On several pages on this website, you will find italicised paragraphs such as this one and the next, indicating that much of the remainder of the content was written when I was in IIT, in India, and between 18 and 21, when the website was first put up, and has been left unchanged for sentimental reasons. For the record, I've since been in the US for two years (between the ages of 21 and 23), where I studied at Washington University in St. Louis, and am now back in India for good, working at the Microsoft India Development Center in Hyderabad. It isn't easy to keep a personal homepage up to date in the face of all the changes our lives throw at us. But I shall strive to keep the information on this website both relevant and correct at all times. However, I will also retain a lot of old content, simply because those words transport me back to a world I could never wish to leave behind. That may mean a very persistent ghost of the past to contend with, while attempting to extract the present truth from this overly formatted muddle, but so be it. Many have found this website interesting. Maybe it was while my life still was. And maybe my life still is. I hope this website will still be worth your while. Because my life still is worth mine.

One thing more - gradually, as my academic and professional subsystems start to fill out more of my life, this website will have to take that heartbreaking turn too. I will eventually have to direct potential employers, and those looking for my research publications, to my Technical section, and put up a link that says My Resume (pdf)! All that will happen in good time. But they will have to make do with being crammed in here with the artistic and creative subsystems that you will soon read about if this is your first time here. Life means a lot more. Mine always has, to me. This website shall continue to reflect that.

I have long been promising my artistic and creative sub-systems a place over which they could fly their own flag, unoppressed by my priorities, and untaxed by my schedule, routine and responsibilities.

rpm --inside_out marks the fulfillment of that promise. I suppose they'd be rather happy here - far from the noise of the web; plain and unambitious landscape.

As a relatively unimportant detail, this website is now hosted on a domain owned by my brother and me. However, for nearly four years, it had a variety of charmingly long and obscure URLs. We thank every one of you whose visits made it worthwhile for us to so seriously consider relocating the site to a new domain when our other free hosting avenues started to fail on us. And we thank all those avenues and servers and URLs for lending themselves to us.

Thank you for taking the time to now visit www.rpmduplex.net/rahul, and for visiting, as might have been the case in the past:
http://primates.ximian.com/~ravi/rahul; or
http://www.che.iitm.ac.in/~ch00056; or
http://cec.wustl.edu/~rpm3.

A look at the addresses should remind you how far you'd gone, from the noisy yet comforting 'heart of the web'! For fear of, and humiliation from, small and ungratifying numbers, I have refrained from keeping count of the number of people that have tread this ground, this 'road not taken', before you!

While you're here, you may be interested in looking at the following sections:

Biography : My profile and a brief outline of what my life has been and should be. And yes, an introduction to my immediate family.
Written Works : A collection of the poems, prose, articles, and reports that I have written, with a brief history of the piece of life that went into each of them.
Music : A log of the songs I've sung in various events in IIT Madras, Washington University and at Microsoft (solo or in a band).
Quizzes : The section that spurred this site. An archive of questions I have used in quizzes in IIT, KCircle, or Quiznet.
Crosswords : The crosswords I have framed, with solutions; and a Crossword Primer.
Guest Features : A collection of other people's articles, crosswords, and quizzes (mostly with permission!).
Technical : My Bachelor's Degree was in Chemical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, with a minor in Theoretical Computer Science. I then went on to do my Master's in Computer Science at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. I now work for Microsoft India Development Center in Hyderabad. This page is about the growing evidence that I really am as much an engineer as I like to think I am!
Downloads : A collection of various audio and video files and documents that I've made or worked on and made available for free download - GRE material and tips; speeches, films, magazines, etc. All the material here is my own and is as such not in violation of any copyright laws.
External Links : Links to other people's websites, weblogs and galleries, as well as other great reading and reference material on the web.

rpm --inside_out --timecode - Rahul Pratap's Weblog : After much procrastination, I decided to deliberate. After much deliberation, I decided to blog. This is Rahul Pratap Maddimsetty turned inside out with a timecode, almost everyday since 5th April 2003. This weblog was powered by MovableType between April 2003 and April 2005. It is now powered by WordPress.

rpm --inside_out --viewfinder - Rahul Pratap's Gallery : Once again, after much procrastination, the scheduled deliberation ruled in favour of migrating my erstwhile Images section to another automated section of the page, especially since my digital camera clicked away more photos than I could manually upload and write about using only Mozilla Composer. This photo gallery resulted on 25th February 2004. This gallery is powered by Gallery.

A lot of factors have gone into making me the person I am, with my given aspirations, and my future. Here's acknowledging a few of them:

The Hyderabad Public School Begumpet on the human and personality fronts;
Indian Institute of Technology Madras on the academic, professional as well as personality fronts;
Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA on the academic and professional fronts;
Microsoft Corporation and Microsoft India Development Center, Hyderabad on the professional front;
Ravi Pratap M. - my brother and biggest example to look up to - on the aspirations front;
My parents and family, of course, on the 'everything' front.

Do mail in your comments on the content of the site and suggestions for its improvement. There is an "Email Feedback" link in the Navigation section of the side bar on every single page on this site.