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Rangaswamy or Bilikal Betta Trek

I came to Bangalore after a break of three months from US and home visit. Situation was not very good in Bangalore because of Cauvery water sharing dispute. Most of the companies declared holiday on Monday 12th February 2007. So it was a long weekend. I and Ayas planned to go out somewhere. Ayas was interested in trekking. Saturday evening we decided to go to Rangaswamy Betta after browsing about the place from internet and experiences of the people who has already visited the place.

Satuarday 10th February 2007:

We packed some Aloo Paranthas from Singh’s house and bought some fruits in C. V. Raman Nagar. We called for city taxi for the morning and planned on how to reach to destination by searching on internet blogs.

Sunday 11th February 2007:
I woke up at 5:30am and got ready to go. Called city taxi for status and at 6:15am we started from MalleshPalaya to Majestic. At Majestic we took Idly breakfast and bought water. We took Bus for Harohalli, Kanakpura at 7:30am. We got down at Harohalli bus stand at 9:00am. We bought some fresh fruits from Harohalli market. Now our next destination target was Maralvadi. We asked some auto drivers and local people. We caught a private minibus to Maralvadi at 9:20am. We reached to Maralvadi bus stand about 9:40am. There we took second round of breakfast including sweet-buns, breads and again idly.
We took an auto to reach to the foot hill of Rangaswamy betta. Auto dropped us to nearest village to reach to foothill. There many kids followed us for chocolates. Some even knew English words like carry bottle, show way etc. It was a different experience altogether. We said bye-bye and feared one of them to proceed further.

Now we were at the bottom of the hill and Ayas recognized that he has already come to this place with his team. He boosted my morale. It was a sunny day but not too hot. Cool breezing in sweating was really a feel good factor. We packed up all our water bottles and bags on back.

Jitendra Agrawal's Blog

Wonderla GET TOGETHER for Karauli District

When I came to Bangalore in month of august, I had information about lots of Hindaunia's have joined companies in Bangalore. Thanks to ¡ÈOrkut¡É for keeping all of us updated about each other. I met Akshya, Sonu and talked to Ravi, Jitendra Bansal and expressed idea of get together of Karaulites in Bangalore. I mailed to kyari, Hindaun yahoo groups. Positive responses from everybody and everywhere made my plans stronger. Jitendra Bansal started a thread on Orkut Hindaun community. Hitesh started calling his batch mates in Bangalore. Ravi, Akshaya and Sonu collected email ids and contact information of their friends. We are about twenty married, single, girls and guys from Hindaun, Karauli area staying in different parts of Bangalore based on our survey.
We emailed everybody and got confirmation from ten with lots of efforts and last minute calls.
We all gathered in Majestic Kempe Gowda Bus Terminus of KSRTC on the morning 9:30AM of Sunday, 17th Sept 2006. This is a difficult task for engineers to wakeup in the morning of Sunday. But everybody was on time with night out in preparations and dreams about the excitement on next day.
Manish, Amit, Akash, Akshya and Shikha came from BTM. Ravi came from IISc. Me, Jitendra Bansal, Sonu and Hitesh came from IndiraNagar. We purchased some sweet buns, snax, water etc and departed for Wonderla in our rented Tata Sumo. Our day started with jai jai kar of Bajrangbali and Sachhe Darbar. I was feeling that I am in Hindaun away from formal corporate world.
We reached Wonderla and took a group photographs. Thanks Ravi for capturing moments in your digital camera and sending them to all of us.
Now the fun started with free fall ride. I lost fear for all other rides after winning successfully over most scary experience. We completed almost every ride in different queues and teams. Now everybody was either out of fear or in great fear to try dry rides.
This was the beginning of next step water rides. Everybody appeared in his special Holi dress with the mood of ¡ÈAaj Brij me holi re rasia¡É. After different falling vertical, wavy, pipe and tubs, we were ready to enjoy surroundings. Manish was most expressive to share his happiness. Ravi was getting disappeared to try out his luck most of the time. Aakash was trying to get his best picture for matrimonial. Amit with hair style of John Abraham was busy in swimming and exercises for his physique. Sonu was looking somewhat sad for some unknown reasons and Hitesh was busy in finding a solution for his problem. Jitendra was hungry but not ready to miss anything for food. Akshya got a major accident but nobody was ready to help him. Shikha got allergy. I was busy in looking good to everybody.
With the experiences of CineMagic, Laser Show, Musical fountains, Skywheels we all got very peaceful and planned to return home. By 9:30PM everybody reached home safely with two nights of sleeps in eyes.

What KGP EECS Alumni Do for AVLSI Lab IIT Kharagapur?

Meeting of KGP Alumni with Bijoy G. Chatterjee in Texas Instruments India

BijoyDa expressed his interest to meet a bunch of KGP graduates during his stay in Bangalore from 20^th to 22^nd September 2006 to Shailendra and me. I got very excited to about this and meeting BijoyDa. Shailendra started collecting email ids and contact numbers of EECS graduates from KGP. I helped him in adding my batchmates to this list. On the parallel side we were deciding about where venue, date and time of the meeting. Ayas was making us aware and cautious about possible problems in hosting such events. We took help from my supervisor S. Venkatratnam and manager Ram Anant to make sure that everything goes smoothly. With the support from Venky we wanted to play this game at next level and started calling as many graduates possible from inside and outside of TII. We got many confirmations but other silent and do not know yet kind of participants. On the day Venky arranged for conference room, security badges and dinner to everybody. Hetul and Atul escorted all the visitors to conference room. And I was very happy to see the conference room was not empty but it was looking full.

In the starting Venky briefed about the TI power management activities and collaboration with IIT Kharagpur in this area.

Then BijoyDa told great, inspiring story of his life. I created a possibility of doing something impossible. I got enrolled in the conversions that how he started computer society of India or Indian computer user group earlier started Tata Consultancy Services banking group, successfully running a system with 400,000 chips running simultaneously, building a team of 150 at TRW from scratch and many others. After working for 15 years continuously in US, he wanted to do something for India. He visited all IITs, IISc to be aware of ground reality and to know how he can help these universities. At this time he was in National Semiconductor working with several universities in this area.

After lots of research and efforts he picked up possibility of setting up advanced world class VLSI lab at IIT Kharagpur. His story of failure was a great learning and didn't stop him. He interviewed several professors at IIT and picked up the best among them to do work with him. After excellent results from Kharagpur he pursued IIT Foundation to fund $1m for this lab. He got leading industries in semiconductor area to help technically this lab. This is his great vision and he is very focused and committed for it.

Then he briefed about present status of VLSI lab at IIT Kharagpur and problems he is facing. His measurement is successful chips and papers in ISSSC to make VLSI lab equivalent to top graduate school lab.

He briefed about present areas to focus and responsible professors in that area.

Prof. Amit Patra is focusing on power management, Prof Pradip Mondal on Wired Communication, Prof. T. K. Bhattacharya on Analog RF Design, Prof. A. S. Dhar on Data converters, Prof. Pallabh Das Gupta andProf. S. Mukhopadhyay on Behavioral modeling.

He is looking for someone in Testing.

Hetul of Texas Instruments raised concerned about digital design and digital signal processing. There are good teams in Kharagpur under Prof. Dipandwita R Chowdhury, Prof. R V Rajakumar and Prof. Saswat Chakraborty for that but they need funded projects to support graduate students and research in these areas.

Then he expressed his concerns …

Why we are not playing up to a level of graduate school yet?

What are problems?

Is VLSI lab in IIT Kharagpur is useful at all?

Should VLSI lab be allowed to only graduate students and banned for B. Tech. students?

With a sip of Pepsi and heat from these questions everybody in the room started adding their comments, suggestions and a great discussion started on How and What we can do for Kharagpur.

Kharagpur students are in darkness in many areas, they are stuck doing their work and research so need more guidance. Everybody in the room took responsibility of mentoring a student in the lab working in same area of interest. It will help the mentors as well as students in their growth. The byproduct is that VLSI lab will get to a level where we want. Now we need to make a list of mentors willing to help and students in the lab working or willing to work in their area of interest.

Another problem in KGP is about communication. As communication is very important for engineers and it requires very good listening and understanding context of other person. A continuous support structure from mentor and sincere urge for growing and learning from the students is needed.

Other area of consideration was motivating or inspiring KGP students to do research and projects instead of doing more interesting fun and time pass in hostels. Design contests from semiconductor industries in India, rewards and incentives in projects, cutting edge ideas in projects and publishing papers to famous international conference and journals should be encouraged.

Whenever a KGP alumnus visits Kharagpur, he should visit his teachers, students working in his area and also present about his experiences in the industry. Some kind of the technical lecture or seminar may also be arranged.

A local chapter or group of alumni needs to be formed in Bangalore, which will regularly meet and discuss about progress of lab, students and his experiences. We are strong but if combined then we are much stronger.

This lab is very useful for IIT Kharagpur and to develop VLSI Design expertise in India. Industry, academics and we all should grow together.

Let the game begin.

Jitendra K. Agrawal

Hindaun Talent Meet, Karauli District Alumni Meet 2006

Karauli District Alumni Annual Meet:
All the talents of Hindaun City, Karauli and nearby town came on single platform with this event. Initially, this event was published on internet and advertised through yahoogroups, mails, Orkut community forums and phone calls among batch-mates. Many of you know that Hindaunias in Bangalore had a get-together in Wonderla (An amusement and water theme park near Bangalore on Mysore Road)in month of September and were very excited to make this event successful at Hindaun. Akshaya Kumar (working in Oracle India, Bangalore) called his father and asked for help in local arrangements. This informally started our preparations for get together. Ravi Gupta of Karauli (PhD student at IISc Bangalore) volunteered to give this event a flavor of a conference. He prepared a logo and registration form for the event. We emailed this form to all groups, friends and contacts. Then we started getting positive responses, which encouraged us to make this event as a good start and gave an idea of presenting a memento to every attendee. Hitesh (working as software engineer in Bangalore) wanted some special people to be invited as guests in the event. Now question was whom we can invite? Categories of guests to be invited were...
· Our favorite school teachers: to thank and acknowledge them for whatever we are today is because of them.
· Dignities and reputed alumni from school: these are the people who inspire us to dream, think and do BIG in our life. Experiences shared by them will be great source of inspiration to us.
· Local administrative officers: who take care of our Hindaun
So rough idea about the schedule of the event was divided as following…
1. Our guests speaks about their experiences, thoughts, expectations.
2. Each participant introduces himself/herself.
3. Some entertainment, lunch, prizes.




This was all about planning and date of the event that was fixed on 22nd October 2006, day of Govardhan Pooja. The actual preparations and activities of the events are described date-wise.
17/10/2006:
By this time most of us came to our towns on Diwali vacations and lost all email communications, mobile contacts. I had prepares a database of local contact numbers that helped us a lot. I have kept this docu ment at Hindaun yahoogroup database. Jitendra Bansal was communicating through internet and spreading the news of get together. Local team for in Hindaun including Akshaya, Hitesh, Krishanmohan, Girish, Jitendra had a small meeting. We decided to advertise the event through local cable channel, booked Punjab Resort for the event, finalized lunch menu, went to invite Narendra Ji, SolankiJi and surveyed mementos for the event.
19/10/2006:
Hitesh, Akshaya and Jitendra went to invite SatishJi, BSNL DTEO Ram Avatar GuptaJi, Hindaun SDO. Prepared news about event and submitted to Dainik Bhaskar and Rajasthan Patrika office.
20/10/2006:
We had a final meeting before the event to decide on schedule, anchor, teams, and gifts. Meeting was attended by Aks haya, Brijendra, Gaurav, Hitesh, Jitendra, Pankaj, Ankur and Shekhar.

Karauli District Alumni, Day of Get together:
Finally, 80 participants registered for the event. Responsibility of the registration was taken by Ankur Jain, Deepesh, Prateek and S atydev Gupta. Most of these participants were students of math-science background from Hindaun School. Some of these participants completed their engineering and are working in different parts of India. Many others were engineering students in different colleges like IITs, NITs and other colleges in Rajasthan. MBA, MCA students also participated in the event. Almost all participants reached the venues by 11:15AM. Most senior alumni were Dinesh Ji, Deshraj, Surendra Goyal. First Vinod Solanki arrived, then R.A. Gupta Ji, Sunil Singhal and finally Hindaun SDO Bhaagirath Lal ji arrived at the event. All the guests were welcomed by seniors. It was 11:30AM and we started the programs.

Parijat Bansal was the anchor of the event. He spoke about the purpose of the event and invited our guest Bhagirath Sharma to speak a few words. He spoke about education standard and recent development activities in Hindaun. RA Gupta talked about the importance of such get together and the need to make it a regular activity. Sunil Singhal talked about doing something for the Hindaun School and keeping contact with all the engineering community from the Hindaun. Vinod Solanki expressed his love and experiences of teaching with his Ex-students. He told to focus bright students of society on civil services. All guests were done with their talks by 12:00PM. Jitendra Agrawal spoke about the social initiative named as Kyari. He told Ex-students to visit their school and school teachers. There is a great opportunity for all of us to do something for our society and our roots. Then Ravi Gupta told to students for doing higher studies in engineering and spoken about research opportunities available. He also told about increasing awareness about NTSE and other scholarships available to students.

12:30PM:-Now it was the time for Lunch. Everyone was waiting for a special Thali from newly opened Punjab Resort restaurant. During lunch time Jitendra communicated on tree plantation idea. On this SDO promised to give land in outskirts of hindaun which can be used for dense tree plantation. He asked us to hire a caretaker/person and watering the trees and develop a infrastructure for watering. About the public library SolankiJi told as now school libraries are open to everybody with specific timing for librarian and also emphasized that awareness to use these libraries is needed among students as well as local residents. After the lunch we bid farewell to our guests and presented them memento of the event.
1:30PM:-It time for some Entertainment? No, first let’s know who all are we? Time for introduction, everybody came to stage and introduced himself/herself with his current designation, location, schooling, college details and some performance. Our seniors were really winners for their performances. Deshraj told us to take a vow that we will never do gender test for baby. DineshJi, a reputed educationist in Hindaun, asked us to meet each other frequently. It was so good to see so many toppers of Hindaun School, merit holders in Rajasthan board, IITians from Hindaun, all together. This was really a wave of Hindaun, City of talents.
4:00PM:-Everybody wanted to go back to their homes by this time. This was it; we completed a successful start of annual meet of Hindaun alumni.

It was a great day for all of us and will remain in our memories forever.
I really want to thank everybody who actively participated in the event and encouraged us to make this event as regular activity.

Thanks to all juniors who outnumbered their seniors in attendance and creating energy in the atmosphere on that day, you are the winners.

Thanks to all the seniors specially Surendra Goyal, Deshraj Verma and Dinesh Ji for attending this event. I hope from next year we will see more diverse age groups in our get together as news of this event will spread.

Thanks to all my batch-mate who always inspire and support me in all my activities. You are true friends.

Thanks a lot for all who could not attend this event due to unavoidable circumstances but their heart and blessings were with us.

Thank You All,

Jitendra Agrawal

Landmark Education is the ONE

Landmark Forum

I came to know about landmark forum from my flat-mate, Ayas. I thought of it as some high profile society’s page3-type time pass activity where people get to know some skills by paying some money. I was very much hesitant to listen to and know about landmark forum.

Ayas requested me to attend the Tuesday evening session and I got overwhelmed by his affectionate request.

I was inspired by all participants who shared their experiences with great confidence in front of a crowed auditorium. I believed in the forum leader when he said “you” can do anything for your life by participating in landmark forum.

In introduction to landmark forum I created possibility of great relationship with my younger brother and registered for the course.

Some sharing: My brother was not doing well in his studies and I was worried about his career. I used to suggest him to do hard work and be serious about his future.

I was wrong in understanding him and thought he was not listening to me. In introduction, I realized some hope for myself in really helping my brother by being “In Action”.

What I got from Landmark Forum?

I realized my hidden powers. I could relate the story of Jambvan and Hanuman from Ramayan as my forum leader and myself. The experience I got in the forum is unique.

Landmark forum leader kept his words and I got what I wanted in my life. More surprisingly, all 340 participants got what they wanted in their life. Now, for me, this page3 type of people looked like a team for transforming the whole planet.

In summary, I learned the secret of seven wonders of life with extra-ordinary experience.
I started my new life after landmark forum in different language with pleasant experience. I created following possibilities out of landmark forum.

1. Being in Action
2. Being a person of Integrity.
3. Being Powerful.
4. Being Responsible.

And now this list keeps on growing at every step of my life. I am unstoppable.

I expressed my love to my parents and brother first time in my life after landmark forum. I expressed my full heartfelt, unconditional love to my brother. I could sense the confidence and love on the other side. This was not possible without landmark forum.

Sharing the story about my brother as I discovered in the forum:

When I was eight years old I was playing with my brother the bow and arrow game. One bamboo stick went directly in the eye of my three year old brother. It completely damaged his eye lens and he became blind with that eye. Due to pain in his eye, he could not concentrate on anything for long durations. I never realized this and never supported him during his exams. I hurt him a lot while he needed my support. Thanks to landmark education that I could express my unconditional love for him during the forum.

Sharing the story about myself in my life:

I belong to a small town in Rajasthan. In starting of first year of college, I was cleaning my hostel room with water bucket and a long coconut broom. Then two students for nearby rooms came to me and said to me “Dada, isake baad humaara room clean kar dena”(Hey, clean my room just after this room). I felt so much embarrassed and from that day I divided everybody in two categories. Ones, who are from villages or small towns, understand my feelings and respect me. Others from cities, stylish, high profile mass, from whom I have to maintain distance. But it was so painful for me to divide and get far from most of the people I encounter in my daily life. I was losing my self-confidence in talking to others, in my work and in my life. I was so lonely and depressed to talk about my pain.

But during landmark forum all high class persons looked none other than me. I felt totally free and got a confidence like never before. I am experiencing the same in my stay in USA for first time, so far and alone from family and friends who are in India.

In commitment seminar in I realized…….

1. I have hidden and undeclared commitments to be listened to, to get appreciated and admired, to be safe and be protected, live in dreams rather than facing reality.
2. I want to be very hardworking, helpful, devoted and dependable person.
3. My character is always confused, driven by others. I am selfish, jealous and a hesitant person.
4. I have to improve in order to get more appreciated and not to feel alone.

I have created Possibilities and Commitments for myself and my life as follows:

1. Being courageous.
2. Being enrolling.
3. Respecting myself
4. Loving.
5. Listening to others.