Airtel 4G: Internet Flashback

So, I have been part of the Cochin and Trivandrum launching and preview of #Airtel4G and I have written long posts about it, four about my experience at the former and one about the same at the latter city. Being the fastest network as of now, Airtel being the only network having the 4G option, can continue to claim to be the fastest network around here, in those three Keralite cities, Cochin, Trivandrum and Calicut if we consider Kerala. There is surely going to be an expansion for the future, and I hope that it includes my current location too.

This speed brings me back to my past, to that moment when I got my first computer which was quite a slow one. It was called Zenith the One Up PC with an Intel Pentium Processor. I didn’t understand what they meant by the “up” because it was behind most of the computers of that time which looked the same. Nowadays, I don’t even know someone who has a PC from Zenith. I believe that it was in the year 1998 that the new computer arrived, I think I had access to slow internet very soon too. But we were satisfied with that at those times.

Well, we still have the slow internet which is slower than ever, as some of the dongles do give us that slow speed for the unlimited connections after acertain limit – the speed has been reduced to 64Kbps these days which is no better than the dial-up connections of that time considering what all we have to load. So, we haven’t really improved from that time as long as we decide to suffer with the slow speeds. From just randomly using social networking sites like Friendster and Hi5, the situation has gone on through Orkut and Myspace to Facebook which has become the big part of life. So, the internet needs more.

At those times, there were two games, Claw and Hocus Pocus, the first one needing the CD to play. Then there was the CD featuring 99 games which changed my life with games including Blood and Alone in the Dark. At that time there was only that dial-up modem, I depended on these disks from Computers@Home, PC World, Chip, It, Efy, Fast Forward, Living Digital and the rest attracting us with headings like “Real War Games”, “25 Must Haves”,”Colour Your World”, “Paranoid Parent Kit”, “Go Picture Crazy”, “Print Adventure”,”Ultimate Utility Cache” – the games and utilities came from the disks only. Now it has gone beyond that.

The movies had to be rented too, and I created my first mail address at Yahoo and waited while having more and more biscuits with tea. The thoughts about downloading a game or watching a movie from the internet was not going to be something in the dream. Even in the later stages, playing an online game was tough for me considering the high-speed internet which the people from other parts of the world possessed. Games like Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 Arena asked for it, but the internet made sure that I never came first.

We were the people of the slow internet, and were limited to playing with local friends only. But everything is faster now, and still we will be behind in comparison. #Airtel4G can surely change that with its speed. The advantage of having the wired connection is that the speed remains the same all the time, and so I will keep the broadband, and would like to have the #Airtel4G for using during travel. As none of the USB dongles really do that well, this could prove interesting, especially as it can be used for the mobile too, with the portable Mi-Fi device.

The #Airtel 4G speed has been excellent throughout both cities of Cochin and Trivandrum except for some pockets, even though it is quick to shift to 2G when it is outside the city limits. The consistency has been better at Cochin though, but that would depend on a lot of factors, I guess. I am not sure if I will recharge it with 4G right now though, because it is not there at my hometown right now. But I hope to use it with all its speed, as the distance from the place of availability of 3G to my location is less than twenty kilometres. The rates are supposed to be the same as 3G, and so I will need to look at it too.

***The images used in this blog post were taken by me at home.

TeNy

Choice of the Heart

Most of the times, there is more than one choice in our life; and it matters how those decisions are taken. All the time, the self-proclaimed people keeps asking us to take decisions from the mind instead of the heart. It has always been the brain who got more attention, and in the end, we wonder if the right decision was taken when it involved the brain – if the heart could have done better? Isn’t the brain getting too much attention in a word which needs more empathy an compassion?

It has never been easy to listen to the heart in our society which looks only for the winners. There have been better times for the heart in the later stages of my life, but not during those earlier times when I was at school. Yes, the first graduation course was also a decision of the mind which had to be changed, but the school days were not so different either. There was no option to choose from the heart – none of us had the choice; no man or woman had a real choice at that time.

The brain asks you to aim for the skies, but what does the heart say?

Yes, there were men who made the choice, but I don’t consider them as my role-models. As far as my little universe was considered, none of them were part of the same. All my friends as well as myself were caught in this option to make no real choice. We were forced to join a random graduation related to the IT field which was at its full power during that time, even though things were beginning to somewhat come down by the time the course was finishing.

Therefore, the decision to join BCA was made out of the mind, because it was the perfect and absolutely sane decision at that time. Everyone else had been spending time looking for those engineering colleges, and doing BCA meant that less money was to be spent and still with an MCA added to the degree, I could be none less than an engineer and also a post-graduate, thus one step forward. Yes, I had qualified in the Kerala Engineering Entrance Examinations of that time just with my guess work, but BCA and MCA combination seemed better.

It was the season of darkness; but things change when the heart takes over.

It was never the time of the heart. Such times had no place for the heart, because the aim of the society was to make an engineer out of even zombies. Each and every parent wanted to say that the son or daughter was studying for engineering. It hasn’t changed much even now, and the coconut trees are complaining that there are more engineers than them, leading to a change in demographics which can be dangerous to the relationship between humans and the trees of the state.

I never had good times with BCA, unless you want to mention sleeping in the classes and never going to the college for days as “good times”. This meant that the brain was rather the selfish and the greedy one, making choices out of having no real choice, and calling it a bloody choice even without an existence. Brain had kept telling that this is still awesome, and you could go on saying to the people that you are doing BCA, thus making everyone happy. But the heart had other ideas.

On one of those rainy days, supported by the beauty and serenity of the monsoon, I decided to end this from the bottom of my heart. There was no point in it, and the same was supported by my mother. Even though the majority was still against this decision and wanted to go with the mind, once again taking my choice out of me, I decided against listening to the same people who stopped my heart from making decisions. I made the decision to quit BCA and take a graduation in BA English and Literature – that felt awesome and it was a dil ki deal!

I am participating in the #DilKiDealOnSnapdealactivity at BlogAdda in association with SnapDeal.

***The images used in this blog post were taken by me on my Sony Cybershot DSC-W310 and Samsung Star Duos.

TeNy

Through the Sands of Time

Every now and then, what has come between my heart and my mind has been a few great judgments. Some people, both men and women have the notion that men can do whatever they want and they are not judged. But it is a third-rate judgment in itself. We are all chosen to do what the society tells us to. There is nothing that I hate more than the generalization, and it is a disgusting attack on a person’s individuality – this statement itself is a judgment.

I have been a Literature student, and have read something from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains“. It is not in my power to say who is in chains of stainless steel and who is in the chain of rusting iron, because the situation is not the same everywhere. But one thing I am sure about is that I have been judged throughout my life, and I have seen the same as a perfect example of why the bloody judgment about being judged is not limited to a gender.

In a grand universe in which the man is so minute, society makes a mockery of him.

This calls for a flashback, and the sands of time has been reset to that period when I was going to do my thesis for MA English. I have already written about the seasons of judgment when I decided to halt my BCA and also when I started pursuing English Literature. Here is another one, as the season of judgment has been something like an eternal, hot summer. The strength of the same has never ceased to amaze me.

I have a pretty good list of judges, and there was one who came home and asked me about the thesis I was doing. It was his right to ask about the same because he hadn’t read English or any literature for such a long time. I told him that I was doing something on vampire and related culture based on a number of Gothic horror works which featured vampires, and was using some traditional beliefs to support the same.

Despite not scoring the top marks, this thesis is a bonus to my individuality.

Actually, there was absolutely no need to explain it in detail, and things got kind of worse. The doubt was like why would somebody do a thesis on vampires which are like the demons which are evil? I was surprised that there were too many people asking the same question after that. I had the extreme privilege of being not the good person that I was supposed to be, and that came out of nowhere.

With all my lecturers at college providing full support, didn’t I have the right to do thesis on whatever topic I wanted? How is it that a part of my studies determine if I was good or evil? I have had the free advice to change the topic and do something on Bard of Avon or my namesake who had enough works for a big project, and that was normal. May be if the focus was at least not on the blood-sucking, it was still better.

But I had enough of this nonsense, and I had changed too many things in my life for others. So, I decided to stay judged for this one; I had to be judged for working with blood-suckers rather than a huge tree which stood alone in the middle of a beautiful meadow or a lovely maiden who waited for her lover, and there was always the dumb fiction. The mind still said that this one won’t fetch me a high score as it was about “the vampire”, but heart told me to go on.

I didn’t score that high in the end, and the right decision was indeed to change this topic which the normal people never liked. But I didn’t want the right decision, because I wanted to be judged for making the choice. This judgment was to be my personal bliss. I finally got that, and was never happier, because I was extremely good at what I did, and despite some people not liking it, I enjoyed every bit of reading about the vampires. This is where I followed my heart, and I had chosen not to score high marks, because I study to know; I do this with all my heart to read more and more – this was a true dil ki deal! I felt good, and I felt like a vampire who inherited a lovely castle from Count Dracula.

“I am participating in the #DilKiDealOnSnapdealactivity at BlogAdda in association with SnapDeal.”

***The two photos used in this blog post were taken on my Sony Cybershot DSC-W310 camera.

TeNy

Joy of Being Together

There are many forms of happiness in one’s life, as they become the other side of that coin which has sadness on one side. One of them is that bliss of being together with your loved ones – friends, relatives, and all those who find a nice place in your heart. The need for people in our life is a certainty, and we need some good support to remain motivated through the dark times – after all, life is not a soft bed of flowers on which you can just lie down and enjoy.

This brings me back to a memory from some time ago. We had shifted to our old home again, and it was a return to the past. But there were still not many friends around there, and couldn’t find most of my childhood friends there, as most of them were having jobs somewhere else, and a few others couldn’t be contacted at all. I was lonely there and the scope was there to be eternally alone unless there was a nice twist to come.

Then one day, I had a Facebook message from an old friend of mine who stay near my present home to which we have returned after a gap of around fifteen years. We had studied together for the tution classes, and it was good to hear from him. He was getting married and told me that he will be coming to visit me. I told him to come whenever he wanted because I wasn’t much hopeful about it – this had happened before with nobody really coming and I was pessimistic.

But that was not the case this time. As I was going through my normal pessimistic model, he came to my home on the very next holiday. We talked about a lot of things, like how he was going through the difficult times in his life, especially with facing people without a job, and it was easy to relate for me because it was the same on this side too. Society wants all of us to get a job, then get married and afterwards, bring kids to this world.

He told me that it will pass, like in his case, as it has only gotten better for him. He had been going through the same phase as I was, without a job and writing for entrance for his post graduation. There might have been times when his case was worse, as I always had some other things to do. He was like for this all the time, but never really achieved the good results for a very long time. He struggled real hard, and I have been the lazy one with my studies, even with my good scores.

He told me that there is always the right time for the right thing, as it happened with him. After his marriage, he was going to go for the Doctor of Medicine, and his wife was also going to pursue the same. He made it clear that things did finally came right for him, and what you have to do was to keep trying. There was never going to be a substitute for hardwork, and he was another example for the same.

So, we had porotta and paneer butter masala at the nearby restaurant, talking a bit more about it, finishing the small meeting with a cup of tea each. It was a fine day which proved with ease that being #together is very important, and we all need our friends in our life. This was that little nudge that I needed to get back on track, and just like Housing.com, lets believe in the power of optimism which can be attained in one way or the other. Check this link for more details about Housing.com and how they can be helpful: https://housing.com/

***The images used in this blog are those of St George Basilica, Angamaly – another symbol of optimism for me. These two photos were taken by me on my Sony Cybershot DSC-W310 #together.

TeNy