This section contains only those of my works that I could find no
reason to not publish. Those omitted include my earliest poems, that I'd
written as a less-than-10-year-old, and am obviously, well, not ashamed
of, but definitely averse to pushing out into the mature wide world; a
few articles written for need of an outlet and not much else; and my
many letters and English Examination Compositions from school, that are
best left on paper.
I thought it best to partition this section:
Poems
Prose
The Fourth Estate (IIT Madras)
Other Writings from IIT Madras
While on writing, I deem it relevant to mention again:
rpm
--inside_out --timecode - Rahul Pratap's Weblog
I suppose I have been toying with nonsensical verse right from the
age of five. I still have the diary (of the year 1988, if I remember
correct) which has all my little two line and four line verses about
whales eating proud sharks that could bark loud, and about pens and hens
and the works!
The first time I directed all such random rhyme couples towards a
single cohesive poem was at the age of six, for a poem called Tony the
Pony, if you please, which was published in Newstime! A lot of poems, in
mostly standard format sixteen lines in four stanzas, followed in the
next three years, and most of them were published in newspapers. Though
my mother treasures these with her life, I choose to overlook them
almost completely. They were written in consultation with my mother, who
I'd ask as she went about her day, "Amma, what rhymes with [word]?", to
which she'd roll out the options, and I'd pick and engineer a line! I
scarcely count them as my poems. My first somewhat mature (and entirely
self-written!) poem, tentatively called The Plight of a Salesman,
remained incomplete. I was about twelve when I wrote that. The
following are all the mature and complete poems that I've written.
A Walk with Myself:
Nature and me?!
The Creative Writing Workshop conducted by Newstime in Hyderabad from
6th to 10th May 1996 rekindled my then momentarily dormant writing
urges. We were given an assignment on the 7th, to write a poem over the
next two days (8th was a holiday) and submit it on the 9th. And I
perhaps partially regret that an assignment is what it took for me to
write what I would truly call my first poem! Written on the 8th of May
in about one and a half hours in which I locked myself in a room,
promising my mother she'd be in for a surprise at the end of it, this
was my last nature poem. It was highly appreciated at the workshop and
was eventually published in Newstime. I had consciously avoided sounding
like the William Wordsworth that I so hate. But some people were
reminded of his style anyway! And I took offence. I love nature. But I
prefer not to express it with words, and especially not the moonstruck
kind! We must all allow ourselves a few mistakes in our childhood. This
one, at age thirteen, is my favourite mistake. I have allowed this one
to be a victim of my rather bad habit of revisiting, revising, and
refining my poems, but I've included the original here before the
unpublished, slicker, less wordsworthesque second draft.
The Voice of a Republic:
The Government as can only be imagined!
During the Final Examinations that marked the end of the academic year
1996-97, I was sitting around with nothing to do one day before my
Computer Science test, and that was quite usual. This time however, the
material I had studied for the Civics paper a few days before had left
quite an impression upon me. I wrote this poem about the Government as
it can only be imagined. And I almost discarded it because when I showed
my brother Ravi the first draft, he had nothing to say! I didn't even
show it to my mother until many days later when I wrote a second draft.
The version published here was refined several times over a year. Based
on a weighted average, I was fourteen when I wrote it!
Conditionally Yours:
Logic treads unfamiliar ground
Many people call this their favourite among my poems. This was one
truly spread out effort - my first love poem, at the most loveless time
of my life! I shall never know why I started composing it. Note that I
use the word compose. This stayed in my head for very long before I
wrote it out. One evening, presumably in July 1998, on the bus back home
from my IITJEE coaching classes, the first few lines started to form in
my head. I had never been in love. I wasn't at the time. But my
speculation that love is a paradox filled me in such a way that I
couldn't dismiss it. It became faith. And many walks from bus stops
later, it became four disjoint stanzas that were iteratively refined and
put in order one year later. It became this untitled poem on a small
piece of paper that I hid between the pages of a book in a cupboard,
because I didn't want people thinking love was distracting me at a time
when academics ought to have meant everything. And the truth is, it
really wasn't distracting me. I showed it selectively to a few people,
and kept its existence secret. I came to IIT Madras with that same piece
of paper in my wallet. When ragged by my seniors, I mentioned that my
interests included writing, and I readily read out this poem as a
sample. It was still untitled. In June 2001, when I first started to
put together material for this website, I had to give it a name. Thus
was finally completed Conditionally Yours. But to be true to my roots,
I'll say the effort was complete only in the summer of 2002 when I
finally showed it to my mother! Again, based on a weighted average, I'll
say I was fifteen when I wrote it.
Maybe: My email signature!
I became a regular user of email in February 2000. For two months, it
killed me that all that went out with my mails was "Do you Yahoo!"
followed by some advertisement. So once again, during a few walks from
bus stops, I constrained myself to compose a seven line (Yahoo! Mail's
limit) poem in my head. And this was the result. I was seventeen when I
wrote this.
Phobicide: My conquest of Fear
My first after joining IIT, this poem doesn't have too much of a
history to it. Two months into my extended first year summer vacation, I
decided that it had been long since I wrote a poem. So I pulled
together some lines which had been randomly forming in my mind over the
past few weeks, and worked on how I could put them together in a poem.
Somehow, I decided to write one about identifying, personifying,
confronting, and eventually killing fear. And somehow, working the
better part of July 11th and 12th 2001, I wrote my first major departure
from the standard format four stanza sixteen liner. A pattern that I am
yet to drop emerged in this poem - a very mathematical viewpoint!
There's a touch of my fascination with graphical visualisation of
surfaces! This poem was published in the October 2001 issue of The Fourth Estate. I was eighteen
when I wrote this one.
In the Second
Before I Died
On 9th January 2002, I read a poem that someone submitted to me for
inclusion in The Fourth Estate.
And I was upset that I hadn't written a poem in a while. So, once
again, I resolved to put together some lines that had been aimlessly
colliding in my head for about a month. Again, it completely escapes me
how I made this a poem about the thoughts that run through a person's
head in the one second before he shoots himself dead! I wonder how. And
other people worriedly wonder why! But just as there wasn't the
faintest hint of love in my life at the time of Conditionally Yours,
suicide was nowhere in sight or in mind at this time. Working after
classes on the evenings of 9th and 10th January, I finished In the
Second Before I Died, with its permissibly irregular rhythm and metre.
"How much order can a suicidal mind know one second before the end?" I
thought, to justify! There is a touch of my fascination with probability
and graphical visualisation again. This poem was published in the
November 2002 issue of The Fourth
Estate. I had only just turned nineteen when I wrote this.
On Life If I May
I started this on 26th June 2002 out of a resolve to once again craft a
poem out of random lines in my head. This was during the Madras leg of
my second year summer vacation, and I wrote some verses of very
irregular metre. A second instalment soon followed during the Hyderabad
leg of the same vacation. This far, I knew it was going to be a really
long poem and given that it was going to be about life in general, it
would take me long to even gather the thoughts to put into it. I was
still fresh from the book Chaos by James Gleick, and the first two
instalments of this poem were heavily influenced by the author's
discussion of fractal dimensions. Sometime (perhaps August or September)
during my fifth semester that followed these vacations, I tried, in
vain, to rewrite the first two instalments and tidy up the metre. And I
let this poem rest until the end of the semester. Towards the end of
November, I was still riding the writing wave from having just finished
and released my first issue of The
Fourth Estate as editor. By now I had migrated for the most part
to composing directly at the keyboard, rather than first on paper. And
poetry was the last unconquered frontier. Though I had written the
first two instalments on paper, my second attempt at refining the metre
was at the keyboard and it worked wonders. Then on 2nd December, after
having suitably refined all previous work, I went on to conclude the
poem in a final burst of enthusiasm. Since the most valuable efforts
came in November-December, I count this as my first ever poem composed
using a computer. As it now stands, I almost never use a pen and paper
any more! The latter part of the poem is far less concerned with the
mathematics I was living on six months earlier, and constitutes the
part I like better. This is my longest poem, and undoubtedly my
favourite. I was nineteen when I wrote it - actually, about a month shy
of twenty. This poem was later published in an issue of the campus magazine Reflections.
Writing Exercise (Poetry): Coursework!
In my final semester in IIT Madras (January - May 2004), I took a course in Creative Writing. It has remained among my most enjoyable courses till date. Every Thursday afternoon we were given an assignment to do in class. This poem was written in about 15 to 20 minutes on 26th February 2004. The assignment was to write two poems, one rhyming, and the other in blank verse, beginning with the words Writing is... This is the one that rhymes. I never got down to writing the other one, and neither do I ever intend to. I was twenty one when I wrote this.
Something About Burning Bright - Part 2: Follow-up thoughts for the tiger
The renewed concern for the tiger that spurred the entry on my blog titled Something About Burning Bright was originally meant to be conveyed in verse, but various factors forced the prose version to crystallise before those thoughts vanished altogether. However, a couple of months later, I managed to put together some very convoluted ideas and make a poem (that reads as two long sentences) out of them in just a single morning and post it as Part 2 on my blog. This is easily my least understood poem. Or so I gather from the total absence of any comments or general feedback on it. Maybe it would help if I gave the following spoiler - the last stanza paints a situation where predator is downwind of its prey (yes, it's that involved!). I was twenty two when I wrote this.
Siege: An experiment in antiquity
My return to India to work for Microsoft, apart from being a career move, was also largely motivated by the hope that I would make an active return to feeling and writing. While two weeks into what was turning out to be an unforgettable working life debut failed to generate a new blog entry, that weekend was good enough to take seriously the persuasion of some lines that had been taking shape in my head over the last month or so. This far, most of my poems had the luxury of describing ideas and thoughts and feelings, thereby escaping the need to describe settings and events. I was willing to try writing about horses and their hooves and everything else that a somewhat medieval setting brought with it as I was convinced that this would be a worthwhile experiment in using vocabulary and constructions that were all along absent in my poems but were otherwise quite like me. As you shall see, I was more concerned with the words than with the story they told, and I'll be the first to admit it is quite pedestrian as originality goes. In fact, there even is a smattering of a story only because I wasn't content leaving this in its original 16 line form and had to expand it in the middle till it stood at its current 40. Evidently then, the story is itself an afterthought, since negligent guards rarely carry a tale by themselves. Perhaps this is only because of a thousand men going in to defend and only nine hundred returning, but well after having written the poem, I felt the similarity to Tennyson's The Charge of the Light Brigade impossible to dismiss (rode the six hundred versus rode back but not, not the six hundred). Like the poem before it, this one too suffers having received almost no feedback in spite of having been posted on my blog. I was twenty three when I wrote this.
The Puppy Unforgotten: To Silvi, finally
This one treads difficult but long overdue ground. Written as an assignment, with even a predetermined title if you please, this is my first, and perhaps last, attempt at writing that poem for Silvi that was always expected of me but which I knew would take long after she died to realise. For the uninitiated, Silvi was our dog, the fifth of the family, our first pet (and how wonderful she was precludes, in my parents' eyes, the possibility that we will ever have another). Based on simple back calculations (I now presume) using dates and numbers clearly presented in the poem, she was retro-assigned the convenient birthday of September 15th, 1988 by Nanna. Less conveniently, she died on the 17th of May, 1999. More than eight years later, I finally found the one moment to latch on to and write about - the single headline time, as you shall read. This poem has somewhat deliberately mixed the voice of a 5 year old (which is what I was when we got her) with that of a 16 year old (which I was when she died). It should be a simpler and more innocent read than most of my others. I was twenty four when I wrote this.
I suppose all of us who love to write end up churning out so much
general prose, that a lot of it is bound to be lost or forgotten, or
intentionally disowned. I suppose I have, over the years, preserved
almost every such piece of writing - school compositions, essays for
newspapers. However, these are the dated kind, that only you will ever
want to read again, ages later, to remember the person you used to be,
the opinions you used to have, perhaps which you even believed would
never change, and then look at yourself in the mirror, just to make
sure, and laugh! Then there are the personal writings, which must
remain, well, personal, but are more on the timeless side. Even though
you grew out of that person who wrote them, they carried feelings. And
that's feelings as opposed to opinions. I don't believe feelings change
very often. As for what I've presented here, I can't say I mean them to
be representative of my prose or that I wish to be judged for having
written them. But since this section is supposed to carry what I have
written, with or without a major reason or motivation or even vision, I
include whatever I can without a fuss.
When Life
Goes Home from the Party: The new millennium and whatnot
As the first few lines will suggest, this is something that ordinarily
I would have been quite content to give absolutely no thought. Towards
the end of December 1999, I was asked by Newstime to write something on
the new millennium. I was still preparing for IITJEE at the time, and it
had been really quite long since I had known any of my opinions, far
less gathered them and written them down. And so I allowed the occasion
to drive me a bit. And I thought. On December 27th, this is what came
from a sixteen-going-on-seventeen year old struggling to belong to the
world. Newstime published it a few weeks later.
The Defining Decade:
What HPS has meant to me
In July 2000, a few days before leaving Hyderabad to join IIT Madras, I
decided to celebrate my return to a normal life. Two years had kept me
from doing anything towards building my own personality and character.
But I knew those two years would only be a necessary tryst with
oblivion. An oblivion that was sandwiched between two periods of the
most worthwhile overall education. One of those periods was the ten
years I had already had in The Hyderabad Public School Begumpet, and the
other was to be the four years to follow in IIT Madras. While IITM was
still being looked forward to with the highest hopes, I had plenty to
be grateful to HPS for. I hope the perspective of a seventeen year old
captures most of it. I still grow more thankful for HPS everyday. This
article was published on the now long gone www.hpseagles.com.
The
Personality Slaughter House: Ramaiah bashing
This article, written in May 2001, at the end of my first year in IIT
Madras, has become far more significant that I could ever imagine. The
introductory notes which precede it are now bigger than the article
itself! And they explain everything that there is to it. So read on. I
was eighteen years old when I wrote the main article and first
introductory note, and twenty when I added the second, and twenty one when I added the third.
Yeayn!: A tribute to Baal (Yeah
Right!)
This is no article carrying opinions or feelings. It is just a piece of
humourous writing that captures the quaintest person to have ever roamed
this land. In August or September 2002, the editor of The G Mag (the
Godavari Hostel Magazine) announced The Slander a Godavite Contest. I
knew I could only write about Tatavarthy Balavamsi - the one and only
Baal. The next issue of that magazine never came out, but this is what I
had to write anyway!
The Fourth Estate has been
the campus magazine of IIT Madras since November 2000. I remember
leafing through the very humble pilot issue in my first semester, and
wishing I could be a part of it. And in January 2001, I finally got my
chance. A notice went around the institute inviting correspondents.
Applicants were to be judged by their sample article - a story about a
character called Velrams. I wrote Velrams and Jazz, among my most
forgettable pieces of writing till date. But then, I have never been a
writer of stories, so I hardly disappointed myself. The editors really
liked the style, though, and I was given my correspondent badge on 27th
January 2001. And that's the day I came to know Shravan H. Mukunda, the
guy whose name the magazine continues to be associated with, for better
or for worse! Shravan was the most permanent feature of the ever
changing editorial team, while the other two positions were filled by
senior correspondents by rotation. The other constant features were the
youth, the future - Vipluv Aga (Satcho) and myself, correspondents for
two years. Shravan's two terms saw three issues other than the pilot -
March 2001, October 2001, and February 2002. He graduated in July 2002.
After two Shravan terms, The Fourth
Estate changed editors in August 2002. We retained the name as a
bit of a tribute. Ajit Q Narayanan joined Vipluv Aga and myself, and we
have been editors for a year so far. Our first issue was released in
November 2002 and our second, in April 2003.
PDFs of both the issues of The Fourth Estate released in my term are available for download on the Downloads section of this site.
Saarang 2001 - Cribs
This was my first report for The
Fourth Estate - a small but memorable piece reflecting upon all
that didn't quite click about Saarang 2001. I was quite bitter about the
way it was edited. Some of the strongest lines were lost. It is for that
reason that even today, as editor, I make minimal changes to my
contributors' work. This here is the original draft of the article.
Aurangzeb - A
Reflection
I wrote this report about IIT Madras Stagecoach's Aurangzeb in the
summer vacation immediately following my first year. It was eventually
published in October 2001, an issue which Shravan and I shall greatly
treasure for the sheer volume of contributions we had to make ourselves,
to compensate for the dearth of articles.
Comfortably Numb - The Institute Hospital
This was also published in October 2001, and was the first of my major
journalist adventures. This was a project quite close to my heart -
interviewing students who had been victims of the great apology known as
the IIT Madras Hospital, and later interviewing officials of the
hospital for a reaction. The final article created quite a stir. It was
the required jolt. The hospital had always been joked about, but nobody
looks at the hospital the same way now. This article was rather poorly edited by Shravan, and he added some paragraphs that do stick out as distinctly his style. He also muddled up my ending. I've tried to restore some continuity to it, but as I do not have my original draft preserved anywhere, I am not sure it will match up to the original.
Comfortably
Numb Part II - The Maintenance Section
Reports criticising the inefficiencies of the system were now my
territory! I returned in February 2002 with an attack on the Maintenance
Section and Engineering Units. Nobody used to think much of the
Maintenance Section anyway. So I doubt it significantly changed the way
anyone looked at it!
Informals -
Must the Show Go On?
I had been Informals Coordinator during the year 2001-02, our
disastrous term culminating in the most tragic Saarang 2002. A lot of
this wasn't our fault. We had been kicked, spurned, trampled and
abandoned by the Saarang Core Group, and our interests were sacrificed.
And all the while we were still expected to perform. This article was
written for the November 2002 issue (my first as editor), as an appeal
to the incoming Core Group for Saarang 2003 to either support our
juniors who had now become coordinators, or otherwise recognise that the
spirit of Informals was going to be battered again, and perhaps give it
up. This was a reflection upon what could have been a wonderful
experience for our batch of five coordinators, but was so totally the
opposite, and was very close to my heart. It finally paid off. The Core
Group of Saarang 2003 were admirably supportive, and our juniors had a
struggle-free and very successful stint as Informals Coordinators.
Backward March - Editorial
(November 2002)
A whole lot of cribbing against the system that I now find very unlike
me. I guess it was the Shravan effect haunting the magazine! Thankfully
we gave that up in the April 2003 issue.
Directorspeak
This started out as what I thought would be just an interview with the
Director of IIT Madras about a trip he had made to San Jose in January
2003, for the great congregation known as IIT50. Prof M.S. Ananth,
however, made it an unforgettable forty minutes of anecdotes, witticisms
and wisdom and whatnot! The final article, published in the April 2003
issue, rather sadly could not retain the format of an interview, as I
just didn't have the heart to leave out any of his words. So I had to
settle for encapsulating his ideas.
The Chosen - Editorial (April
2003)
We're proud to be in IIT. We're prouder to be in IIT Madras. That's all
I have to say about this one. It has been fuelled by thoughts burning
inside me right from my freshman days. Ajit Narayanan and I wrote two
separate drafts of this article and stitched it up together. This is the
final result. This article has turned out to be extremely controversial and has obviously drawn some rather negative feedback from students of the other IITs. I do accept that the generally jingoistic tone of the final draft has brought in some rather irresponsible statements, and I do apologise for that. However, I must say that I stand by my original first draft and will be glad to receive any comments about that. After reading both our final draft and my first draft, any specific comments on content exclusive to the final draft can be mailed to both myself and Ajit Narayanan, and we shall respond. My original draft is more personal and in it I feel less compelled to write for an audience than an editor of a magazine would.
So here is Rahul's
Draft of the April 2003 Editorial.
The Fourth Estate has
completed three terms. Ajit Q Narayanan will be graduating in July 2003.
Vipluv Aga and I (with a third editor) hope to return next year with The Fourth Estate - The Fourth
Coming! But currently, a whole lot of new ideas seem to be flying
around for a revamp of the campus press structure. We hope The Fourth
Estate will remain untouched by it, and that all the
beginning-of-term-motivation-and-zeal of our illustrious student
secretaries is directed towards a new guinea pig magazine! It is an
absolute pleasure, and a matter of great pride for us to have been
associated so closely with the magazine for three full years. And unless
circumstances take it away from us, we hope we don't have to let go
until we ourselves graduate.
Speaking from the future, I will add that Vipluv and I did not return for a second term as editors. This was for various reasons, ranging right from other seventh semester commitments to a general bad feeling about how things would turn out. The Fourth Estate lives on. It's IITM heritage now. And we're a part of that. That's all that matters.
The Spirit Haunts No More
Shaastra 2003 was bigger than ever before. I only had a small role in it as its newsletter coordinator. And though all of us came out of it feeling mighty good about ourselves, something felt out of place - both where Shaastra and our general approach to everyday engineering practice was concerned. After a first draft that brought a surprising reaction from a Shaastra core group member, I toned it down to result in this. This article, written during SP's term as editor, was my last contribution to The Fourth Estate.
Other Writings from IIT Madras
I was the Newsletter Coordinator for Shaastra 2003. PDFs of the four issues we released are available on the Downloads section of this site.
One Step Short - Alms for Alchemy!
My juniors who were the editors of the Chemical Engineering magazine Alchemy in 2004 were very keen that I should write something for them. After being reminded for two months that my article was keeping the magazine was being published, I finally wrote down some random thoughts about my four years in the Chemical Engineering Department and on the edge of its outside, on a random night when I accidentally happened to have thoughts on the topic! This, as it turned out, was actually among the first articles submitted to the editors! I wasn't sure if they'd be interested in publishing some blog-like rambling of a non-chemical engineer, but they said they quite liked it. I still wonder how they possibly could have!
Arming an Unshielded Mind - Thoughts with Which to Leave IIT and Return to the Real World
This is the text of the speech I gave at Reflections on March 11th 2004. It was the first time a student in IIT Madras addressed a gathering in the CLT to give a full-length speech. Reflections is a forum for students and faculty to share their thoughts, ideas and views on 'the deeper issues in life'. When they first decided in January 2004 to experiment with a student lecture, the student core put forth my name. After ascertaining that I was more than willing to oblige, the talk was scheduled for March 11th. I prepared several hours for this speech, starting about five days ahead, writing on paper after ages! My first draft, intended to be titled Our Place in Time was very different from what I did eventually speak about. After a discussion of its points with Prof. Devdas Menon, I wrote an altogether different speech, that dealt instead with only one small point remotely touched upon in the first draft. The final speech ran to about forty minutes. As it turns out this was very well received. It has been the single most overwhelmingly satisfying experience I have had in IIT Madras. The full audio of this speech is available for download on the Downloads section of this site. Note: This is a more or less verbatim transcript of the speech. It will make for rather strange reading as it was not written to be read but to be heard. I cannot descend into a rhetoric analysis of the speech or even any other linguistic aspects of the exercise that it was to compose it. Just bear in mind that the spoken language is vastly different from the written!