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Arbit Friendship!

Long time no c! This blog was untouched since 22nd May. That was the day when G7 (our gang in NITIE) members started arriving for their final presentations. Since then I have had little time between making my report/presentation, attending the National Practice meet of KPMG, IRM and going out (just once!) with buddies!
Finally, the campus is again getting empty. Most of G7 is gone and once for all Shubham has left NITIE. Shubham - a character who has been with me almost day-and-night since the last 2 years. I feel compelled to write a few words about him today.

Shubham and I belong to the same engineering college - BIT. Yet, had anyone asked me or him about each other just a month before leaving BIT and we would have asked - Shubham/Nikhil?? Who?? Oh he's in Comp Sc/Elex?? Hoga koi! When I made it to NITIE, I was the sole person from BIT to get in. I had known that one Shubham Choudhury - 'the geek topper of Comp Sc' was in the NITIE waiting list and had cleared XLRI. Everyone said he would join XLRI - and I never cared anyway!! Then one day while I was reading the newspaper in the library, a thin guy came round and said – 'Hi!'. I felt as if this was a face I had seen many times in the campus but did not know who it was. He told me he was Shubham and had cleared the NITIE waiting list; we had a brief chat and exchanged phone numbers. To be frank, the first 'Hi' Shubham said impressed me - I had never expected the person who had topped the charts of his branch all through his college days to be so friendly to a guy who was known for little in acads and a bit for 'netagiri' in the batch! But still, I had almost thought that this geek (as I still felt him to be) would be a useless chap. As we went forward planning for NITIE admission and adjusting our (due) final year exams with them, I realized that Shubham was far from a geek and well deserved his admission to a Top 10 B-school.

When we came to NITIE, we got rooms nearby. Shubham had a comp which we wanted to set it up asap for using the NET facilites in NITIE but it was getting difficult due to many problems we had with the OS and software in the comp. I had a lot of experience of playing with hardware and we soon had opened the comp at least 10 times trying to make the HDD a secondary in someone else’s comp and transferring required files to it. I guess that was a point we both hit-off together as great partners in almost anything we did. Later when I got my comp we did the same exercise again and we have been together in almost anything we did since. We have done too many things in the past 2 years – starting with Acumen poster design and ending with MastishK, Arbit, BIT Alumni . . . .
The history of our friendship is interesting but the nature of it is more interesting to describe – that would be the next post!

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