VISA.. Gone in 60 seconds ..

Dust dust ... blogging after a looonnngg time !!

Phew !! Totally relieved after a month long preparation towards my visa interview. Faced problems right from a spelling mistake in my name in the ration card to the exaggerated i20 amount towards availing a bank loan. The required paper work took me 1 month to complete with me shunting between the banks, auditor's office and now I am almost thorough with all government documentation procedure :P.
(I never find a relevant job a engineer holds in this real world - everything is filled by accountants, bankers, etc .. :-/ )
And unanimously its been decided that Applying for the US visa and getting the docs ready is the best way to lose weight, closely followed by traveling in a PTC bus between T.nagar and Vadapalani at 7PM.. :P .. you lose your hair too .. ;-s

Now, coming to MY interview - the following happened :-
I was scheduled for 0945 hours. I reached the venue by 0900 hours (my mom accompanied me - deposit your cell phone and other electronic items at the oxford univ press gate or you can leave them to the person who accompanies you)
At the screening process, I went to a counter where a young pretty Indian lady was there - (I was all tensed until then)..She said "Prasaanth sweety, give me your docs..thank you sweety.." - that was the MAGIC.. LOL .. I started to relax :P.

The person who interviewed me was a middle aged guy with black rimmed glasses - he gave a Pink slip to the person in front of me (started sweating profusely) [VO - Visa Officer]

me : Good morning [remember to maintain Eye contact]
VO : Good morning Prasaanth [types something]
VO : So, Georgia Tech? [smiles]
me : Yes sir.
VO : What is your area of specialization?
me : Wireless communication
VO : VLSI?
me : No, No .. Wireless communication
VO : Oh, what are its applications?
me : Its anything that involves wireless transfer of data For eg. Mob phones.
VO : How are you gonna fund yourself?
me : I am taking a loan for 58000 dollars and the rest is being funded by my parents
VO : Are you taking the loan in American Dollars? [smiling]
me : No sir, I converted it for your convenience
VO : how much in INR?
me : 25 lacs rupees
Kept typing for some 30 seconds or so..
VO : I am approving your visa, @#@$#$#%#%

I was too excited to hear those words that I didn't listen to what he was saying and left my bag there itself and came out - the officials called me and asked me to take it along :D..


Not even a single document was asked - but it is all about the confidence that you exude. I was dressed in a complete formal sense (Full arm shirt and all ..) but it is not mandatory.. dress comfortably so that it boosts your confidence.


Check out this blog link for the necessary documents and VISA interview tips (Terror boy sanath kumar's).


Make sure that you arrange your documents properly in a plastic folder - harmonium folders are preferable, and they look like this -

In case of a pink slip : Do not worry about this guys - I heard these words straight from the Visa Officer. There will not be any problem with your VISA approval, it just requires some administrative processing, fill in the questionnaire and you should get your visa in 3 weeks

TIPS :

1. As far as possible, try to avoid words in the Technology Alert List (TAL).
2. My dad works in a company that consults and does projects for chemical plants - had I been asked bout my dad's profession - I'd have just said "He works in an engineering consulting company" - avoiding the word "Chemical" which is present in the TAL.
3. Do not LIE, unless you are good at it.
4. When you lie, make sure your documents corroborate that, for eg. I know a person who was rejected a Visa just because he told his area of interest was Computer systems when his resume said it was Information Security. If your specialization falls under TAL, do not hesitate to tell that - a little bit of processing time is all that will take and you will get your visa unless you are a distant cousin of Osama.
5. When asked for your academic scores - tell them that you have got a 1st Class with Distinction (in case its above 75.. i am not sure bout the exact mark that classifies it) - but the word "distinction" does make a difference
6. Commute to the Visa venue by an auto/car - avoiding Bus will save you from gasping for breath and panting during the visa process.
7. I came to know this from a guy who attended a VISA counseling session - seems that the officers are least interested about the auditor's statement as they feel it is always possible to get the required statement by paying them. So, in addition to whatever auditor statement that you take, make sure that you take the Fixed Deposit (FD) original slips, bank passbooks, statement of accounts, etc.
8. Prepare your answers in case your GRE/TOEFL scores are low.
9. Check out this link for standard questions and answers - was quite helpful.

Hope I've covered almost all the points that would be of some use to people who are applying for F1 visa.

P.S : I sincerly thank Sanath, Naveen, Gopi, Padu, Mithun, Deepan, Harish, Srikrishna, for their timely help and patience, most importantly, for answering all of my stupid questions :) :) :) ..

Atlanta, here I come !! :):)

Study Holidays -- Truly a misnomer !!!

TAS 1:Hey why was 8086 invented when 8085 was there dude?
TAS 2:Guess they were outta business
TAS 3:What does circular convolution do to a signal da?
TAS 2:Dunno da, they make them go in a round-about fashion, you say that convolution is the action of coiling or twisting or winding together, so circular convolution must be a redundant term, mostly a grammatical error.
TAS 2:How are pointers addressed da??
TAS 1:A 'sir' or 'miss' can do i believe.

So are the discussions that are prevalent just before entering the labs to take up our practical exams, all along sweating and struggling to get an 'o/p verified' on the sheet expecting the motor to atleast budge from its current position or to have an unknown/un-intelligible code of a processor working in the DSP lab. After which, sit through the viva sessions that compel a student to cook up the most interesting answer posed nonchalantly by the external. After this dose of trauma comes the ever favorite, most adorable aspect of Anna University- THE STUDY HOLIDAYS.

In my first year of study, I used to wonder why such holls were given as while we would have read all that during our course or during unit tests which we will sit through, only when they started did i realize the importance of these holls, they were meant not for study but to be spent in repentance for all the mistakes that we had done in our college life - I mean, repent for actually joining the college :P . Let me not digress, as to the intention of study holidays, they were created by a holy soul who might have thought that all the active college days are not sufficient to do away with engineering and the exams that follow them.

My routine during the study holidays : Get up early to see that everyone is sleeping and so as not to disturb their interest, i lie down and wake up when the crow is tired of cawing (there aren't any roosters in my vicinty!! ) , do the usual morning routine and then open up the syllabus just to stare it as anyone do upon a stranger - having xenophobia i hated the syllabus. I take up my notebook just in case I have anything jotted down relating to that subject and dismiss the note book as useless (by which some 2 hours would have sped past!!) and then to a siesta, then the evening befalls and I find myself stuck up in the same page so a message to a friend asking for the status in his side, when it sounds pleasing to me I go on to spend my evening in spiritual solace and sleep hoping to study atleast in my dreams!!

All this happens until i realize that there are just 3 days for the exam and i hurry through the time table just to make sure that only 3 days are left and start away with the first subject simultaneously worrying that there are more subjects (/battles) to face.....

Just as I got the taste of the study holidays in the first year, it happened to install a kind of setback in my mind that - I can do away with the exams during the study holidays and care not much during the college days, which I later realize is the biggest mistake of all that I have ever done. I shall not blame the system this time for it, but atleast there is much scope to improve upon which I am not gonna discuss.......for all the good reasons in this world :P .

Oh I forgot to mention-- this blog was written during the fifth sem study holidays :P.
And TAS in the start of this piece is an abbreviation of Totally Annoyed Student.

Micro Processors - |_ O \/ E 'em

One of the subjects that made me feel that my engineering was worth the penny, prior to which i thought that this engineering was a mere waste of time, energy and resources (if done in Tamil Nadu). So what makes me love this subject? The very fact that my computers, printers and mobile phones contain this wonderful thing called processors and with ads on dual, quad, etc cores and the prospect of studying them and understanding their architecture is something that certainly makes me go gaagaa over them. So what is a microprocessor? It is essentially a computer on a micro chip, capable of taking care of the memory operations, arithmetic and logical operations. A processor that has been included in our purview of study is 8085/86 which were from Intel. The 8085 is an eight-bit microprocessor introduced by Intel in 1977.

Von Neumann architecture is followed by 8085, with a 8 bit and a 16 bit data bus. It had all the features like the clock generator, system controller, thus increasing the level of system integration.

Oh my goodness, i never wanted to go into its technical details, so let me stop writing about them, however i was then in a very excited state that i wanted to write bout this for some unknown reason and i shall leave it here....(tired and i need a good sleep now, so bye)

Dusting off the cobwebs....Dust...dust...............

Long time ever since I gave a damn to this blogspot, save the ads clicking sessions which are quite regular. This week, quite hectic or torturous as i would prefer to call saw me in the depths of despair owing to eleventeen hundred messages (give or take some hundreds) that i would have received, at late night hours, during classes, when i relieve myself ;), during lunch sessions regarding the outbreak (oh that word is used generally for contiguous diseases, isnt?) of Anna university semester results. Now that you would have realized that outbreak is a mild term to be used in this context. The unwritten agenda of Anna university probably holds the maximum number of oxymoronic-features ever written. Some being sound-disturbance of mental health, uncomprehendable-easy to understand rules, expect-unexpected results, and so on. A perspicacious and diligent worker will surely succumb to the vagaries of this cruel system of evaluation that has been striding with pride and arrogance for about half a century. Do your best and leave the rest to God has been replaced by Try doing the best and rest is for re-evaluating. Rumors fly sky high during the result announcement hours that all the sites excepting the anna university sites publish the results and that the Anna university Server's reflexes are down by 200% that one will feel that a 2Mbps connection was a mere waste of money.
Thou shall tolerate all this, but the very moment you get your results you keep staring at the page for sometime wondering if there has been an identity theft looking at the scores that have come. The first column that is generally checked by all the private engineering college students of Anna university would be Pass/Fail column and when you see a line of P's neatly arranged you exhale tonnes of air with that moves the monitor an inch behind ;). But what do these Anna univ people gain through this insane intention??? Technically speaking the people who evaluate the papers are not adequately fed, neither they are given their salaries nor the time to evaluate, thus an evaluator shall obviously resort to unscrupulous marking system. I'm strongly reminded of the documentary film for just ten minutes but it had a life time impact on me. It was about an evaluator's day at the evaluation centre. He enters the hall wherein he is given a big bunch of board exam papers which is to be evaluated and he boisterously begins it with a neat marking system-i mean a justified one, and when he takes the second paper a mosquito hovers around him and he tries to shoo it off, and guess what, the paper had not got the marks it deserved and then came the third paper by which the mosquito had created enough torment to him and was biting him and he was trying to hit it in a frenzy fashion which saw 'zeros' more prominent in the paper and ultimately the score hit a bare minimum of just twenty marks and the documentary ended. This documentary unfortunately came to my notice two days after my board exams ended, imagine my plight. I got seriously pissed off and i made it a point to pray to the God that my paper shall go to a presence-of-mosquito-non -disturbed-man. The more studying you did for the exam, the less sure you are as to which answer they want. The student never knows what is the exact answer that the evaluator expects neither the evaluator understands what the student has written, so they are always like the two goal keepers of a football trying to communicate with each other shouting from their ends. 'What we know is not what He knows' is the thing that has been sinking in me since its been two years with this lame system.


I shall leave this post at this point so as to not give a conclusion cos the problem doesn't seem to have a solution or atleast it hasn't been attempted to be solved or at least i don't wanna try bursting my head attempting to search for solutions as i have enough on my plate for now...................
As for the picture above, its one of my all time favorite question papers :D ;)

He bored..He drilled..I stared at him open-mouthed

One fine evening, in an ice-cream parlour..ordered a sundae...after an hour with my hand over the cheek, waiting patiently... "Come in", announced a voice, i mumbled and went in. I started with "Good Evening sir..", he cut me saying "lie down", pondering if i had actually spit anything wrong i tried lying over a fabulous hybrid version of a chair and a sofa all along staring at some curious looking instruments that were neatly arranged before me. The dentist now came to my eye level and asked me "what is the problem??"..i repeated in my mind "whats the problem?? everything is..My exams..Indian team..Gen. Musharaff..my fulminant tooth ache"...i blurted out "its my stupid tooth, its aching..", ordering me to open my mouth, so did i do, he put a spatula kind of thing into my mouth and examined everything, he said "you have a bad case of tooth infection, it is quite common these days.." and he broke-off and went to his desk and attended to some call, while he was busy talking i wore a contorted expression, all because of the fact that he left those digging instruments in my mouth. He came to me and continued the stuff from where he had paused, "you will be needing a Root-Canal-Treatment since the infection is quite severe and it cannot be mended by ordinary ways", now that it was evident that my tooth needs some serious amount of dentistry we were convinced that it shall be obliged to, next comes the most traumatizing part- the fees..he said it would just cost us four thousand bucks..(i mumbled JUST 4k-like drafting out a cheque-you gotta write the word 'only' in your amount even if it were a penny or a fortune!!).. i sighed..so this month's highlights shall be spending a wholesome amount in dentistry. My software upgrades will have to wait for yet another year since my hardware needs immediate attention :(. He then announced to me that this treatment needs three sittings since it involves three major phases and he put across some medical term (its quite common for medicos to scare engineers with un-pronounceable words), i left the clinic with mixed feelings.

On way home, my sister was piping in some curious questions "hey how did u feel like on the chair, i guess it would be fun over that, you could sit,sleep,move it automatically..." i didn't utter a word-i prayed god "please make her understand that it irritates a person if he is asked bout his medical torment", she continued "the colour of the apron that he put over could 've been pink, blue was dull, why didn't he give you one apron.." this time i said "you are stopping now, or else you shall be visiting an ortho". The prospect of getting a tooth alright with a dentist is like a cat on..no no it shall be a T-REX on the wall, it ought to balance the right way and go on.

Treatment..was it?? This time he wished me cheerfully (now that he has got someone on whom he can try his pranks on and still get a hefty sum for it!!), i too wished him and clambered over that strange chair or whatever it is called. Here comes the plot-the driller,i initially didn't realise that it was one, when he put it into my mouth and started his business, it gave a high frequency noise that was piercing my ears coupled with the drilling action on my tooth, while doing this he kept talking to me so as to make me realise that he wasn't going to kill me, he said "whenever you feel uncomfortable just raise your hands", wow!! i thought, he has given me some scope to communicate with the mortal world.
The worst of the worst was that he was working with a mirror!!! The reflection of my mouth and he was seeing it, what if he gets muddled and takes right for left and left for right, there is a high risk of messing up the entire business. It was only after his re-assuring wink did i let him do the punk business. He was busy tinkering my tooth when he jerked quite unexpectedly that made me scream, he then reassuringly patted me saying that his predictions were right, the infection is god damn deep (200 feet!!!), i mussitated "i know, i know, that's why i am here". His tools were quite interesting, one was a simple 'dehydrator' a tiny pipe like thingy that sucks out all the water/spittle from our mouth (i had fun with that trying out in all parts of my mouth when he left me all alone), i then remembered the brief stint Mr.Bean had with his dentist wherein he paralyzes the doc and then does the treatment all by himself, silently visualizing that i grinned. The nurse who had been observing all this gave me a 'you-are-not-normal?' look for which i simply stared aimlessly that made her think otherwise. How can i possibly explain all the antics Bean did to his doc with a coupla needles in my mouth, aah needles...this is the most EVIL part of my treatment-grooving needles.

A cute box with several packs of needles with brightly coloured needle heads, so this is where the crux of the treatment lies-he chanted. Getting fractious is quite an ordinary thing in a dentist's lair, i thought. I didnt give him even the faintest idea of response that i understood what he said and simply opened my mouth, tasting his success he put on some febrilish(portmanteau of febrile and sluggish- my invention ;) smelling medicine over it and like a child that was offered a huge array(sorry..couldn't resist the usage of word array which strongly reminds me of the wonderful programming classes) of brilliantly coloured chocolates he started selecting the needles (drillers- a technical term :P )and got to work, occasionally i jerked, irked, yelled till a point when my eyes were brimming with tears, tears of pain, tears of toothache, tears of Colgate (aye, i liked that paste- it tasted super, i blame it, the taste distracted me from brushing my tooth in the right way. Three days of torment, agony, harassment, crucifixion (OK OK all mean the same, i just wanted it to be implied or rather nailed strongly), came then the final part of fixing a ceramic protection to my tooth and after which it shall be Scot free, for a lifetime........

Now with my tooth fixed, the moral or whatever it can be called of this story zeroes to simple thing -

Pictures speak LOUDER than words

to \/ | \/ A or not to V I V A

My heart was beating at 256kbps...sweat trickling down my already-tensed face...

External :So, what is your experiment?

Me          : Load test on DC shunt motor sir.

External: Hm mm..So why do you do the experiment?

Me          : Sir, we gotta know how the characteristics of the motor vary under load conditions.

External :That's great, but tell me why are we doing this experiment?

Me          : Err..Sir the characteristics of the motor ought to be determined prior to its  usage..observation of its parameters with regards to load variation will give us an idea as of how to evoke an efficient process of the machine's working.

External :The equipment manufacturer always gives a data sheet, you know that? (yes..i replied)..it will contain all the necessary details regarding the motor, so why                                 should you do it?

Me           : Probably for the verification of the data sheet??

External :You can't expect your equipment manufacturer to give you wrong details!!

Me          :OK sir. Let me exemplify it with an example, sir we use these motors in trains, so its   constant speed ought to be maintained even if innumerable compartments are added keeping in mind 'bout its capacity, so we need to....

External :So u say trains use these motors?

Me          :Yes they do..

External :OK tell me why have you conducted the experiment?

Me          :(pondering.............) Sir, its recommended in the syllabus.

Thus ended my eventful viva session after which i asked him the answer for which he grumbled "how do i explain that??" (fondly rubbing his chin) !!!! Damn it, this is what i was struggling for right from the beginning.

 I always used to appreciate the idea of viva-voce wherein real knowledge could be tested and one cannot escape through rotten mugging. The purpose of viva-voce fails when the so-called external tends to stupefy the pupil with questions that are un-answerable (i mean the sensible way!). Yet another viva session that i despised was that of my data structures lab, god please stick some rotten carrots in some part of his body that you wish. He asked me the logic of my program and i boisterously explained every part of my program that even Dennis Ritchie would have asked me to stop to wonder whether C could do so much. All along i faced the monitor pointing to some lines that were brilliantly colored (red, yellow, green, etc) and after finishing i looked up at him. Poor thing, he was busy examining the strength of the ceiling, pondering if this building had the right approval from the corporation or whatsoever..craning his neck to every nook and corner of the room but...this poor soul. I was fuming like hot sulphuric acid. I think he was stuck by the sudden decrease in the decibel level near his area, that he suddenly shot at me one question which made me go dizzy, "Which city do you come from??", i bit my tongue (it ached, yea this is all real), i said "Chennai, sir". He noted something down in his paper (probably ticked my name in the list of "souls excruciated for the sake of laugh").

Education is always a paradox, it arrogates that it provides wisdom to those who acquire it, yet do not see the sapience in any of these people. Education cannot be blamed as such, it is up to those who do the business with it!!

Will all these happen in every other institutions which i always wanted to be a part of?? I didn't want things to happen the way they happen.

The way i want education to be :-

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence the University George education. - Bernard Shaw

Shaw might have quoted this on an occasion where there were no doltness amongst the teachers and this shall not hold true at this moment wherein the duty of a teacher winds up when he/she successfully run through the recommended syllabi interrupted by a couple of tests that are supposed to examine the skills that the pupils had acquired through the course of study. I always believed that the university provided a  unified collection of thoughtful ideas to transform education into what i called real learning. My belief was shattered, i didn't want education to be the way it is to me.Just as iron rusts from disuse, even so does inaction spoil the intellect. So act as if no one had ever attempted to solve the problem.

My take on this issue shall be this, I'm not like the rest raising my hands for the abolishment of the exams, but i shall surely pop-up if i do not see the point in writing tests that could be cleared off just by doing some last minute patchwork in the process of which engineering course need not be given such a long duration of four years. Engineering could be done in a matter of 80 days during the  study holidays. Sounds great!!! "Around the engineering in 80 days"!!!!! Guess you might not like that, how about a life like this- students in the college hither and tither, tension mounting, the team leaders sweating profusely, coordination at its best, aha it is what IT IS...a tech fest..robots cuddling the humanity, technology riding on the environment, innovation at its best....whoaa...eventful were those days, wouldn't it be nicer if we make our entire course of engineering eventful. Instead of carrying a bunch of observations+records (and God must only know, we might even be given "rough"observations, "fair"observation, record notebooks with checks, record notebooks with stripes, XL records,XXL records and what not!!!), we must take with us a notebook to note the principles of what we learn, how it could be put forth for the betterment of the society and the most important part is to ask questions.

The important thing is not to stop questioning. - Albert Einstein

Instead of giving written assignments that results in nothing productive but the decrement in the number of trees in the country..huh.. project work ought to be given that fosters the unity amongst groups encouraging team work and brings the creative best out of them. Vociferous appreciation ought ta be done to inch out an aura of happiness out of our hearts and shout to the world "I think, i lead". Good leaders are those who know whom to lead and where to lead. To make a good leader an open mind is needed, and education is the only means to open our minds to eternity.

When thoughts strides through the Alma mater, fond memories of teachers patting you, the fun and frolic of classrooms, boisterous friends, groundbreaking ideas should wade. The best way to acquire them would be to open our minds (as well as other's ;) ) and learn to learn.

I must certainly thank my eccentric viva session or else i would not have got a topic to blog!!

                                               "Ini oru ini oru vidhi seivom

                                           vidhiyinay matrum vidhi seivom"

What am i gonna write here?? :-? ;)

In bed after a sumptuous meal, did i suddenly remember my friend giving me his blogspot address for the sake of commenting, aarggh i forgot the URL!!! Huh...let me ask him later, quite unexpectedly from the back of my mind a little birdie chirped "hey, you don't own a blog!!,what for do you pay your internet bills", ouch!!(it hurt) i had never felt the need for a blog until then. I immediately woke up, straight to my lovely PC, I dashed for an account with blogspot...I have never been to studying with this momentum even if my exams were to come up the very next day..so with an account, i'm a proud owner of few bytes of memory in an ocean of bits..ok ok lets stay away from technical stuffs...I started thinking 'bout 'what am i gonna write here?'..its my habit to draw the so-called good luck "God's" symbol each time i write in my notebook...damn my keyboard i don't have such symbols here, if some chap related to microsoft is reading this make note of it..i need a "pillayar suzhi" symbol on my keyboard..hey i'm deviating..oops...sorry...so..what am i gonna write??..i first looked up for the meaning of blog and i got this "A shared on-line journal where people can post diary entries about their personal experiences and hobbies"..too vague did i feel about this definition, why would anyone like to share their interests and hobbies on an online journal when nothing productive can be got out of it!! Crazy...coming back to my problem, i wanted some topic..something on this vile earth to fill up the space that was chosen by me without any pre-planning..peeping into my personal interest of computers, chips, etc.. i pondered ''if i were to write 'bout them, the readers who primarily hook onto net and get to blogs wish to refrain themselves their day long strenuous activities..will not listen to my interests or bother why or what i like", so i cogitated the situation carefully and finally came to a conclusion.."why don't i write 'bout my struggle to find a topic for my newly created blog?"..ahaa here it is...right in front of you...i've succesfully explained my difficulty with ease!!!