North Meets South (Part-5)

Cultural fest of the college happened in the second semester. While Dan has a tendency to stay in the room, the rest of the batch, including Noorahur and Amala have the tendency to stay at the institute, talking to each other, going to canteens, working for the fest. Montek and Amala, became more close, sharing their personal life, exchanging messages. An air of closeness has grown between them, and everyday they would exchange atleast 3-4 messages. But they never took it for love. They thought it's just friendship and both of them tried to keep it pure.

Most of the time, the room used to be empty, except for Dan. This gave enough time for Dan, to learn about computers. In the first semester, three of the six people – Upman, Modi and Montek brought the computers and Dan used to play with them to learn about computers. He learnt a lot of tricks, hacking into the institute’s mail directories, trouble shooting the computers. They were not his computers, so there was no problem in experimentation. How much he learnt in first year, can be told with a simple example.

[The next paragraph is about a cool thing did by Dan, but if you are interested in the love story only, you can skip it]

There is a club by the name Microsoft Club. In his second semester, there is an induction of the club, but Dan couldn’t make it through. In the presentation, during the orientation of the club, a prefinal year, Computer Science student, who was the head of the club expressed the inability to give many other free softwares, other than present in the common directory (website)of the institute, simply because place is not sufficient in it. He told that a common web-portal can be formed so that institute users can download many different softwares directly from the directory of Microsoft, or getting the keys of a multitude of Microsoft softwares. But the problem, he couldn’t get institute E-mail id’s of all the people at one place. Circulating a notice through all the departments would be a good idea, but he needs volunteers. Dan, after coming from the orientation, worked on the problem. He called the head of the club in mobile, and told him that within a few minutes, using putty, entering into the institute’s mail directory which is built on unix, he could get all the E-mail id’s -  if needed department wise. Then the head invited Dan to his room, where he demonstrated to him, how it can be done. The result, everyone from first year to final year, got an account, and can use it to retrieve keys to any Microsoft software, including the keys to older versions of Microsoft - Vista, XP and almost all Microsoft softwares like Visio, Project, Studio etc.,

The semester is about to end, while Amala and Montek drew more close to each other. When Amala is about to leave for summer vacation, Montek personally went to the station to give her send off. Waved her bye, and came back to the hostel. Amala went to her home and enjoyed the summer vacation. But both of them didn't think that something is gonna happen in their next semester that is gonna change their lives forever. Thus, the second semester ended