Journey of a Filmmaker

     The hat trick ball is always the tough one. I had applied for taking part in the series of off-campus placement programme by Anna University even before the Exterro interview. I couldn’t take part in the Accenture interview which was the first in the series because it coincided with the Exterro one. So I participated in the second drive which was by Cognizant. It was held days before the Pongal festival. I remember calling my dad the day before the interview and telling him about my friends coming to my home. It was the first time and I felt a little uncomfortable about the bringing up the topic. Surprisingly, he agreed and was more enthusiastic than I really was. Then he asked about the interview next day. I confessed my fear of continuing to crack all interviews coming my way even though I had just done that two times. It was overwhelming to go on with an invincible track record. Because as Dr. Abdul Kalam puts it, many really are waiting to tell it’s all just luck if we fail a

It all started the day following the last exam of the last semester. The whole class was asked to take part in an intensive training in order to be equipped well enough to attend the exterro interview. The first day was 22-12-14. It was a Monday and we were asked to bring all our things to stay in the hostel till the end of the training. I had my baggage ready and went to college at the usual time. Our class was assigned a classroom at the top floor. I took the last seat and it was fun to be at the last. Then Parthiban took over. He segregated the students based on whether they want java or c++. I selected Java and we began our training in the communication lab. The training went on for 4 days and it was followed by the interview on Friday. We all were asked to come in blazers. The first round was an aptitude test. The java questions were really a little tough to answer but the aptitude was fun except the time constraint. I was shortlisted for the next round – the GD. There we

This is the first of the series of posts on the interviews I have attended. Hope you enjoy reading it       I must first confess that I was not really very interested in attending the interview. It wouldn’t be all false if I said I just attended the interview so that I could skip classes. It was about a week or two past Diwali and I wore my Diwali dress, an ultra-formal solid blue shirt and my favourite pants to the off-campus held at Senguthar College, Erode. So uninterested was I that, I even took the photocopies of the required documents only on the day of the interview. The first round was an aptitude test. It was done in shifts because there were around 3000 candidates taking the exam. So the guys who came first ended up finishing the test earlier. I reached the venue a little later, due to which I had to take the test in the second shift only. That was not the big deal, I was particularly disappointed because only after reaching the venue, I came to know that the process is of t

I didn't want to skip a day of blogging just because I'm travelling. If I did then there is no use of having a smartphone after all. So what will I blog about today - about the very train in which travelling. While I was travelling in the about 2 months back to attend my final semester exams I had thought that could be my last journey on that train. But it turned out that I have travelled by the same train twice after that. And both these times I travelled a longer distance than I used to while in college. So it's just very ironical that I'm travelling by the same train today. More tomorrow from a new city...

Our college had a decent gym facility to feed the fitness freaks inside us. College going boys usually would have an interest towards building their bodies. May be it was the raging hormones or the natural intention to attract girls or whatever be the reason, being fit always felt great. Until about one month since the gym was opened, so many guys were thronging it in a “welcome attraction”. Well the welcome attraction soon faded away and the gym master became the only one visiting the gym regularly. Soon, My friends Suresh Krishan, Madhan (Maddy Mathan @ facebook) and I started giving company to the gym master at least with our regular visits to gym. We used to do some random exercises and we felt our muscles growing day by day. The one thing that we could not have at home was the all-round mirror arrangement in the gym. We could just look our toned body reflected and this added to the high that we got from working out. As our exercise routine was starting to become more mundane of

Having attended a lot of interviews in person and via phone and skype, the whole interview thing has started becoming some kind of a boring conversation where I just have to give some pre prepared answers to the most typical interview questions. But lately I attended an interview by an e-commerce enabling company whose name I would better give when I get selected and this was a totally different interview experience for me. May be if I reach a position where I would have to interview people for job, I would certainly re use the questions that I answered. The one very distinct feature of this interview was that it made me to mine the best and positive part from within. The HR on the other side was Nisha and she opened the interview with an introduction of herself. So sweet of her that she made a very long introduction that I became tensed may be she would expect the same kind of an impressive intro from me too. I gave an account my marine studies and then switching to engineering inclu

Many have this simple doubt – why is a manager paid more than the people under him while all the work is done only by the sub ordinates and the manager simply oversees them? Is it not unfair to underpay a working person and overpay someone who supervises? NO, it is not. The weight of managing people is very high. Only a few shoulders have developed the strength to carry responsibility with ease. Others just have to join the lot which wonders why the hell these managers are given perks. Responsibility is such an important thing. Some people just hate responsibility, some others pass responsibilities by pushing it someone who could well be a scapegoat, and only a few cherish responsibilities as if they were born for it. Feeling responsible for your success is the greatest feeling you can ever get. There are many situations when we succeed at something but we don’t feel it at all. We just sleep like it was any other day. This happens because your heart knows that you are not responsible

Ever heard a song on a loop and had that feeling that the song should go on playing and you simply wish that the tune doesn’t end at all? Well, it is second to none. Total addiction to music. Total addiction to tune. It has the power to surmount any soul and that’s why certain music are called soul-stirring. Today, I am in a hurry to write down something to keep up the flow. All I could come up with a list of lesser known songs that could potentially blow your mind away if you are one such lover of soul-stirring music. The first one on the list is “ketenna unnai” from Desham. It was composed by A R Rahman, the Mozart of Madras and no doubt it is a masterpiece of a music. Forget the lyrics and just start listening to the background music and the interludes. Its sheer experimental feel is sure to blow you away. Many of you would not have heard this song at all. It’s from the dubbed version of the Shah Rukh Khan starrer ‘Swades”. The surprise is the clever reuse of the tune earlier used

The whole of the batman trilogy by Christopher Nolan, Batman would abruptly disappear while still in conversation with people often offending Commissioner Gordon and many others. But only when the catwomen does the same thing to him in the last instalment he realises it in an amusing way saying, “So this is how it feels like?” That was when he got the taste of his medicine. I have so many of such weird behaviours like making people wait for my reply in chat (mostly because I used would be browsing with many tabs open simultaneously and often wasting my time deciding whether to close a tab or not – damn you, tabbed browsing) and not attending the phone while my friends call me (well, not intentionally but often accidentally because I used to have my phone in silent mode and wouldn’t mind throwing it away on my bed and go watch the tv for hours and coming back to see a double digit number of missed calls). As hypocritical as it may sound, I want the “typing” to appear once I hit send a

Sometimes I used to argue against God why there are so many gifted people who create magic with their lives and others who spend all their years being just a spectator to other's  show. Even when I am convinced of the fact that there cannot be a show without audience but why is it that the audience is meant to be an audience and why was he not given a chance to be a showman and enjoy the feeling of making a thousand others feel the way you expect them to by your showmanship. How are people chosen for a specific task to be performed throughout their life? Is it just a matter of chance or someone rigs everything from somewhere above? I don't  have an answer to this question. I have to discuss this thought with a lot of other equally interested and ignited minds to come up with even slightly probable axioms. Well, today's post is not going to a spiritual search leading to God but it is going to be about epiphanies. We all know some famous epiphanies of history - the discove

Disciplining myself into a habit seems to be very tough task to me. Take for example, this blogging challenge, I had kept good for about 12 days and now it feels very difficult to maintain it. But the best part is - having done it for these many days, I could not just throw it out of my daily routine easily. It hurts to turn away from writing something before going to sleep. I get a strong urge to do so every night. May be that's how habits are built. So however boring it may be for any of you who chose to read this after this point, please don't  stop reading in between because once you start eating a meal you got to have it in full to enjoy the full taste however bad it is. Only then you can proudly say, I had the full dinner and it was a complete shit. May be after reading this post you will say to yourself, "what the hell was that I just read?". Some of you may even defy the digital rules and try yelling at me. Any way any reader yelling at his screen is not goin

            It would not be easy for you to believe if I said Fight Back, my first short film on youtube was in the development for more than one and half a year. Well, First I must confess that action is not really my genre but I also love to watch some stylish action flicks. Truly a stylish action flick of my kind is very hard to make with all the resources I can ever have. This is how it all started. If I remember rightly, it was May of 2013 and JayaPrakash (the lead actor of Fight Back) pitched an idea for a short film where the main character wants to fight but he couldn’t. I was really attracted to the frustration of this character and I came up with the title “Fight Back” in a few days. We then had a photo shoot with JayaPrakash posing as an action hero. Those snaps are still a great fun to look at! I started brainstorming for the script matching the title. Yeah! We actually had a title but no story. I was in hostel during those days and my choice of locations were