Vikki-Pedia: WU7 Days

(Artcile dedicated to the WU7 family members)

It was a winter morning in Jan 1997. Although the whole Bangalore was feeling cold, 53 of us were really feeling the heat. Butterflies in our stomach, thinking of next two months, which was going to shape up our future. Yes, it was the first day of Wipro University Batch - 7 (more popularly known as "WU7"). 53 strangers all locked up in one room and enter JV, who was the training department head. He did a quick briefing about the course, its importance etc etc. All of us felt like going back to college days again :-) Uh... the next two months were so hectic.

I knew only 2 other people in that training room - Anil and Kiran, who were my college day friends. So, initial few days, it was 3 of us who used to stick around together.

My typical day used to start with the ride on White Hero-Puch I had (those days, Hero Puch was the in-thing :-) ). Atleast I can name few others who had Hero-Puch that time, Tushar, Chamee, Shashi, all had a black Hero Puch. Drive from RT Nagar to Mission Road used to hardly take 20 minutes. Used to have some nice Idlis in "Some-Darshini" and get into the training room by 8:30 AM. Uh, man, used to get psyched by looking at some guys already working and studying something. Well, I used to settle down, chat with few friends and wait for the training session to start at 9 AM. We used to have some sessions on Unix internals OR networking concepts or training on C. I still remember the Unix classes from Shruthi.

More often than not we used to have lunch at Shiv Sagar, a restaurant on Mission road. Nikhil and me used to feast on the Channa-Batura most of the times :-) (It was really a very high spending on lunch, considering that we used to get around 2500 Rs as stipend that time). During lunch time, all our discussions used to be centered around some program not working, some broken linked-list or some core dump !!!

There used to be lot of assignments, lot of "surprise tests". And not to forget JV's favourite lines - " Day is still young" at 7 in the evening :-) We were kept on our toes each and every day. We used to have lot of "group discussions" as well, I still remember the discussions we all had on Unix internals ( those discussions on Paging, Memory management etc).

Anyway, slowly got to know the fellow-trainees. Slowly some groups started to form. I sticked around with some more new friends like Prasanna, Chamee, Prasad, KM, Tushar, Nikhil, Shashi etc. By the end of the training session, we were just like one big family !!! Each one of us bonded with others so well. We had completed a project on RTOS. And we were all set to jump to the next level (as employees of Wipro). So, the D-day arrived, we all had to face a final interview. It was sometime in March that the interviews happened. On the next day the results were announced !!! JV was there to do the honors, he asked if the group want to know the list of people who are selected OR list of people who are rejected. If I remember correctly, it was Nalini who was vociferous in her opinion that the list of selected candidates be announced. JV started reading the names... fortunately or unfortunately it was in alphabetical order. So, I had to wait almost till the end to know the fate. JV announced the last but one name, then he said "AND". I for sure knew that it is either me OR Yatindra who would make it. Oh God !!! That was a real happy happy moment when my name was announced !!!!! Uh... what a relief....