Was just going through old stuff present on my disk. Came across the project I had done when I was in thrid year of graduation. I saw demo of that code again. I saw it again. It has some special importance, and always feels good whenever I play it. I still remember those days when we were doing that project on Speech Recognition. We were trying vaguely to implement algorithms (DFT and FFT), about which we didn't even knew head or tail at that time. Then we had meeting with Mr. Sampath from concepts, and things got quite simple. We abandoned that idea of DFT and FFT and we resorted to the old time domain method for speech recognition. As usual jaydeep and sameer did most of the understanding and coding. Amit was ill at that time, vishal and i had gone home. When I came back, Jaydeep and sammer announced that after many failures with those DFT and FFT algorithms, we finally were able to recognise two words with pretty high success rate. After that we extended the concept to speech operated elevator. Only drawback at that time was that it's success rate used to decrease as we tryied to increase number of words to recognise, and with many different sounds and pronunciations our database would increase and so did the failure rate. Finally we compromised at identifying only two words, one word (soar) to make that lift move up, and other (reverse) to move it down. The idea to identify was to identify the position of letter "s" from these two words. Then we further extended the concept with the real dummy lift, driven by motors. That didn't happen, because of shortage of time, But we did that graphically on computer simulation of the lift.
Never got bored with that stuff, though it might have been old, or nobody might use that technique to recognise speech now. It's always a nice feeling when you could say that I did that when I was in school, and at that time when others were also trying. Though the implementation wasn't any sophisticated, but the concept was relatively new at that time. And for a college project, it was really nice to attemt quite successfully. In the compitition organised at the inter-college level, we did got second prize. Just after another masterpiece, a remote controlled car by nachiket, ajit, rohit, anupam and sumeet. I still like that third year project more that any other project I have done. Partly, the last year project was almost a sort of bouncer to me. It was successful specially because of sameer and jaydeep, as they did the most part of understanding. At the end, when I understood that project completely, it seemed simple enough to implement for anybody. On the way we disproved somebody (don;t want to disclose names), and identified a new relationship between speech signals. We got an international paper in EURASIP journal for that.

On Birthday's..

It's real nice to celebrate birthdays.
I like, the way people come and bless,
I like gifts people brings to me,
I like blowing of candles on birthday cake,
I like cutting birthday cake,
And what I don't like is b'day bums.

Avoide those who give that wise comment, "Look you should be doing good things, now since another year has gone". Even i know that I am wasting my days, but atleast I am happy with the way I am living my life. Somethings I would definitely had done better, but in the end they all turned out to be just fine.
When I look back, I could see a bright (not soo) past. But considering whatever I have today, it certainly was bright. Well I am waiting for that big day ahead.

Normally we speak marathi even in bangalore as all friends are maharashtrian. And except in the office and outside, there is no need to speak local language. My friend, who was giving directions to the taxi he had called, told the driver "wahanse KHUPP aage aao." The driver was stumped and might be thinking what does that mean? Then i went to a tamilian restaurant, and asked waiter "sambar Vaati me doo", waiter was confused.

There seems to be many maharashtrians in banglore now. Sometime it really feels good, but sometimes bad. We used to enjoy privacy, even in the public places, as no one used to understand marathi. Now, since, we find marathi people, we can not talk loudly at public places, which we would have otherwise. For example, while fixing our cable, we were trying to explain the cable-man about how he should fix it. But despite of our attempts, he seemed not to be getting anywhere near our expected pattern. Finally my friend, out of frustration, said out quite loudly " Hey south-indians muthh astat, bilkul bindok" and blah blah blah. Well the cablewala heard that and replied angrily "Kai mhanalas, punha bol", then my friend was running for some covering sayings.

I had been to mysore on three different ocassions, but never been with the guided tour operators. It was quite funny, the way they were describing history. At one place, they showed a big red coloured building, and explained that "in this building, food, lodging and washing are given free to every occupant", natuarally everybody wanted to have a look, and everybody were straining to get a glimpse of that monument. Then the guide explained "... thats the mysore central jail", and suddenly out of nowhere a big plank, calmly sitting on that building with bold letters MYSORE CENTRAL JAIL, came in the view. It was there from the beginning, but suddenly came to focus. Then there is a fort built by tipu sultan in srirangapattana. The guide explained, "After three fights with the britishers tipu sultan was defeated, not because they out-performed him, but because his defense minister betrayed him. Before dying, tipu sultan and his father were ruled by srirangapattana for 22 years."....and we were unable to control the laughter. Lastly when we entered vrindavan garden he said "this is vrindavan garden, which is famous for its fountains and musical fountains. As you can see, there are number of fountains in this garden, these fountains are supplied water from the dam, and it is very beautiful to look in the night because of number of bulbs illuminating it but in fact there is no water in dam, still it is beautiful". How can we see a beauty of a fountain, without water in it.??

When the future looks bleak, we tend to loose our interest with the present. We stop worrying about the present and start thinking about the future, which has not yet arrived. This mess's up the present, as we loose our concentration, and that again mess up the future which was coming.

This had happened few years back. That time I was travelling in mumbai by the local train. The train had stopped on some station, I don't excatly remember name, and as usual local train was over-crowded. Many people come daily in the search of work, or just to roam-around. The city has almost everything, right from the five-star hotels to the road-side motels, plush banglows to slum-dwellers. Nobody really cares what others are doing. As i was saying, the train was stopped on the station. The train was about to leave, when some people came running towards our coach. They were shouting something, which was un-clear, because of noise around. When they reached the door, of our compartment, they started pulling out men standing at the door. We were tensed. As i said, mumbai is un-predictable, we thought they were some gundaa's and were trying to loot passengers. Through window i could see those fellows dragging those poor passengers. They were shouting something, and they took them in the room. Then some of them again came back towards our coach, I was praying for the train to start moving and it did start moving before they reached our coach again. I read that board hanging above that room, and i was surprised, there was a twist-in-the-tale. The baord declared "Railway Police Station", and those people in fact were policemen in civil dress.
Now my view changed completely, but still i was surprised, and a bit scared. They were coming back again towards our coach indicated that there are some-more culprits still there in our coach. Anxiety grapsed us. The feeling that there are some culprits amogst us and they might do something, made us uneasy. But even this assumption was short-lived, as moments after, i came to know that the compartment i was sitting was in fact a ladies compartment and Immediately on the next station, even before the train had come to a standstill, we jumped out of the compartment from back side, and boarded another compartment.