KVK - class of 2000 - reunion

The backstory
It was yet another tiring weekday. I have had my rough day already and was seeking some peace for myself. The disease was known and the symptoms were clear, and I also decided to apply the same old medicine for it. Chat up with old friends. Today, however the term old meant something different. I had caught up with Namrata and Hricha the previous weekend - online. So I pinged Nammu trying to break a meaningful conversation. Which I did, in a while. An hour into our conversation we added Aditya into the chat, and soon Ramana, and soon we said "we should meet, guys!"

  

Then someone used the word "reunion" - an irony sort of since Namrata was never in my section and we never had a union while in school. We decided to give it a shot and honestly we have got very nice responses from everybody. Chakri - we loved that email of yours despite its taste. ;)

Over 100 emails, tens of group chats and many phone calls later - the D-day - 27th March arrived.

The D-day

I was 10 minutes late, along with Nammu at our pre-decided meeting spot "the school ground". There wasn't anybody around but soon Shravan came in to join us. We already knew, it was kind of going to be a slow start. An hour later nearly everybody was there with us and we stormed into the school gate - we had written permission from principal - it was only symbolic that the first picture we clicked of was that of me and Shravan kneeling down in front of principal's office. Epic! (pic below) 

Within minutes we all became so close as if we have been meeting daily at school over the past 20 yrs. We went down to some classrooms of 6th-8th, and from there down to the assembly area, where we held a mock assembly - and made a mockery of it (pic below). Totally. Me, Ramana and Raghavendra soon took over our role in handling the A&V system - again, only there wasn't any. Some (read many) pics were clicked here, and many subgroups formed and disintegrated - a classic case of a dynamic network behavior. Okay, Rahul - shut up now.

Then we went over to the primary section to meet nobody. But slowly, wryly, I was being reminded of all the tickling events of my life at the time. For instance, in the 5th grade I was punished along with a bunch of others for getting into the scientist hostel behind the school and playing in the pool of water there naked - well almost. We were only swimming. :D

And from the 4th grade, I distinctly remember Rabya Khan madam slapping my test note book on my face. Of course, there after, nothing changed in particular. 

In the 3rd grade, I was reminded of very sweet memories of Mini trying her best to make me write my notes and neatly. I did neither of the two.

Two scenes from 2nd class stand apart for me. One was of Mini and Nisha dancing in class in Rama Menon madam's SUPW class. Second was that of Nida. Nida and I were benchmates those days, but I was the lesser benchmate you see. She used to be first to arrive in class and always occupied the bench to the fullest giving me a few centimeters to sit (that allowance, if she wished to be generous!), and again I wasn't supposed to touch her. You see those days, it was a sin, no? (Me and Nida went over to see if our bench by the window still stands - it isn't there anymore sadly.)

I wish there were an easy way to explain the day to you guys who couldn't make it. I wish I had the powers to articulate what I felt today. I wish even deeper we had all guys turned in just so the fun could have replicated. 

But for a bubbly angel in the form of Hricha who kept us enthused all along, and but for Shravan's PJs in the latter half of the day (which were not poor at all!) the day wouldn't have maintained its flair. 

I wish there was a way in which I (on behalf of all of us) could thank Ramana for taking care in arranging the luncheon. It was special for many reasons including but not limited to: Sowmya's singing talent, SL Aditya's story about the class leaders' punishment, and in many doses the revelation of Ashu-Adi relationship. Okay, not really (pic below). Thanks to Ashu for volunteering for the fun, and Aditya for involuntarily generating much fun. Raghav for the occasional one-liners, Nida for being candid about the sweet corn soup (\m/), Harini and Narayani for those careful stares that reminded me of class 9 and 10. I'm sure at many occasions they had a story to tell and didn't. Waiting for next meet, perhaps? Naresh at his witty best didn't let the flow drift away, Namrata presiding over the proceedings was silently observing and throwing away an occasional  tongue-in-cheek one-liner that accounted for her powers of observation and silence.

 There was one complaint though, Sreelekha was silent for most part of the day. Most, because, she wasn't silent when we were driving from school to the lunch venue. No, I'm not telling you what she spoke of. It was a secret between her, Namrata and me. :P

Now after all this if don't tell you what I was doing it would be cheating. I was reminiscing good old days at each moment spent with those around me, and those who couldn't come. And whom am I kidding? I was also occasionally stealing a few glances at the ladies who grew up from being young kids over more than a decade. 

In the rest of the pics (in that order) the rest of the story would be summed up. The last one really completes it - the billion dollar smile. :)

Quoting noted activist and politician Jayprakash Narayan's words:

 భాష కి అందని భావము గుండెను పిండేస్తుంటే మనకి మామూలు మాటలు చాలవు ...  

Literally meaning: When words fail to represent emotions and squeezes our heart - normal words won't be enough.  

Many thanks to everybody for making it memorable to the extant that words fail me in writing this post.

And like I have said before "Brought back many memories. And new ones were made." :-)

PS: Despite the hype (read motivation) given by Hricha - I couldn't articulate this post well. I'm posting this in order to make it timely.

PS2: This happens to be one of the poorly written post I wrote in recent times. Where my words fail I hope the adorning pics will complete the true story. :)
PS3: It was fantastic to speak on phone with Mini, Nikita and Sriram Reddy while we were in school. 

The Journey to ACL

Alright. To start writing on a positive note, I would say "Eureka!!".

The Eureka moment of my life
I was about to go out for dinner that evening. When Surya finds me rather restless while he had some words to share with me.
He said "Your paper has been accepted, right ?".
I thought he was referring to the HLT-NAACL CLIA Workshop paper which got accepted 2 months back.
Then he reiterated "Congratulations! You have done it in ACL".

I closed my eyes in disbelief , opened up again, breathing harder now and asked him not to joke. He said "Check for yourself at the website". I did check it there and was almost crying in happiness. There was a different kind of pain I was addressing suddenly. I was relieved of a lot of pain and that was the reason of this unknown pain. Oh, I was crazy! I must have chanted "ACL....ACL" a few thousand times that night. :D

No doubt, I was happy. :-)

PS: For those who are unaware of ACL, it stands for the Association of Computational Linguistics. The premiere conference of our area of research. There hasn't been a single indian university publication in ACL since 1993. Then, it was Dr Sangal's publication I heard. Last year somebody from IIT-B had a publication, I have heard (not confirmed). And now it was me. :-)

The Midnight oil
This work started from a poster that I saw at IJCNLP last year in Hyderabad. Something struck me at that time in that poster. The poster was by Shilpa Arora (to my memory!). The poster was a little too simple or the explanation wasn't too convincing, that I wasn't impressed with the work. But that is how I thought about a few things at that time. That work is no way related to this my current work, but I somehow still feel that my initial thoughts started because of my disappointment at that poster presentation.

I continuously pondered over the initial ideas but had no one to discuss my points. I had nothing to claim. I just had a few observations by then. All of which would be rubbed off saying "trivial". (Ironically, even one of the ACL reviews mentioned it "Trivial", yet he found it necessary to be included!)

Then started my work independently but I never had the habit of being isolated. I drew upon Suman's habit of staying up late night and used him as a pseudo-Reviewer. Every night I would take him to the white board and explain what I think. Most of the times I repeated myself. This process brought a lot of clarity on my subject. He almost never asked questions but when he did they were usually good. Especially because they came from a person who had no idea what I was going to do with the data at hand.

Suman went away and I submitted the paper to EMNLP 2008, to start with.

End-of-Cycle
To start with I sent the paper to EMNLP 2008. But later on due to the rejects (mostly rightly so!) I kept on sending it to each and every conference that was in my path. I ended up sending the paper to 9 conferences in all. Starting with EMNLP 2008 and ending with EMNLP 2009. Having said that EMNLP 2009 was just a formality to mark the end of cycle.

EMNLP 2008 --> ICON 2008-->ECIR 2009 --> EACL 2009 --> HLT-NAACL 2009 --> SIGIR 2009 --> RANLP 2009 --> ACL-IJCNLP 2009 --> EMNLP 2009.

At ACL-IJCNLP the journey ended peacefully. I had submitted the paper as a single authored short paper and is now an accepted publication.

The role of a mentor
In november 2008, I saw a mail on SIGIR-list. SIGIR 2008 Mentorship program it read. The idea is that senior program committee members could help/mentor junior researchers from unprivileged institutions like ours where there aren't any senior people who could help. This was of some hope to me as I knew that my paper needed major revisions and smoother polishing before I can send to a good place. SIGIR was the right choice. I was handed over to Dr Charles L A Clarke, Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo. After over 50 conversations including reviews, questions and answers I ended up in a draft that was indeed smooth and soothing to the eye. I submitted to SIGIR poster (which again was suggested by Charlie himself. Thank you!). It got rejected, but that step had changed my own perspective of the whole work. I was thinking from new point of view, I now had new vocabulary to explain the terms. Reviews from SIGIR were equally important they gave me the right foundation as to what I should do before the next submission. I took the reviews seriously and used them thoroughly to extend it to ACL short paper.


Thanking my colleagues!
I never got the chance to thank all my colleagues who helped me mature this paper to the current level or those of them who continuously read each of my innumerable drafts and gave their valuable feedback. I would like to thank Sowmya, Prasad, Swathi, Praneeth, Santosh, Vasu and Chandan for reading my paper and for their inputs (if any!). I would also like to thank some colleagues outside lab Sai Satya, Mahesh Mohan etc who gave their helping hand when in need. Thanks Mahesh for those un-conventional thoughts, I am treasuring them!



PS: The first title I gave to this post was : "From Kondapur to Singapur ". True isn't it ? Why? You'd do good to know that ACL-IJCNLP 2009 is going to be held in Singapore. And by the way, I am going to attend it.

PS2: Considering the events that are happening around me now, there could be more posts on ACL soon. Some more positive publicity to ACL and perhaps negative publicity to some others!

Here is a cache copy of the accepted papers page. (I am hoping that ACL-IJCNLP doesn't have a problem with this.)

And I Blog Again!

Three years back, a rather aggressive yet shy sportsman posted his first post on his Weblog. He still considers that piece of writing to be on one of the most intriguing topics he'd still want to write on. His writing skills at the time were bizarre and his understanding of life were questionable to say the least.

Later that year he joined IIIT hyderabad, he wanted to keep blogging and keep his friends updated on most happenings of his life through the blog. To a reasonable extent he was successful. He used this blog to report on various aspects of his "current" life. From his current sports events at IIIT-H to his passionate fanaticism towards Sourav Ganguly, his travel to helsinki, and his experiences on spending money there.

Unfortunately, however, being under the cover of an emotional outburst, one fine evening he decided against blogging forever (he thought!). He was visibly upset, but at something that had nothing to do with the blog. On another not-so-fine day, he declared himself unfit to write blog-posts anymore. He still wonders why!

This blog is a question, that answers all the previous questions on why I shouldn't blog. Well I am not exactly going to answer that question, however, I would ask more questions and more importantly keep blogging forever this time (hopefully!).

I hope this current blog would be more matured in its content and the thought process involved in the background than the previous ones listed above. I also hope that any post in this blog doesn't offend any human (living or dead or otherwise!), in so much that I would have to regret. And even if it does offend somebody this is an open disclaimer stating "I don't care!"

PS: This post comes exactly 3 years after my first blog-post ever. Yes, it comes after 3 years, 0 days , 0 hours, 0 minutes and perhaps 0 seconds.

PS2: Meanwhile, I'd also like you to know that I have started another blog which deals with a different kind of writing. I hope I could impress a few using this hidden talent of mine. :-)