I logged in casually in the afternoon to check my mail and suddenly Yashwanth tells me that GATE results are out! Then Krishna was also online and told me he got 90 percentile. Congrats, dude!

The website wouldn’t open for me as it was swamped with visitors, so, Krishna looked up the results for me. I got 97.13 percentile !!! I was more shocked than happy because I had a total of 3 hours of preparation for GATE during the whole year and I didn’t expect a result like this . My rank is 993 out of 35019 who wrote the CS paper.

For the benefit of my non-Indian readers: GATE is the entrance examination for post graduate degrees in the science field in India. It is somewhat on the lines of GRE in USA.

Yesterday morning, I attended the GATE exam. I did very well considering my (lack of) preparation . Paper was quite easy actually considering that it consisted of what we have already studied … but I still feel that the probability of me solving a probability problem is …. I don’t know, I already told you I couldn’t solve probability problems!

In the evening, I attended the Bryan Adams concert at Palace Grounds. I had gone alongwith my buddies Balaji, Nitin and Srinivas. We were waiting for the show to begin from 5pm. We were let in to the ground by around 5.30 . With more than 30,000 people in the grounds, there was so much pushin’ and shovin’ and suffocation, and to think I paid 600 rupees for this! That’s when I (wittily?) commented to my buddy "I haven’t suffered so much even in Tirupati. Why should I here?" the pretty girl standing in front of me, heard me and giggled.

After a lot of chanting of "DNA sucks" (DNA Networks were the organizers of the concert), things finally started happening at 8, but the wrong things. Aasma, the pop band, came out to sing but they were booed off the stage after 2 songs. Then Dragonfly came and sang about 4 songs – one was pretty good but we were just too tired of waiting to listen.

Finally, Bryan came out at around 9:15 and started singing immediately. Then all of us got into the mood and Bryan sang all our favourite songs – 18 Til I Die, Run to You, I’m Ready, Back To You, Cloud #9, Everything I Do, …. he sang for nearly 2 hours and believe me, when I say, it was worth all the trouble. We just had the most awesome time and to think that if I could take about 10 steps, I could have shook hands with Bryan – that’s how close I was to the stage.

After a "We want more" chant, Bryan sang some more songs and finally it was time to go home. Then I told the pretty girl that "I don’t know about Tirupati, but this sure was a spiritual experience for me " . After we reached the parkin’ lot, we waited and waited for the traffic jam to get cleared – we waited more than an hour in the parking lot. Then finally we got something to eat on the way and I reached home about 2 in the night, but it was all worth it…

My website is up and I have 7th semester final exams going on! I have to study Perl/CGI and Java today – the problem is the borin’ syllabus books and the Balasubramaniam Java book literally put me to sleep. Sad, but true.