Bday bashes

Birthday bashes usually go badly for the guy in question namely the 'birthday boy' since the bash turns out to be more of an excuse to give the birthday boy a bashing on the day he graced earth with his presence.

My birthday 'bash' turned out on the same lines. However if there is one thing I regret, its that I didn't get to taste the cake which was so beautifully kept for me. As the photo shows, people felt I should not have the cake and eat it too....

One funny habit people have here: that of wasting coke by drenching a person in coke/ mazaa/ minute maid. Very crazy habit!!! Who wants to waste that much coke??? 

Lucky for me, there were three other people who shared their bday with me and that saved me from a resounding thrashing. 

The vagaries of Mess food

In the last few days, there has been quite a ruckus about the quality of food in the mess, not to mention the presence of 'animal protein' i.e insects in the food. Several photos of the debacle have already come up on our newsgroups.
Somehow the very perception of a "mess" has eternally been an eternal mess(pun intended). Earlier memories of mess food include NIT mess food which, to say the least , was not something I would wish for my worst enemies, leave alone poor frail engineering students such as myself. Very quickly early on during ragging, our seniors used to take us to the local canteen known in our campus as Jhoops and open accounts for us at Jhoops. That benevolent man used to supply us on credit. For the next four years, it would be the eternal adda spot, the place where we sat down to finish assignments or just plain laze around. The ledger books would get thicker with our entries as we accumulated credit, paying for it at the end of a term or sometimes after we got a job. My final year was spent half the time at Jhoops lazing around between my rare classes. Sometimes even the profs turned up for tea there!
I miss the concept of a canteen/ jhopdi/dhaba here at IIM I.I cant have tea or snacks when I like. Punctuality is a must. If I come before 8:00 AM or after 10:00 AM, I dont get breakfast and so on. The night mess is ok but it neither has the ambience nor the cost benefits of the dhaba. Frankly even now, nothing beats a cup of simple chai along with a Bun sandwich and Todphod at the night jhoops(cheap at 8 bucks for the lot).

Sounds of Silence

Its been quite some time since I listened to Simon & Garfunkel and my new Logitech speakers just begged to be allowed to go out full blast. So I put on a playlist on Simon & Garfunkel and sat in the dark listening to the lyrics. One of the most touching songs of their collection is undoubtedly The Dangling Conversation. There is this one part of the song which almost always brings tears to my eyes.:

Yes, we speak of things that matter,
With words that must be said,
Can analysis be worthwhile?
Is the theater really dead?
And how the room is softly faded
And I only kiss your shadow,
I cannot feel your hand,
Youre a stranger now unto me

Every time I listen to this song, it reminds me of an old friend who was also a passionate lover of Simon & Garfunkel. That friend of mine died more than 2 years back but this song brings back strong memories of him talking to me, riding his moped,playing cricket and our going for quizzes and debates together. We were close friends once but drifted apart once I joined college and didnt interact that much. Now I wish I had known him better.

Simple Pleasures

From a Reader's Digest articles I can remember two lovely quotes of Lin Yutang, a chinese scholar and philosopher. They are:

"Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials. "

"If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live. "

Alas, most of us have forgotten these. Life is a rat race where we are the rats and we keep running on the treadmill till we collapse exhausted or clear another hurdle to find a faster treadmill awaiting us. Very few of us stop to appreciate a beautiful sunset/sunrise or a pretty scenery. Even fewer ever chucks our jobs and say " I am gonna laze away this afternoon" . Its sad to think of all the afternoons and evenings we let slip.
So from now on, I have a new resolution: Skip more assignments, free ride more often and relax coz life is gonna go along without me anyway.
P.S: This starts this week, I aint doing the MIS assignment On the heads of the rest of the group be it

Apps, Apps and more apps

The beginning of the new term augured well, We seemed to have some chilled out profs who didnt mind if we slept in class, we had a few fun teachers and I seemed to have kept my head above Sea level. But I should have known all this was too good to last.
I need to know exactly how much B.S can be tolerated for answers such as " Name one incident in your life where you had a significant paucity of time". This is not to forget the same age old questions: Name some academic achievements , name the most important incident of your life. But all said and done, I slowly achieved a Zen like state where I could write total B.S answers for arbit questions thrown at me in a dozen forms. This was to come and bite me back in the ass later during an interview.
My B. Tech degree finally came of integral importance to me. One of the companies actually cared about the branch we had attempted to study in college. I turned out to be the lucky opener for IIM Indore(much like the first warrior of the Greeks Protesilaus in the Trojan War.Legend has it the first warrior to set foot on the shores of Troy would be killed. Protesilaus bravely jumped on the shores and died soon) In a similiar fashion I was called, the sacrificial lamb itching towards slaughter. I was informed that the 1st lamb had quietly sneaked off in anticipation of murder and hence I was the chosen first sacrifice on the altar of the interviews. The interview went by like a blur except that one of them had immense pleasure in picking up each of my markseets and sniggering at my amazing marks. Whenever I said words like "determination"/ " hard work", he would cast a meaningful look at my resume and marksheets and snigger a bit more.
Later interviews were more on a common line. Y marketing? Y do u think we should take u? The answers to these I repeated and repeated till I grew bored. Funnily wat was scarier was not remembering what I had written on the forms. So half the time I would be thinking back to that night when I had filled out the form sleepily . I would wonder which incident I had put down and then probe the interviewer carefully to see his reaction. Quite a few times, I could see the interview perplexed. Promptly I would say another such instance... and so on.
One of the few take aways(in business terms) from this whole process has been my growing acceptance of a suit. Earlier I was extremely uncomfortable in suits and couldnt imagine wearing one for more than an hr. But thanx to this process, I now got used to wearing it for a whole day (with a tie to boot).

Few days of solace and happiness

At the end of the first trimester, I knew only a few things while I was packing:
1) We didnt have a confirmed ticket for our journey
2) The car seemed to be late
3) It was good I was leaving the campus after the debacle of the endterms.

The details of the journey to the railway station is a story worthy of another post some other day, when I shall talk bout the vagaries of potholes, the awesome roads in Madhya Pradesh, the beauty of the solitude of stations such as Bhusewal and the applications of Murphy's Laws to journeys through the middle of nowhere. Rest aside, once I had landed back at Calcutta, I was pretty confident that I was through all my troubles and what awaited me was a beautiful week of pleasure and fun interspiced with good homecooked food and the opportunity to sleep for more than 16 hrs at a stretch.
Little was I to know that Mamata, the leader of the "oppressed masses" would choose that very day to unleash her vitriolic skills on the masses of Calcutta not to mention blocking all paths to the locality I needed to reach. A half hour of frantic circling later, the cab driver accepted defeat with a philosophical shrug and dropped me off at the Metro station. 45 mins later I was finally at my uncle's house. That afternoon I reached home and enjoyed 4 beautiful days till I had to board the train to come back to IIM I.

quizzes

Around 1:15 PM every day, the class suddenly gets all tense. One of our scouts goes out every 5 minutes for information, for information can truly win the battle. Suddenly the scout returns breathless and slips into the class whispering, Quiz @ 3.
Quiz! the dreaded word hits us. Some of us groan, the thought of yet another afternoon nap lost made worse by the event of a quiz. Some of us turn ashen, as we realize procrastination has led us to a point where we know neither head nor tail of the syllabus. Some murmur among themselves, the elite few who have ghisaofied for the test and are ready to smash all existing records

5 mins before 3, there are a bunch of students standing outside the hall. There are different types-- - guys like Sandesh(Rip Van Winkle of our class) and Rakesh(photographer) who stand relaxed, content in the knowledge that they will ace the test and get out of the claustrophobic atmosphere of the classroom within 10 minutes. There are the nervous many, clutching books and notes in their hands and trying to make sense of feverish squiggles made while we were sleeping in the classes. Finally we have the Sapta Rishis(the 7 knowledgeable seers ) to whom we turn to for advice/ help when we dont understand stuff( The Saptha Rishis of our batch include Debasish, Vaibhav, Chinmay, Pratik, Ankur, Nikhil Gidra and Bhavin)

The quiz is invetably a collection of highly mysterious Greek and Latin phrases and concepts which we have to translate into Etruscan and match against the available answers. Usually all four options seem totally correct or totally wrong. Once in a rare while , simple questions seem to turn up and we spend more time wondering where the twist is.

At the end of the quiz, the remaining few trudge out and swear to work harder next time and walk down to the canteen. By the time we have descended the stairway to knowledge, we have already forgotten the quiz .

The Hill that never sleeps

That is the nickname of IIM Indore a.k.a Planet I

I never thought I would land up in a management institute , let alone an IIM. That said, its sometimes very interesting and mostly very hectic out here.
July 23rd, a red letter day in ways more than one(found my lucky watch and the shocking telephone call). I was just back from my friend's house when this odd phone call came in. My parents were sure some friend of fine was playing a prank on me. I picked up the phone to get the stunning news: " You have been granted an opportunity to Join IIM Indore" After hearing the voice, I wasnt so sure that this was a prank. I said Yes and then kept the phone down after listening to some instrunctions.An hour later, the mail came in and it took the next few days to sink in . Then it was a quick Kingfisher flight to Indore and lo behold, I was at the portals of knowledge where was proudly writtenSiddhi Mulam Prabadhanam(for the ignorant, the motto of our institute.

My first day was one marathon day where I hit the ground running(literally and metaphorically). Early morning running, yoga and classes killed all thoughts of lazing around. My dad was overjoyed, it was the first time in years that he has seen me wake up before him and actually do work. The rest of the day, I met several others like me who had come here with hopes of settling in early and instead got to run up and down the hill. A note here for cardiac and pulmonary patients(if you can walk up the hill and reach the main building, you aint got anything wrong with u. )

New College, New Place

MAY 1, 2008

Finally at the end of my undergraduate college life.
I never thought I would reach this day. A day when four years of college life have gone by. I never imagined I would make such great friends who will stay on in my memories.
Best of luck to you all guys
Hope you rock wherever you go

Posts of my previous blog

This blog is a attempt to tell the little stories accumulated over these grt yrs of college

Saturday, July 01, 2006

LAN Games

For those of us who have computers, one can hardly forget that we were game crazy for quite a while. While some like First Person Shooter ones, others are fanatic about Role Playing Games. But one factor links us all together , a fanatism to finish the game & master its secrets.

Thus it was not odd for me to expect gaming when I came to my hostel. But LAN gaming rocked my world apart. Firstly one can hardly beat the rush of playing games with ur friends or against them. The games go on till late in the night & one attends classes bleary eyed the next morning. Then we queue up again in the evening to beat all others & be crowned the champion.

But LAN gaming has its own problems. Woe betide the switch which fails / the person who shuts down the LAN.

Thats all. gotta play the next game of Counter Strike now. Adios, amigos

Monday, June 26, 2006

The Power Nap

ZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!

The power nap is the "in thing" what with the Japanese now having taken it as one of their newer national pasttimes but some of the best practioners can be found snoring /dozing in our own classrooms or hostel rooms of our engineering colleges.

When one enters a classroom , we can usually note that after the 1st two benches filled with eager, enthusiastic students, there are quite a group of sleepy students. Some very quickly come to terms with their sleepiness & quickly slide into the arms of Morpheus.Others valiantly fight the onslaught & sometimes break the hold for a few minutes . Such "sleepfighters" can
b easily identified by their notes . Their notes go as:
" The atomic no. is ...aluminuiiiiiiiiiiiiz..........." and the rest is a squiggly line which stops abruptly when the class is over.

The beauty & importance of the power nap has been recognized by us students for a long time. It rejuvanates us for the next class, keeps us fresh & active and prevents us from being noticed in class by the professor. LONG LIVE POWER NAPS

Saturday, June 24, 2006

Error 404 Page unavailable.......

ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
The guy next to me in the CC(Computer Center) of our college screams & throws up his hands in frustration. Error 404/551.... Bang! The server is down again.A huge bunch of students are left with computer screens filled with error messages & crashed connections. This is but one of the many days we are left with our heads in our hands as our college server breaks down.

Somehow it has always been noticed that when a student has only 5 mins left before class starts & the CC is full, the server works perfectly. But woe to the foolish student who shall dare to reach the CC when he has all the free time in the world/ the CC is empty. Withing 5 minutes he faces a broken connection.

Still nothing is as bad as the scenario when someone has just typed a mail /almost finished downloading a song & just before he/she hits the send button or the download is completed, the server crashes.The feelings running through one's mind then range from rage to insanity as one contemplates the time & energy spent.

But VIVA la GOOGLE. Gtalk works even on the worst connection & this software has saved many of us from certainly committing the total wrecking of our software.

Friday, June 23, 2006

The looooooong line

Wherever we turn in India, one can see an ubiquitous line of people standing in wait. Be it for water or for a meal or in the supermarket, the line is part & parcel of most people's lives . Thus it is not unnatural that we had to face huge lines even in college.

My first day of college started with a huge line of people standing in wait to get their names registered. Thats where I first met my roommates & thats where my roommate made one of the biggest mistakes of his lifetime by jumping the line & taking a spot 2spots ahead of him.Soon thereafter we faced lines everywhere, be it waiting for our ID cards while skipping lunch so that we wouldnt miss the chance or our library cards.And yes, who can forget paying our mess bills by waiting for 3 hrs in a line

And who can forget the lines @ the mess during lunch & dinner.In the first few days, the mess workers & "cook" were on their best behaviour , the food was great & our parents envied us on hearing about the menu.But this was not to last & soon, the food descended to its present state.

Now two years into this college, I am free of most of the line problems as I can finally apply "Seniority funda". But still One line lasts : the line for dinner on the day of "Special Dinner".

Friday, June 16, 2006

The beauty of footballl

To all those who may keep checking my blog,sorry for not posting anything over the last few days. Alas, I like ordinary people everywhere have got engrossed in the happenings of the World Cup. The last few nights have been sleepless ones with me periodically following the antics of England, Sweden, Italy & Spain.

For sports lovers , such an event is a glorious opportunity for us to sit in front of the idiotbox with refreshments in hand & enthusiastically support our favourite teams. Loud are the screams of happiness as a goal is scored by some charismatic forward & equally anguished are the sighs as some opponent finds the back of the net in his search for victory.

In this World Cup, we can notice a difference in the tactics & play of the teams. Ever since FIFA introduced a 4 week layoff for all players&teams before the World Cup, players seem more relaxed, fit & enthusiastic.Thus we can truly hope to see a better World Cup.

In the matches played so far, it can be seen that the African teams make up in enthusiasm & energy what they lack in experience/skills. Thus many a well established team has been put under pressure by newer teams . One hopes that some of these teams make it to the next rounds.

No football discussion can be complete without mentioning the Brazilian team. As one commentator famously said: - " You know its the Brazilian team playing when the right back (defender)is caught offside". Filled with a plethora of stars & footballing genuises , one can only hope they turn out 2 show us some of the magic they are so famous for.

But lets not forget the famous quote: -

"Football is a game with 22 men in the field desperately in need of rest & 20,000 in the stands desperately in need of exercise. "

Friday, June 09, 2006

Hope Springs Eternal before the tests

They say Hope springs eternal in the human heart and nowhere else can this be better exemplified than in students in colleges before their endsemester exams. Each and every student hopes eternally that he/she may be able to swot the whole syllabus before reaching the examination hall.
But alas what we students have unerringly found out is that Murphy's Laws wins every time. For those of you who may not have heard of Murphy's law, the famous law goes as such : " If anything can go wrong, it will . "

The night before an examination, you can frequently find the following species of students:
a). Gattu aka Rattabaaz aka Muggle ( not in the Harry Potter sense people):
This class of people are a breed apart. Although they study throughout the semester and if possible through the holidays, the day or to be more precise the night before the exam, you can still find them moaning :" Kuch bhi nahi complete hai yaar " which frankly makes most of us wanna throttle them. Still they have thier uses, usually they are the few people with perfect notes & all the bokes required for the examination. Most importantly , they actually know the syllabus & whatever has been taught in class.

b). Good in studies yet funloving
This is a species which has almost been exterminated/ is almost extinct. The rare members of this species believe in actually learning the topic & understanding the concepts so these people really dont need to slog as the exams loom. At the same time, they believe in cutting loose once in a while.

c). People who survive on the basis of chits
These form a largely increasing breed of students who start preparing the night before the exam to make microscopic chits with detailed information printed on it which gives them a substancial chance of surviving the exam.

The morning of the exam, some students walk in cool & ready to give the exam. Some walk in reading from a notebook, not ready to even give up those precious ten minutes required to reach the examination hall.Yet others come up biting their nails tense & expectant much like the father of a baby about to be born. Yet one thing is common to them all. They all pray for two occurances : Firstly , the question paper being easy & if that is not possible then the inviligator being friendly .

It is at this junction that we usually find ourselves at the hand of Murphy and he rarely disappoints us.As I had stated , his laws stay constant and here are a following examples that most students would recoznize from personal experience : -
1. The question you leave for the last (and not attempt if you run out of time) will be:
(a) the one you can answer best
(b) the easiest question
(c) a wrong question that you get marks for just attempting.
f it's (c), you will run out of time and not attempt it.

2. If two ppl beside you are copying, the examiner continuously stares at you... And the chances of you getting caught(for no reason) are proportional to number of times you look at examiner .

3. For the most imp exam.. the invigilator wil b one of the lecturers who hates u the most.. n loves pickin on u n readin over ur shoulder

4. Marks u score are inversly proportional to how hard u studied !!!!

5.You get to know the answer as the exam ends
You end up doing the hard questions in the begenning and realise that the easy ones are still left; but realise it in the last minute


6. the invigilator of ur class is always going to be an asshole, who wouldn't let u even blink sideways. as opposed to the invigilator in the next class, who stands guard at the door, so as to inform students if the senior invigilator/squad is coming or not.

These are but some of the adverse applications of Murphy's law which afflict us.

But what is worth watching is the behaviour of students in the examination hall. A few students literally pounce on the questionpaper eager to solve the questions while others take it hesitantly while worshipping most of the gods/goddesses we know.The few students of the 1st group start writing furiously and feverishly while the rest of the students scan the questionpaper thoroughly. Once we have read the questions, we decide which ones we can do, which ones we will wing it as & when it comes& which ones are to be avoided totally. Then the actual attempt at the exam starts. Frequently we look up, down, sideways & in all directions till the inviligator get suspicious. Sometimes one can catch the eye of another student and we can read the despair, sorrow, pain & humiliation in his eyes.

One can catch some of the students exchanging info beneath the inviligators view & somehow getting away with it. Slowly the 3 long hours come to an end & finally we are free of the horrible torture of this subject. But even as we take the first hesitant steps outside, out comes some student with a huge smile on his face and saying : " Phod Diya" aka Done greatly while all around you are guys with frowns & grimaces on their faces. After that student comes a group of excited students who discuss answers & questions . Invariably the answers of numericals never match & the method you may have applied will not matcn with the one applied by other students.

As we walk out of the examination hall, expectations start to slide on a exponential curve. Slowly after the initial moments, we start wondering " Are we gonna clear this examination?" Then starts another fevered bout of calculations as everyone tried to calculate how much we have done & how much we should get. That night the discussions continue but at least one exam is down, only a few more to go. And once again in a few days starts the pavane.......

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Exams 1

The Clock struck Twelve. NO this is not the beginning of the novel "1984".

The clock struck twelve & in barged a irate friend who said: " Behen****, Saale kitne time se xerox leke ratta maar raha hai . Give it now , I have to finish these topics before 1:00 A.M.".
This is an ordinary night of NIT Durgapur as the exams loom closer and closer. Many NITians learn the famous funda in their first year : "NIT Durgapur mein raath nahi hoti" meaning NIT Durgapur has no night. The true applications are best seen during endsem examinations as the students open their motheared books & notebooks for the 1st time .

As most engineering students know, studies are done only in the few days preceding the exams.So suddenly a week before the exams start, students search for their books in the mess they call "hostel rooms" & start borrowing books& notes fron other "good" students . Then are heard some classics questions & statements :
1. "Jo (mujhe)aata hai, woh (paper mein)aata nahi hai; jo nahi aata hai woh aata hai"
2. "ye question 2 saal se nahi poochha hai"
3. "ye last time hi poochha thaa"
4. "tere paas iske notes hai??"
5. "woh chapter... mark weightage 6 marks... (facial ex-pressions speaks the story)"
6. "nahi samjha to rat le"
7. "(when someone is intensively doing his last revision) "Yeh nahi aayega !!!"
These and other colourful statements make the rounds of the hostel as we stand in lines around Xerox shops & printers. The library which till then serves as a hangout for amorous couples, is filled with students looking @ books and saying :"yeh Syllabus mein hain kya".
As the exam approaches, panic levels rise as students study topics for the first time or even better find out that what they studied is not in the syllabus.

Suddenly topics of discussion such as chicks, bikes lose precedence to topics such as :"Ok midsem me mujhe itne mile, attendance mein panga nahi hai 15 mil jayega , How much do i need to get in the endsem " . This is a period when everyone's tempers are on a knife edge so usually there are a lot of fights & name taking sessions but finally we all get to reach the exam days.
My next post Exams 2 on the examinations days