The Life and Times of Soumik

Well, here we go again.

My final term exams for class XI are going to start from 4th of February. I’m pretty tensed right now. The syllabus seems huge and time is running out. Pretty soon, I’ll have to start burning the night lamps to finish the syllabus.

I know I can’t blog within my exam, so c’ya again on 23rd Feb(that’s when my exam would end)

Wish me luck!

The sole objective of this post is to say that I’m not dead(although this blog is, for quite a long time). I was busy all this while with my exams and projects and all, and honestly, I didn’t get time to come online.

I hope to blog regularly from some point of time in the future. (although I’m not too sure about it) I’ve got a pretty boring, bland and uneventful life and I don’t think many people would be interested to know about it. The only ones who read my blog are Neel and Rajesh(They are the only ones who commented) .

That’s all for now, I guess.

Westlife’s new album, “Back Home” was released on 5th November. I was very excited, because this album featured original songs for the first time since “The Love Album”. Turned out my excitement was justified.

The songs are just superb. The ballads are astoundingly beautiful. As usual, Shane’s powerful and melodious vocals scores above everything in this album. I thought that after the walkout of Bryan, Westlife would not be able to recreate their magic. But I take back my words. This album is the equivalent of “Turnaround”, almost the equivalent of “World of our Own”. My favourite tracks, till now, are “When I’m with you”, “Us Against the World” and “You must have had a Broken Heart”.

Westlife is “back home” with a bang. And we fans love it.

Encouraged by a thread at Chip forums, I ventured into the unknown world of Adobe Photoshop(to me) this week. At first I downloaded Photoshop CS2(no prick of conscience for me ), but it failed to run because I only had 256MB of RAM, whereas it required a minimum of 320MB of RAM to run. But this initial setback didn’t dampen my spirits in any way . I downloaded Photoshop CS and started searching the web for some basic tutorials. After 20 minutes or so, I was able to create this :

I know it’s not a big deal, but for me, it was “..not bad”. So I created some more cool writings and styles.(I’ll upload them later since I’m feeling sleepy now )

I was also searching for a Westlife userbar, but I couldn’t find it anywhere(Perhaps Westlife doesn’t have many tech-savvy fans ) . So I thought, now that I know the basics of Photoshop, why don’t I create one myself? So I started working on it and here’s the result :

Pretty cool, isn’t it?

My friend and fellow Chipper, DJCancer has created a new tech-blog, !-Geek-Age-!. Go and check it out.

As you already know, I am basically a lazy kind of guy, who likes to spend his time at home on front of his computer, more than anything else. So after a lot of persuasion, when I relented to go pandal-hopping with my parents, I was kind of skeptical about what kind of experience I’d have and was keeping my fingers crossed.

My father wanted to start with Jodhpur Park. For that purpose, we hired a cab and headed slowly towards Taratala, from Chowrasta. For a few minutes, our cab cruised along smoothly, giving no hint of the things that lay ahead. Then the traffic slowed down to a trickle, and finally it stopped. The road was jammed by a multitude of cars, ranging from buses to motorbikes to cycle-rickshaws. And almost all or them were pouring out terrible, evil-smelling, dark petrol/diesel fumes from their exhausts. And we had no choice, but to take in the foul-smelling, harmful gases(Our cab didn’t have an AC). Time to time, our cab moved slowly forward and then again stopped, cutting out the engine after some time. In this condition, we had to spend two hours, in the cab. By the time we had reached Ajanta cinema hall, I was feeling nauseated and tired. Mind you, the path which we had traversed in two hours, you could cover that in fifteen minutes on a normal day. So, we got out of the cab, paid the driver and went out to get some fresh air. After visiting two or three small pandals in the vicinity, we all felt hungry.

Here starts the second episode. We headed to a well-known restaurant, “Durbaar” and obtained a coupon to get inside. We were 42nd in queue to get inside the restaurant. The guard informed us that it would take us at least an hour to get inside. So we went and visited some more pandals. When we returned after an hour, we were surprised to hear from the guard that the 32nd family had gone inside and it would take half-and-hour for our turn. I’m weak in Maths, but I’m strong enough to figure out that if 42 people equates to an hour, then ten people(42-32), should equate to much less than half-an-hour. Nevertheless, we sat on chairs outside the restaurant and waited. We saw that many people were sitting at the tables, inside the restaurant, and they were not provided with any food. Also, many of the tables were empty. Then it started. One man walked upto the guard and asked him why he was not letting people in when tables were lying empty in the restaurant. The guard replied that there was shortage of water and so food couldn’t be served. When the man told that they were hungry and they would buy mineral water bottles, the guard replied that there was shortage of raw food materials too. Hearing this, all the people, waiting to enter the restaurant became angry and started shouting, “Why didn’t you tell this earlier?”, “What kind of restaurant is this where there is not enough raw food material?”. They sought out the owner of the restaurant and started arguing heatedly with him. The owner assured that people have been sent to buy the raw materials and fetch water, but he arguing continued. Seeing that we wouldn’t get food here, anywhere in the near future, we went to some other restaurant and had our dinner. By then, it was one o’ clock in the morning and we were exhausted. So, we returned home after that.

After all these, I have vowed that I’d never, ever go out for pandal-hopping during the Pujas. So much for keeping my fingers crossed!

PS : BTW, my friend and fellow Chipper, Choto Cheeta(aka Sourav Basu) has put up some nice pictures of Durga idols on his website. Check them out.