~/blog/first-research-conf-chennai-trip

I know it's been a while since I actually touched this blog. It's mostly because consistency isn't my kind of thing. The bad burnout cycle I've been dealing with for the past 3 months kinda got to me pretty hard this time, worse than last. I had a lot of things going on since the start of this semester. I was already pretty burnt out from the previous semester and that burnout literally carried over to the next semester. I mean I was consistent for 5 semesters straight so its kinda obvious that burnout would eventually get to me.

Amidst this burnout I actually started being serious about my career. I understood that software development as a career isn't my cup of tea because my restless brain cannot sit with a single idea straight even for a short period of time let alone learn and perfect myself in a single skillset + I hate corporates. This kinda showed me the clear path towards a research career. I've always been a Mr.Brains and I think it suits me. I'm thinking of becoming a professor but the path towards it isn't in India.

Anyway, I got curious about research back during my freshman year. I published a few preprints that weren't of any use but I got a bit of experience from it. Then in sept 2025, I got the idea of taking a survey from xmpp and irc users and thought I could publish it that way and I did just that.

My paper got accepted at 3rd IEEE International Conference on Research Methodologies in Knowledge Management, Artificial Intelligence and Telecommunication Engineering at RMK Engineering College, Chennai after a rejection from NIT Surat's similar conference. I was surprised that my paper got selected in the first place and kept doubting if the conference was really legit because the paper idea I had wasn't really groundbreaking by any means but would only serve as a review paper for future citations.

This time I was unsure about my paper getting selected, so I booked a reservation for Chennai Express from Hyderabad to Chennai because Indian Railways usually lets you cancel your reservation and get most of your money back unlike plane tickets. Given my previous experience with the Mumbai train, I was skeptical about the train experience but this time I had no choice because planes were too expensive because of the war in the Middle East.

The date of the conference was 15th April but my train was on 13th. The conference kept getting closer so did my burn out which was getting even more intense. My German learning came down to an extremely slow and dull pace, I started having those burnout headaches whenever I sat down in the class for lectures, and kept thinking about finishing my degree faster and be done with it.

The Travel Begins

Finally 13th of April finally came. I didn't make those "masterplans" like I usually do because I was burnt out even for that and that's when I was caught off-guard. While I was putting my presentation slides onto a flash drive of mine, I suddenly noticed some weird shortcut on the flash drive with most of my files missing. It almost got me but Windows prevented me from opening the file saying it could be a virus. I immediately booted back into Linux and studied the files on VirusTotal only to realise that the pendrive was infected with a Trojan Horse. This happened exactly 3 hours before my train started and I was in a bad state of panic because my wall of cybersecurity was pretty thick with a lot of measures in place but what almost got me was me using a pendrive to get a guest speaker's presentation onto a different pc during a college event (honestly that event was a waste of time, should've gone to MiniDebConf Kanpur). I had no option but to nuke the Windows drive (FreeBSD along with it) and only use LMDE until I get back from the trip. I also had to throw away my bootable usb because I thought it could be infected too (a mistake). I initially threw the OG infected drive but some folks at IRC said I can unfuck it so I took it out.

I boarded the train after downloading Cyberpunk Edgerunners and Shutter Island to watch during the journey. It was a pretty uncomfortable ride as I couldn't sleep that night as I got 2AC LB which means that it was way too shaky for me to sleep.

14th April - Day Trip

I got off the train at Chennai at 5:50AM in the morning of 14th April and this was the first picture I took.

I then booked a Uber to the hotel and took this picture of Chennai Central Railway Station in a moving car. Funny, exactly four years ago I joined my undergraduate degree at a uni in Chennai but dropped out due to unforeseen circumstances but I'm back to the same city to begin the next step of my career.

I immediately rushed to the Hotel to fresh up, have some breakfast and have some sleep so that I can function normally for the rest of the day. My breakfast was included in the hotel's package and I had the following food items; of course, can't have a day in my life where I don't eat eggs.

I found a nice Middle Eastern restaurant nearby and thought i'd swing by and try some dishes. I ordered a Yemeni Chicken Mandi and it looked something like this.

14th April was supposed to be my official "trip time". My hotel was close to Egmore Museum so I decided to visit it. I was quite disappointed because most of the exhibits in the museum were either closed off or were under renovation. Not to mention the bad Chennai weather that drenched me in sweat. There were a lot of artifacts in the museum but it felt extremely boring as I was a solo traveller. There's only so much I can do alone. I bought a camera pass for 250 INR along with 50 INR ticket but I felt like I wasted my money in there, just boring selfies and statue clicks.

I had to head back to hotel because of the heat and humidity. Marina Beach was on my checklist for the day but I had to wait for the sun to calm down. Finally at 5:30, I reached Chennai Light House. It costed me 20 INR for the entry. There were a lot of people trying to get up there so it took me 10 minutes to get to the top via lift. The view from the lighthouse was amazing. I could see the entire seashore from the top and there was this cool breeze that made the weather a bit bearable for a few minutes.

I then walked down the lighthouse and headed towards the beach. The walk towards it was pretty hard as the sand dunes made my walking pretty difficult. I somehow made it to the shore of the beach and those were some peaceful 10 minutes of that day but I couldn't wait for long as there was an IPL match scheduled nearby and that means a lot of insane traffic. I tried some balloon shooting before leaving but my aim was bad that day, only 6/10 shots had hits.

I booked a Uber to this cafe called Writer's Cafe close to my hotel room. Marina Beach Road had a lot of traffic due to IPL so the driver took a while to get to me. I got into the cab and we started driving off to the location but there were no U-Turns back to Marina Beach Road so we had to take a really long way. The driver was from Kerala and turns out that he himself was pretty new to Chennai (He told me that he only came here a week ago). We had a short charset about Hyderabad and then he tried showing me a popular Cathedral in Chennai which was on the way. Due to our long detour, the fare of the cab jumped to 300INR from 209 INR. He told me to pay only as much as I could and I settled for 250 INR. I then ordered my dinner at the cafe; Crispy Chicken Mac and Cheese, and French Fries. The Mac and Cheese had no salt but it somehow didn't get me sick. The fries were good.

After all that I was full, I just went back to room and crashed on my bed.

15th April - Conference Day

It was finally the conference day. I had to catch a local suburban train to the venue. I got up early at 5:30, got ready and ran to the railway station and took a first class ticket. I thought locals are usually crowded to the brim but turns out that you can avoid the crowd if you take a first class ticket. I got a really amazing view from the train. I travelled through the city suburbans, sea water and bridges too. All while having a cool and chill atmosphere inside the train.

Then I got off at the conference venue. The people at the conference told me to have my breakfast first so they took me to the dining area and served some Idli, Vada and Upma and poured Sambar all over it, they also gave a rava sweet with it. Then I noticed some staff speaking Telugu so I wanted to know if I should come to the same hall for food and I asked the same in Telugu. Suddenly, the two people seated beside me gave me that surprised look and asked where I'm from. Both of them were Telugu too. Our sessions were divided into 9 tracks and turns out that the person behind me was also in the same track as mine. He's Telugu but lives in Chennai and also speaks Tamil. It took us a while but we finally got our conference kit, they also gave us a free bag with some goodies in it. After all, I paid 10,000 INR for this conference.

We got a lot of food served in there that'd give instant diabetes to anybody. My presentation went amazing. It was about XMPP and IRC and the judge said it was a good study. I took my certificate and got on the bus to head back to hotel. I again soaked in sweat inside the bus. I suddenly noticed someone say "Hyderabad" and noticed that a guy was talking about TGSRTC. I immediately asked if he's from Hyderabad and he said yes and we had a bit of a chatter. I felt a great sense of Delhi Public School energy coming out of him so I asked which school he studied at and of course he studied at Delhi Public School too. My stop was getting closer, I had to get off the bus and take a metro ride close to hotel. Then the guy sitting beside me said he's going to the metro too and asked if I want to tag along with him and I said yes. We got into the underground chennai metro rail and I've never been inside an underground metro rail before, it was awesome. Me and the other guy were going our separate ways so we said bye to each other (didn't even know his name).

The Disaster

I reached my room after spending 14 hours outside and thought I'd finally relax and watch some Cyberpunk Edgerunners only to realise that my laptop got bricked when I turned it on. I had no bootable usb at hand so the only thought that came to my mind was to somehow ask the hotel guys to use their pc. I grabbed my flash drive and rushed to the lobby and the receptionist pointed me to a pc that I can use. It was an ancient PC which was in a pretty bad shape. It has only 2 I/O ports which were already occupied by the keyboard and mouse and any attempt to disconnect the keyboard would lead to PC not booting at all so I had to disconnect the mouse and connect my USB in place of it. After a while the bootable USB was finally ready and I went back to my room to reinstall linux, only to find out that my SSD actually died (don't worry its the spare SSD that died).

16th April - Heading Back Home

It was finally the time to say bye to Chennai. I got some souvenirs from Egmore Museum before leaving. I went to the railway station at 1:30PM and sat in an expensive railway lounge because I could not survive the heat otherwise. I played some KOTOR 1, a game that I had to abandon in 2023 due to corrupted saves.

I got inside the train at 4:30PM. Ordered some Pizza for dinner and landed back at home at 3:30AM. Pretty sleep deprived right now....