It seems like ages when we were given our final year project last year in August. With time, the excitement seems to have faded away or should I say that we were not even 2 months into it, when it started to seem more like a burden that we had to get rid off.
With the final project presentation in about 10 days from now, we are still to have a look at a fully functional project ;-) And that reminds me; our software has still not gone through the ritual of name giving or “naam karan sanskaar” (a ritual of name giving performed on a new born in Hindu families). I guess it has to do with the fact that our project has not been able to make it out of the technical womb in the stipulated time. Incidentally, this time also happens to be of approximately 9 months.
I still remember the whole buzz surrounding the allocation of project guides which marked the first official step of the initiation of the final year project. After a lot of critical analysis we were able to shortlist the professors we wanted and were lucky to have got our first choice. This was just the beginning of a rather eventful year as we were to see.
We were happy because we were given the freedom of selecting a topic which we wanted to work upon. But as it soon turned out to be, the task of selection itself was daunting enough, let alone having to start upon it. Whatever domain interested us carried with it the risk of not being able to complete the project within the given time frame. On the other hand, every other project idea seemed a trivial little thing which could be finished off and done with easily (The realization came much later how wrong we were…!)
After googling various project ideas and abundant consultations with friends and seniors (Believe me. We didn’t leave out anyone) we zeroed in on an idea which had been previously worked upon but we were going to do it our own way. We were handed over a yellow card in which we were supposed to track down all the meetings throughout the year with our project guide along with a brief mention of the agenda discussed for each meeting.
Before we move further, let me make this clear to the reader that it always went without saying that any work not involving a scrap of technology was assumed to be assigned to me by default. I need not explain this to you if you are smart enough to understand and just in case if you can’t then it would be sufficient for you to just know that project managers DO NOT code themselves ;-) ;-). They just manage.
As a result of the above, it goes without saying that things like the yellow card, project reports, information gathering( READ: searching the internet with good intentions but more often than not ending up on wiki pages of movies, suicidal attempts and so on) always fell in my domain and therefore became an integral part of my life. While talking to the guide or discussing the project, my mind would always wander and think about as to how project group number 10 can have the maximum lines filled in the yellow card. My project mates and I would often sit and joke around as to how great it would feel to go ask for ANOTHER yellow card. Anyways, that was my work back then, in the initial days.
And just then, before you may want to jump to any conclusions about ours being just another group in the race for filling up their cards (You sure know who I am referring to ;-)) let me tell you there were great minds involved. It was just a matter of time when the dormant minds of great people like the WRIGHT brothers (refers to Shukla and Anshul; two people with the greatest amount of knowledge and expertise I have ever come across in my life. IT IS NOT EXAGGERATED) would let loose and create wonders for us. We were to find this out later.
The topic of Wright Brothers brings me to another joke that Anshul once shared with me. One day he told me, that he has always believed that Shukla’s level of concentration is so high, that if he was to stare into a page of a book for more than 30 seconds, the paper will catch fire. This particular incident brought me childhood memories, of making the sun rays pass through a magnifying glass and concentrating them onto a particular spot on a piece of paper and in the process igniting it. I could so easily imagine Shukla playing the sun god in this very case.
I guess I deviated and went a little too much into the brothers, when I really should be talking about the project but then they deserve this much from me for the admiration I have for them.
The days that followed consumed most of our time in searching around and trying to correctly identify the little pieces of the BIG jigsaw puzzle that lay in front of us. With the passage of time, we soon discovered that this was not really moving forward the way it should. But then again, we were not bothered too much for all the 3 besides me believed that they could do it while I believed that I could make them do it ( Remember the project manager bit ;-)) Before we knew it, the first semester had already ended and soon we got busy with our examinations. At this point, I decided that it was time for me to crack the whip on my people and I ordered (READ: begged) everyone to stay back for 10 days after the exams to do a little project work.
We drew out plans of how we will be tackling our little project vacation that lay ahead of us. The plan was partly drawn out by Anshul and me and read something like this:
Day 1: The Exorcist
Day 2: The Blair Witch Project
Day 3: Project Work and Rosemary’s Baby
Day 4: Project Work and Toons
As you would have figured it by now, the vacation was already given the name of Horror Movie Film Festival and the venue was decided to be Shukla’s place and precious little time of the preparatory leave was being used for searching the best titles from the internet.
Soon, the vacation came and nothing went off to plan as is the case usually. When I say this, I mean both about the movie festival as well as the project. We could only succeed in doing a bit of both. However, we derived two major positives out of staying back in Pune after our exams. These were
We got the opportunity to interact with the people whose project’s extension we were working on. By reviewing the existing project, we got greater motivations to believe that the project is going to be a cakewalk(Imp: No matter how difficult a task is, we are in the habit of making ourselves believe that it is not a big deal, so that we can always postpone it till the end)
I saw the most well directed horror movie of my life till date- “The Blair Witch Project”. Don’t miss out on the word project in it and it is a must watch for everyone out there.
With this we ended part 1 of our project making and packed our bags to go home, oblivious of the task that lay ahead of us in semester 2. But as always, we had full control of our surroundings as far as the project was concerned. We just knew, the time had not come as yet.
To be continued…
