I usually don't speak about my personal life anywhere on the internet or hell even with people in real life but I think it's time I come out of the cocoon. This post is quite personal and writing it publicly sure does get under my skin but that feeling is why I lost a lot of things in life.

I'm a strong believer in the String Theory and how it affects us humans and it sure did in my case. Would you believe that attending a free software conference got me a date? I bet you wouldn't but the string theory did that.

I attended UbuCon Asia 2024 in Jaipur back in September 2024. It was my first ever trip that's not a family or a school one. I met a lot of cool folks there and learnt a lot about how such communities work. While I was waiting for my plane in Jaipur to Hyderabad, I came across Launchpad which is a bug and translation platform for Ubuntu and I slowly started translating some software into Telugu for Linux Mint. I decided I could round up a few more people at college and revive Telugu language teams. I messaged one of my friends and asked her if she was interested in localisations and she said yes and we worked on some translations for a while until she got bored and left them.

I gave up on translations too as I was the only one doing it. One day when I came back from work (I was interning at NIT Warangal back then), I decided to maybe translate a few strings. This was in May. Immediately after opening Launchpad, I noticed a name very similar. Looked just like my classmate's.

I texted her if it was indeed her and she was somehow as surprised as me that I found her on the site. Turns out that the other friend who was translating before told this girl about translations and this girl started translating Linux Mint for a while too.

Despite being classmates for two years, we never talked to each other properly. During the discussion about Linux Mint, she expressed how she has been wanting to talk to me for a very long time and that I've been quite unreachable most of the time (I admit it, I was grinding my ass off in college to never repeat the shit i did in high school). I said sure and that she can text me when she feels like it.

This was during May and I wasn't in much of a contact with her until again in July. During the first week of college, we began texting a lot and either me or her asked either of us for a coffee (My memory is bad these days) and she wanted to get to know me better so we met over a coffee in our college.

She ordered a black coffee and I ordered a regular one. We had a few discussions about life and she was often pretty straightforward to my face when she said some stuff, that felt a little uncomfortable because nobody was that straight to me before. And then she started talking about career and bam! she asked me if I'm interested in working for a friend's startup since I do hardware stuff these days. That definitely spoiled my mood and I left shortly after it. I almost didn't want to talk to her again.

But there was something about that "straight to the face" talk that I liked and asked if she wants to play badminton with me and just a few days after the coffee thing, we met for badminton. This time there was less talk, more playing. Me being a calculated guy, I kept looking at my watch to move to the next task in my schedule and kept telling her the time and that quite annoyed her lol and I liked her yelling at me about it. We played for a bit and we decided to take some rest and we had some really close talk sitting beside each other that I never had in my life, sure felt different and the whole boys hostel saw us and were asking if she's my girlfriend right after I went back to room.

Around that time I was seriously prepping for GATE (something that I ditched now) and she somehow wanted to write GATE as well and wanted to study with me at the library. I'm usually not a group study guy so I said I can't and then she asked me if we could do it over an online meeting and that was fine for me. We got on the online meeting and started "studying". We didn't study anything but kept talking for the whole one hour. She was quite surprised that I can actually talk like a human and not some kind of person who studies day and night.

I was soon knocked out by a bad strain of Influenza A and I couldn't talk to her for a while. There was a lot of distance between us all of a sudden as I was already having a lot of hurdles in my life to get into a relationship that too a short one considering that I have no clue where I'd be in a few months. We still wave hi when we often meet in college but thats about it.

This also made me realise how boring I used to be because I was grinding my ass off in college and people only knew me as a programmer who codes day and night and has a 9 CGPA (both are false) and most people failed to realise that I actually have a life. Holding back on expressing my feelings surely put a dent in my social life as well as mentally. I don't hold back these days and it surely helped me rekindle my social life. I don't know what the future is gonna be like.

Anyway thats a long story of how free software got me a date :P wait, is it really a date though?