There is ‘Rip Van Winkle’ in me as well.

Tomorrow is Christmas. And shamefully, tomorrow I complete my thirty days of silence in the Sun blogs too. Though I am in possession of a few reasons that I could list for this rather long sleep, it has more to do with my laziness than anything else, which kept me away from the web logs. I can only hope that the Rip Van Winkle in me doesn’t show up so regularly and keep me away from jotting down a few lines in my web logs for as long as a calendar month.

Let me take you back in time to tell you, on a quick note, what was going around me during the last thirty days or so. The week subsequent to my Singapore journey was spent in Bangalore, teaching a course on High Availability. Last time I took this course was around January this year and hence I wasn’t so sure about my fluency on this subject. But Sun Cluster concepts turned out to be too interesting to be forgotten. Consequently, things went quite smooth (though of course my voice started breaking towards the middle of the course), the credit for which, undoubtedly, belongs to the gentlemen in picture below.

The Sun Cluster Administration training ended on December 01 2006, Friday. I spent that weekend for a two day program on Solaris Operating System at the Indian Engineering Center for Professors and lecturers from various colleges in and around Bangalore. It was indeed a nervous affair to stand in front of the people, who make Engineers and talk about a subject as vast as Solaris Operating System. But they were extremely receptive to what I was speaking and I enjoyed my two days spent with them. The only thing that went wrong was my voice. On Saturday evening, my voice cracked. And on Sunday morning, I went absolutely voiceless. That was quite depressing to me as I had to push it for at least eight hours on that Sunday. I kept motivating myself thinking about some great incidents in cricket: one of which was about Sunil Gavaskar’s only century in Limited Overs Internationals, which was made when he was running on high fever. And when I started speaking on that day, Sunday the 03rd December, I was shocked that my voice never came out. For the first half an hour or so, I could only whisper to them in the class. Occasionally, with great effort, I could produce some voice, but as a result of the same, I felt extremely weak and giddy. Somehow I managed to cleanup everything satisfactorily and there was immense sense of satisfaction in me on my walk back home from my office. But I didn’t know then that a few days of medication was in store for me from the next day onwards. The photo below was taken during the two day program on Solaris at IEC. You could see me putting all my efforts to produce some sound in guiding the ‘photographer’ to capture this group photo.

The medication was mainly for high fever and severe throat infection. The strength of antibiotics put me to sleep most of the time during those days and I found it really hard to attend to my duties, even to respond to my E-mails. I hereby openly apologize to all those who sent me mails during that period and never heard from me back. My voice is back to normal. Looking back, I feel extremely satisfied to have been able to talk continuously for hours on that unfortunate day, in spite of no voice, well almost.

Cut to the present, I am stationed at my home in Kerala waiting for the celebrations to begin.

2 thoughts on “There is ‘Rip Van Winkle’ in me as well.”

  1. Merry Christmas. You are so right about the antibiotic, it’s tougher to put up with the side effects of antibiotics than cold itself!
    Merry Christmas!

  2. hi rajesh how r u, i receive ur mails regularly,
    i dont think u rember me, i am one of the faculty who attended ur workshop on solaries, in november end 2006, i am one standing with T-shirt in the right side of the photo, i was just going thru ur blog and just could recall ur teaching ur throat infection on last day,
    we at MSRIT are now doing some projects on solaries, and ur notes helped us lot in many a times in reinstalling solries after crash.
    anyways nice to c ur blog with lot of info on SUN micro.

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