My Guardian Angel

I strongly suspect that I have a guardian angel watching over me.

This statement is not a reflection of my religious beliefs, the amount of caffeine I consumed today or the number of sentimental movies I've watched in the last few days (just 1, actually).

I picture her (of course it's a her) as someone as beautiful as Audrey Hepburn, who played Hap - Richard Dreyfuss' guardian angel in Steven Spielberg's "Always". Sigh!







But I digress.

Unlike most guardian angels, my angel (let's call her Hap) does not have to rescue me from failed parachutes at 3000 ft above sea level, shark attacks off the coast of Australia or poisonous snakes in the Amazon. Hap's duties are mundane by comparison, having mainly to do with saving my skin every time I have a academic deadline which is almost impossible for me to meet (having spent my earlier time in more engaging pursuits such as sleeping, playing the fool and Orkutting). The job involves a lot of effort and creative thinking, but is very low-paying. I do my best to cheer her up, however - I give her as many opportunities to save my neck as I can. There's nothing like helping another person (the more nincompoop, the better) to make you feel good about yourself.

For example, when I needed to present a term paper along with Palak on Virtual Honeypots for my CS628 (Computer Systems Security) course last semester, Hap had her work cut out for her. After all, we were a little more than 12 hours away from the presentation (mostly night at that) and were tired from evading all the other work we were supposed to have done by then. To make things worse, we hadn't read more than a couple of pages of the two long papers we were supposed to understand and present. Finally, our professor's words were ringing in our ears - "If the presentation is not upto the mark, you will receive considerable negative credit for wasting my time". Oh, and did I mention? - we hadn't made a single slide of the presentation yet.

Six hours later, we were still in the lab - mosquitoes cheerfully biting us at regular intervals to keep us awake and going. I don't remember exactly how many slides we had made, but it wasn't more than seven or eight. Our target had been to reach 40 slides before we went to sleep and then review the whole thing in the morning. Evidently, this called for a change of strategy.

We began to read the same paper in tandem, occasionally gently chiding the authors for calling a spade a three foot long appendage-powered earth crust relocator. Four hours and an incredible reading effort later, we had come to 35 slides - including the title, outline, conclusion and references. Reasoning that an hour of sleep was worth more than 5 slides, we headed back to our rooms for a serene one-hour nap (actually, I vaguely remember throwing in the towel an hour before Palak did and going to sleep in the lab itself).

At 8:30 AM, my alarm clock did its duty faithfully for which it rather undeservingly got a nasty response from me. We made ourselves as close to presentable as we could and headed to CS101. After a presentation by someone else, which we spent nervously looking at our notes and (me) contemplating staging a fake attack of appendicitis, we were ready to present.

This is where Hap was supposed to do her thing.

Now, to the uninitiated, Palak is famous for sleeping in various positions - in bed, while talking, while giving presentations etc. Don't get me wrong. He's a gem of a guy, very bright and great fun to be with. While he's awake, of course.

When he stepped on stage that day, I was hoping for a good presentation, because I knew he'd read his part well. What I didn't expect was for him to charm the hell out of our instructor. He was eloquent, articulate, insightful and answered all questions with panache. No, really.

By the time my half of the presentation came up, I was relaxed already. No matter that I made a boring second-half presentation, no matter that I called a router a switch and tried to justify my statement. Palak's virtuoso performance had carried us both to the no-harm mark. Hap had done it again, in the face of impossible odds. (See the fruit of her efforts here)

The reason I'm writing this entry now is because I have a thesis meeting tomorrow at noon. At last week's meeting, not knowing when to keep my mouth shut, I promised my guide that I would come up with an implementation and rethink the primitives of distributed debugging, all within a week ("Yes sir, I promise to move that mountain from there to there. Are you sure that's how far you want me to move it? How about to the next continent - I hear it's nicer there").

It's 12 hours to H-Hour and I'm completely blank. But I have no fears. Hap is giving the matter deep thought, I know for sure. She'll come up with something. Jeeves couldn't do it better.