Documented for Posterity

The best chussis are utter accidents ... and I solemnly believe that they should be documented! Here's an exchange, which took place on facebook, as always after 3am in the morning.

For those who don't understand Urdu, I've translated into English at the end of the post ... though that DOES take away the essence of it

What is a 'Chussi' you ask me?
Here is a wiki entry by one of the masters himself!

Without further ado ...


Ali is looking for some good spacious backpack. 1:39am - 23 Comments

Wajiha Said at 2:47am October 17

why? you wanna fit a body in it?

Adeel Rizvi at 2:50am October 17

no just himself :P

Wajiha Said at 2:52am October 17

phir tau normal size ka bhi chalay ga! -_-

Adeel Rizvi at 2:53am October 17

normal kyun? saath kuch aur bhi dalna hai? small sahi hai

Wajiha Said at 2:54am October 17

haan kya pata saath koi takiya hilaaf rakhna ho? sardi na lagay na!

Adeel Rizvi at 2:55am October 17

lol haan phir sahi hai. warna tao wallet seh bhi kaam chalaya ja sakta tha

Wajiha Said at 2:56am October 17

nahin wallet se nahin chal sakta! phir 5 rupay ka sikka kahan aaye ga! abhi note milna nahin shuru huay! state bank nikamma jo hai!

Mohsin Attaur Rehman at 2:58am October 17

becharay ne ek backpack lena tha .. sirf ek backpack :O

Adeel Rizvi at 3:02am October 17

haan so we are helping him decide ^_^

Wajiha Said at 3:03am October 17

yup yup -_-

Ali Mohsin at 3:18am October 17

@wajiha and rizvi:
mein saath mein aik dual-sim mobile pe le raha hun... sims tou hain nahin mere pass... tum donon ne fit hona hai uss mein?? :0

qasam se kitne wailay log ho!!! :P

Wajiha Said at 3:20am October 17

hum aa tau jayen par tumhara dual sim mobile nahin chalnay wala phir ... will be permanently corrupted -_-

Adeel Rizvi at 3:20am October 17

Ali Mohsin ghussa kar gaya hai. gandi chussiyon peh utar aya hai :P

Wajiha Said at 3:21am October 17

well yeh konsa kabhi achi chussiyon pe charha tha jo ab gandi chussion pe utray ga?

Adeel Rizvi at 3:23am October 17

lol true!

Ali Mohsin at 3:43am October 17

yeah for sure corrupt ho jaye ga... i forgot sim's slot mightl be a lil bigger for u ppl :P
and thanks for explaining me this inverted-bell-shape graph of chussi-meter!
3:45am!! and tomorrow... rather today is a working day :S

Adeel Tassawur at 11:56am October 17

sala aik backpack...aik backpack insaan ko ali-mohsin bana deta hai :P

Wajiha Said at 12:19pm October 17

Allah insaan ka maghphirat farmaye -_-

Adeel Rizvi at 12:25pm October 17

meaning Allah kuch bhi banay lakin Ali Mohsin na banay?

Wajiha Said at 12:28pm October 17

open to interpretation

Ali Mohsin at 4:31pm October 17

eyaar mutt preshaan ho iss baat per... :P
aik mein ne backpack ka lena hai... duniya tension mein aa gayee hai :|

Adeel Tassawur at 4:50pm October 17

i heard this would be the topic of next Obama /McCain debate

Wajiha Said at 12:30am October 18

what? optimum size of a backpack for Ali Mohsin? weren't they already researching it at CERN? pata hai tabhi tau large hadron collider kharab hua hai! they gave it this problem! a little too much for the machine's capacity!

Translation

Ali is looking for some good spacious backpack. 1:39am - 23 Comments

Wajiha Said at 2:47am October 17

why? you wanna fit a body in it?

Adeel Rizvi at 2:50am October 17

no just himself :P

Wajiha Said at 2:52am October 17

in that case a normal sized one will work too! -_-

Adeel Rizvi at 2:53am October 17

Why normal? Does he need to put something else in it as well? small would be better

Wajiha Said at 2:54am October 17
Yea what if he wants to keep a pillow or quilt etc as well? We don't want him to catch a cold!

Adeel Rizvi at 2:55am October 17

lol then its okay. Otherwise a wallet could have made do as well

Wajiha Said at 2:56am October 17

No a wallet wouldn't have worked! Where would the 5 rupee coin fit then? The new bank notes aren't available yet cuz state bank is useless!

Mohsin Attaur Rehman at 2:58am October 17

The poor guy only wanted to get a backpack ... just a backpack :O

Adeel Rizvi at 3:02am October 17

yea so we are helping him decide ^_^

Wajiha Said at 3:03am October 17

yup yup -_-

Ali Mohsin at 3:18am October 17

@wajiha and rizvi:
I'm also getting a dual-sim mobile ... I don't have sims ... but do you guys want to fit in it instead?? :0

Honestly how free are you!!! :P

Wajiha Said at 3:20am October 17
We don't mind coming but then your dual sim mobile is not going to work ... will be permanently corrupted -_-

Adeel Rizvi at 3:20am October 17
Ali Mohsin has gotten pissed off. Has come down to bad chussis :P

Wajiha Said at 3:21am October 17
Well as if he ever managed to move up to good chussis that he'd come down to bad chussis now?

Adeel Rizvi at 3:23am October 17

lol true!

Ali Mohsin at 3:43am October 17

yeah for sure it will be corruped ... i forgot sim's slot might be a lil bigger for u ppl :P
and thanks for explaining me this inverted-bell-shape graph of chussi-meter!
3:45am!! and tomorrow... rather today is a working day :S

Adeel Tassawur at 11:56am October 17

one damn backpack ... one backpack makes ali-mohsin out of a man :P

Wajiha Said at 12:19pm October 17

May god forgive the man -_-

Adeel Rizvi at 12:25pm October 17

meaning god creates you anything but Ali Mohsin?

Wajiha Said at 12:28pm October 17

open to interpretation

Ali Mohsin at 4:31pm October 17

buddy don't be stressed out over this ... :P
i just needed to get a backpack ... the entire world is in tension :|

Adeel Tassawur at 4:50pm October 17

i heard this would be the topic of next Obama /McCain debate

Wajiha Said at 12:30am October 18

what? optimum size of a backpack for Ali Mohsin? weren't they already researching it at CERN?
you know that is why the large hardon collider is not working! they gave it this problem! a little too much for the machine's capacity!

for your past *click* *here*

So I have a counter on my blog, which as is obvious counts the visits to here, and also comes bundled with a number of features including where the recent visitors came from and also the referring URL. While I was randomly clicking away at the referring URLs, one of them was a google search for I-T (Iqbal Talaat Bhatti's) blog. So I clicked away from link to link and this is what I stumbled across:

this blog → my statcounter page → Google search: "Iqbal Talaat Bhatti's blog" → youtube result for Iqbal Talaat Bhatti (movie alpha) → Similar vidoes on youtube → *some more clicking* → Batch12 GIKI welcome add → Batch12 GIKI farewell video.

So here it is. Some things I can say about: "I was there when it happened"

Batch12 GIKI Welcome Ad (2002)

Every year, the freshman batch in GIKI is welcomed in by the junior year batch. Typically it includes publicity, multimedia advertisements, all leading to the weekend of the welcome show and the concert. So in 2002, my batch i.e. batch12 (class of 2006) was welcomed in by batch10 (class of 2004). And here is the welcome add that they made for us:




Batch12 Farewell Video (2006)

So like the welcome, the farewell to the senior year is given by the Sophomore year. We did it for Batch10 in 2004 and Batch14 did it for us in 2006. Crofty (Saad Sadaruddin Khan) and Polly (Fahad Rasheed) surprised the rest of us Batch12 people with the following dedication to the batch. Reflects croft's skill at flash and polly's eye for photography and ear for music. It was an emotional 4 minutes 39 seconds for the 170 or so people in the auditorium. Here it is:




About Movie Alpha (sometime in the dark ages between 2002 and 2006, actually the 5th semester)

There are no words to describe this piece of work which I-T, Basim, Babarman, Rizvi and some other people in my batch found the time and brainwave to make back in the 5th semester. Here it is, and you have been *sufficiently* warned!

Nostalgia

"Friday, November 19, 2004

The night is over and I'm really really weary

After dinner I came back to my room discussed some implemention issues and approaches of the Mousatron with Hashim till 3:00 am. After that it was a couple of 8051 e-Books and Data Sheets for me. It didnt take me long to get bored though and I ended up watching Legends of the Fall again ..."

What you see up there in an excerpt from a blog entry that my good friend I-T (Iqbal Talaat Bhatti) made in his blog "I-T's Blog Central" three years ago. This is one of the first few entries. I-T started blogging in Novemeber 2004, back then blogger was pretty new, and all of us were home from GIKI for mid-semester break. I-T didn't stop just there but infact i'm sure he was the single influencing factor in getting many people to blog, including me. Though I never was as faithful to it as I-T, as is evident from his long list of archive as opposed to my very short one. I even killed my blog and reincarnated it after a year. Please do pay I-T's blog a visit, the link is in my right pane under 'More Blabbers'. Anyway, since I am celebrating sad-yet-sweet nostalgia, I will continue to explain the background to the entry I-T made above ...

It was our 5th semester, and me, I-T, Hashim and moody (Ali Osman Hameed) formed a group for our Microprocessor Interfacing course project. We were all hoping to become fully qualified Computer Systems Engineers in another year and a half. We, rather ambitiously, decided to make a mouse-in-a-maze robot and after careful and lengthy deliberation, christened it 'mous-A-tron' (i think I-T and I came up with that one). A huge undertaking as it was, I-T and Hashim took the job of working on the code for the microprocessor itself, with I-T doing bulk of the actual coding, I was entrusted with making a circuit to accept the signal from the processor and send it up to the 15volt stepper motors (stepping it up from 5 volts to 15 volts on the way), which would in ideal conditions turn to make the mouseatron run, and I also designed the robot body in this rather cool engineering design software that we learnt in our 2nd Semester. I can't remember the name right now, but incidentally, it was I-T's elder brother, Kashif Bhatti, who was a mechanical engineer and had graduated in the spring of the same year we had joined, taught us the software back in our 2nd semester as he was our Engineering Design teacher.

Anyway, Moody and Hashim took the responsibility of actually constructing the robot body using the services of the workshop in the mechanical engineering faculty of the university. I-T also single handedly constructed the infra red obstacle detection circuit which was supposed to be the 'eyes' mousatron would use to get out of the maze. We spent some four weeks labouring over the project, during which I-T went crazy learning about the 8051 microprocessor while I could claim a half PhD in stepper motor theory. We finally got done with the four seperate parts of the robot but found out that they wouldn't work when put together and there was no time and hope to debug as the semester was nearly over, not to mention the final presentation was in the next few days, so in the end we showed all 4 components working seperately and incidentally got away with one of the highest scores in the class. Apparently we had done more with a non-working project than many people with fully functional ones :)

Fast Forward a year-and-a-half

All four of us graduated in the class of 2006. Our final exams ended mid-May 2006 with our convocation on 7th of June. Among our various accomplishments was an A in our two-semester, final year project, for which I-T, Hashim and I were again in a group. I think after mouseatron the three of us almost always ended up making project groups together.

Fast Forward three years

I-T: After graduation, I-T spent some time at his home in Lahore with his family. He had earlier applied to Microsoft, made it all the way and got hired. And I believe that he thoroughly and truly deserves it. But even before that, he worked at GIKI for sometime as a teaching assistant (TA), which I'm sure he was really good at. He moved to Microsoft which is situated in Redmond, outside Seattle, in April 2007 and been there since. Other than working, he spends his time experimental cooking, photographing, kayaking, canoe-ing, extreme sporting, biking, travelling and has nearly drowned at one occasion and multiple-fractured his arm at another. He's in Pakistan (Lahore) these days, his first trip home since Microsoft and is due to leave for America in a few weeks time. He blogs very regularly at his blog central. Link in the right pane. He is also found to cheer sad or sick friends up (meaning me) by sending them Chocolates and KFC through gift services.

Hashim: After graduating with the rest of us, Hashim, originally from Rawalpindi, worked in a local software house for a while, then went to GIKI as a TA around the same time as I-T, and left a few months after him. He is currently pursuing his masters degree at Chalmers in Goteborg, Sweden.

Moody: Moody also from Lahore party-ed after graduation and then moved to London, being a British national, as he was born there. There he switched jobs (and apartments) with quite regularity, yet never letting the party die out as many of our batchmates from GIKI went to UK for studies and proved to be his constant companions. He is currently working in the I-T department at Harrod's and can be heard from (online ofcourse) complaining about his 11 hour shifts.

I: Having gotten a job offer from P&G while I was in my 8th semester (I had interned for them in the summers after my 6th), I moved to Karachi just 2 days after graduating from GIKI. I started with the company on 12th June 2006. Coming from Islamabad, which is as diametrically opposite to Karachi as any two cities can get, I have had a rough time living alone here, with very few friends, a few personal set backs, and limited mobility due to the rather unsafe nature of the city. I have been here for nearly 1.5 years now, and I spend my time away from work in my room, staring at my laptop screen, enjoying the delights of unlimited internet. I was reading through I-T's blog archives when i stumbled upon the post above. My mother is still in Islamabad, where she has lived for 27 years and where I was born and raised. My sister now lives in Dubai with her husband, having gotten married some 2 months after I came to Karachi.

Here's the link to I-T's blog entry that triggered the cascade: The night is over and I'm really really weary


Here's a google map with GIKI, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore and Karachi tagged along with my impressions of them. For Redmond, London and Gotenborg refer to your nearest google map.



View Larger Map


P.S: I'll try to dig up some old mouseatron stuff from my old PC which is lying like a relic in my room now and post them here. Next time I'll try to post about Egypt. A few people were interested in that.

Guess Who's Back, Back again!

Me is back, Tell a friend! :P

Been inactive for quite a while. Primarily because i was trapped in the so-called 'hell hole' that is GIKI. Well it ain't that bad. But it hardly leaves you any time for doing anything human. Like update your blog, or read a book, or ride a bike etc. etc. Me got three weeks break before the last semester starts. It feels so weird! Five more months and i'll be a fully qualified engineer! *gasp* oh well all you visitors expect a post on chinchillas :D