Bought a course book after ages!!!! "Programming Microsoft Windows with C#" by Charles Petzold.And no am not going to delve into the intricacies of the contents of the book or write a review on it. Rather I was more interested in writing what inspired me to buy the book.
Ideally you would associate a software engineer from NITK Surathkal to be a geeky kind of a guy; someone who is attracted to new gadgets and thinks in terms of bits and bytes ;0's and 1's. But unlike many of my counterparts I hardly fit into that mould ;or so I thought till probably the final year of my college. Why?? Well I can attribute many reasons some of which are-
Guess your psyche is deeply affected by the people around you;the company you keep; the kind of people you interact with while you spend those 4 crucial formative years of your life in college. And atleast my friends and classmates at large were mostly the kind of people who took to IT purely because they wanted to study in a college of repute in a decent branch; very few of them actually knew what courses were going to be taught whilst in college and whether that would would actually interest them. In college I found two really different classes of people; One class consisted of people who knew all the while what they wanted out of life ;hence opted for streams that interested them and always fared wonderfully well in academics. These guys had their career planned wonderfully and are now gracing some the top US universities and am sure they are faring well there.
I unfortunately (or fortunately) fall in the seconnd category. And hence after a certain point of time studying became a necesity rather than a pleasure; and this finally boiled down to studying for the sake of getting good grades which would accrue into a good GPA; something which we felt was absolutely necessary to land up in a good paying job. And this assumption is far removed from the truth. And yes somewhere down the line a sense of frustration and desperation did set in; what was I doing studying all this; did it actually interest me; was it adding any value to my career? Well these questions did creep in from time to time and I was unfortunately not able to find answers to most of such subjective questions.

One more very important thing which affects you while you are in college is the faculty. I know am stating the obvious here; but still this is something I realised when I was about to leave college. I remember in my final semester I tried my level best to work on a research project; courtesy one hardworking Prof who instilled in us the urge to think and do some genuine research.The only thing worth remembering in my final semester was the discussions we used to have with him. We used to forward improvised half baked ideas to solve a problem and he used to think deeply before successfully pointing out the limitations in our ideas and hence the research we did.. I remember the kind of "high" I felt when he said that we could actually publish a new research paper if we could get appropriate results. (That we weren't able to publish it is an ebntirely different story. I am planning to write on the same later.). But that is besides the point. ... For the first time in 4 years I felt I was doing something interesting; something of value; something which forced me to think ; to analyze;to understand in depth about a particular feature and how one can use it to improve a certain application. I felt I was doing something substantial;not learning some crap by rote to reproduce it verbatim in the exam and get marks. I remember my entire final semester was devoted to working on that project. I had taken three more courses to complete my credits but I hardly knewwhat was being taught in those subjects; my attendance in those subjects was dismal; and all along I knew that I was about get screwed royally.But all those apprehensions were always kept at bay. Also the performance of my peers in other branches and their admits in US universities somehow affected me . Thats what peer influence does. When you see people around you moving ahead;it somehow spurs you on else you start feeling like a big loser. I know that ideally one shouldn't get affected by such feelings but as humans we just can't control ourselves. I guess it is but natural to get swayed away by your emotions. And that precisely the reason why studying in a good environmment helps; a competitive atmosphere always keeps you on your toes preventing complacency to creep in. It gets the best out of you. You start developing the feeling that you should not end up being an also ran. I need to stand out just like few other people in my group have done.

Well the seed that was sown then has sprouted . I have now bought a book on C# to learn that language . I may just end up working on a research project on "Compilers" ; a subject which I hated not very long ago; again for two reasons- I just learnt it because I was supposed to learn; The teaching was so pathetic that whatever little interest you might have had was stifled in its infancy. I know am being very harsh here but am sure most of my classmates will agree on this point. And to think of it I got into the compiler work courtesy the project I did in my final year and beyond.

How my interests have changed over this short peroiod of time. Its now entirely upto me to do some good work and achieve the "creative " satisfaction I have been yearning for since a long time. Its a pretty difficult task. And I just hope am upto it.