month! Can’t wait to see what happens

- a Rugged Rat heaving a sigh of relief!

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