Microsoft has been wonderful till
now. My companions throughout the day are WCF services, SQL Databases and C#
with the cool JavaScript hanging out with us at times. In the evenings, I find
some solace with stimulating discussions and debates about implementing ideas
with real people. It is this time that truly rejuvenates me, the whiteboard
filling up with several different approaches to a problem, and number of coffee
mugs increasing on the table as the time progresses. As I recall the many
discussions, it was for one of the applications that we were considering using
a hash table with chaining to resolve collisions. The call taken and everyone
having approved on it, we decided to discuss the performance aspects the next
evening.
The next day I decided to drive to
work. It was a solitary drive of 45 kms, the empty road inviting me to push the
accelerator a little harder and the radio playing some real good songs. At one
song I stopped to listen, pausing my complicated thought process that usually
comes to me only when I am on the high road. That song reminded me of my
internship days. How I would travel two hours by local transport to get to
ISRO, how I would spend my evenings in the ISRO library stacked with the latest
books and journals, the light green walls and high ceiling with just the right
amount of light, making the environment conducive to read, the long waiting for
my Java code to process thousands of records, my 20th birthday
around the same time. I found it intriguing how just one song had brought about
so much information, so many memories back to me. The reason was that I used to
listen to the same song every morning during my journey to the internship. In its most
basic form, I found my mind working like a hash table. In my case the song was
the key, however it could be anything, even something as small as a smile, a
feather, a toy and all you have to do is iterate through all the memories
associated to that key to bring out nostalgia in bouts.
The memories, they are all there in
the corner of the mind somewhere, and it needs a certain stimulus to remember
them. The bad memories when still fresh in the mind, a stab in the heart every time
you remember them, but as time passes by they are buried under the stack of
newer and better ones. A dull feeling of sorrow is still associated with them
but it will pass and after many years, perhaps the bad memories would also
bring a smile on your face reminding you of your naivety.
