Bye Bye Dost!

It was not just another Monday. It was Akhil Lodha's last day on campus - the day he earned his B.Tech, M.Tech degrees in Computer Science with flying colors. He invited me for a dinner just before leaving. We went to PopTates, Saki-Naka. It's a cliche to mention about our common petoo type attitude when we are out to a restaurant. So, the delicacies kept appearing and vanishing!
Then, we engaged into a flashback discussion of our IIT lives - A long discussion where each shared his key learnings, shockers, setbacks, bad patches in last 4/5 years. In the hindsight, I must say that approachwise, we two are a little different but when it comes to the ambitions we carry, we appear very much concurrent.

The topics which we mulled over were like: Role of IIT "Bombay" in our development, Role of Mumbai City, which areas we desire to have explored better (our answers turned out to be exactly complimentary), the role of Networking in life - its positives and flip side, the true passion of solving research problems v/s solving them with a motive of publishing papers etc etc.

I am listing here some of the mutual conclusions on random random topics:

1) Popularity and Effectiveness - They can't go hand in hand.
2) Be happy in life, treat happiness as a journey and not the destination. Don't treat happiness as conditional.
3) You have got just one life to live. Either live it your way or waste it living someone else's way.
4) Remember your past achievements whenever your morale is down and you feel low. Take strength from them. Showing courage and defeating the situation is a habit which you develop over a period of time.
5) You learn the most when situations are adverse"st"! A fierce impedance comes only to test your inner strength and to give you pieces of learning.
6) Escaping from problems, critics, enemies is never a solution!
7) Don't fear anybody as long as you know you are correct.
8) If you are consciously sure of yourself, stones like back-bitching, J-factor feedback from friends/critics won't have any impact on you.
9) Listen to everyone but in the end, do what you like! No harm in getting influenced as long as your mind also supports it logically.
10) You can not fool all the people all the time - Abraham Lincoln
11) In the long term, truth comes out!!
12) Hard work follows binary logic. If your input is 1, output will also always be 1 if not always in the form you expect it to be then in some other form. The time lag maybe there but you will realize it sometime in your life.
13) When you look back, you can interestingly verify: why certain incidences happened, why certain choices were made. In short, everything seems to converge in the long-term.
14) Role of Mnemonics in memorizing words! :P
15) How many true friends can you name in 10 seconds with no effort?
16) There is huge difference between a Friend and a True Friend.
17) Why do we tend to gel better with people who are not our direct peers ? Is it because peer to peer friendship is mainly governed by just need-help relationship ?

In all, it was really a quality time that we spent. After a long, I got an opportunity to talk at length with this sweet genius friend of mine. He is going to US now for his MS in Computational Finance at CMU. Dude, I know this is not a place to write testimonials but I shall just say that you are one of the sweetest friends I have ever had, I feel lucky to come to IITB to know your more. Though, it feels bad that you won't be around anymore, But, when I just foresee what you are headed for, the pinch is all gone. All the Best dude for future and I hope your dream of having a Dukaan on Wallstreet will come true someday very soon! :)

- Abhishek