Arbit Globe

The King of Fruits

2011-06-12T23:18:00.003+05:30

Despite the recent aging processes I have been going through due to which I am quickly turning into a spectacularly boring old fella, I still retain a childlike enthusiasm for certain things in life. Window seats and mangoes being the two which come to mind instantly.

I hadn't partied or imbibed the spirits for a while, and the Saturday night plan at a friend's place seemed just like what I wanted after a tiring, travel-filled month. Just as I'd settled down and was waiting to open a beer bottle, she announced that she had some mangoes and maybe we could have a snack before we got started. And that was that. A huge, stupid smile covered my face as she got them out. I tucked into them with an enthusiasm rarely seen for anything else, and within 15 minutes, all my grand plans of having a fun night with the usual gang had turned into a sleepy evening with a fruit-filled belly. I lay back on the sofa, a content smile on my face. The booze seemed boring now, something that would ruin the taste in my mouth. It was supposed to be a party, so I tried. But after just a few drinks, I was done. All those mangoes were making me feel distinctly sleepy. They'd kinda ruined my party, but then, there's no way I'd choose anything else over them. Mangoes, you see, are my weak point.

There's a deep, emotional connect between Maharashtrian Brahmin families and the yellow fruit. Atleast with the ones who originate from Kokan, that spectacular coastal strip of land second only to Kerala in peninsular India. We really dig into the stuff. Come mango season, and we'll have them chopped, depeeled and whole, in semi-solid form with chapatis in meal (something which really stumps other people), in milk-shakes and what not. Of course, it's not just any mango, but the alphonso, the king of the king of fruits. It's quite inexplicable, this obsession. The darn thing is, one, costly as hell. Two, its as fragile as any fruit can be, and can find a variety of silly reasons to turn overnight into a ghastly black mess. Even more annoyingly, this often does not manifest itself on the exterior, so you need to have a prayer on your lips if you're pulping a plural number of mangoes into a common container. Three, they are fattening, more than the choicest dairy products put together. Now this isn't a concern for me, thankfully, but even I notice a perceptible bulge in the tummy region a few weeks into mango season. Four, they produce enough body heat to ensure that you enjoy all the ill-effects of teenage times without the associated joys - namely, boils and pimples, large, ghastly, yellow coloured ones. Despite this, there is an irrational obsession with the darn fruit amongst us, and I take this to a completely new level.

Show me a bunch of good, quality alphonso mangoes - heck, even mediocre quality ones - and watch me go week-kneed with sheer anticipation and delight. It's.. a bit creepy, I think, that I should feel this kind of attraction for a.... fruit. It's quite funny. In my new place in Mumbai, my roommate got a 2 dozen pack of the choicest alphonsoes as a gift from somebody. One look at the box and it was love at first sight. The box said that it shouldn't be opened till 3 days from then, and I spent those days in a mixture of agony and anticipation which drove me up the wall. And then, when the moment arrived, I opened it... and I think I don't quite remembered what happened after that! Oh dear. I think I am going to have to keep the darn corporate jobs for a while just to feed this rather expensive taste. The non-profits will have to wait for a while. Unless that's an additional component to my CTC!

I dread the day when my arch-enemy decides to send a hot chick to seduce me for some ulterior gain (the arch-enemy part is essential because part two of the above sentence ain't happening out of any lady's free will - other than the one that love has made blind, of course). No, I will shout, I shall not cheat on the love of my life. Nothing shall make me do that, least not a pretty young thing in a teeny-weeny. And that shall be the moment when I see the evil glint in her eyes, as she fumbles with her large backpack. I will recoil in horror as I realize the magnitude of evil that resides in my arch-enemy. I make a run for it, but before I am out of nose-shot, the heavenly aroma of the choicest, 'A'-grade alphonso mangoes reaches my olfactory glands. And then... I can always claim I don't remember what happened afterwards!

Mumbai...

2011-06-06T22:07:00.002+05:30

Life seems to have an unerring tendency to do two things which lead me to the rather megalomanic conclusion that they've deputed somebody up there just to mess around with me. Since the almighty is considered powerful beyond measure, I can convince myself about the practicality of such an eventuality. One, it makes me do exactly what I have declared that I would never do, to myself and the world at large. Two, it picks and chooses from the things I am damn worried about and turns things around so that one fine day, I find myself right in the middle of that damn thing, wondering how I ended up there. Sometimes, when it really wants to have fun, it does both together. And that's how Mumbai has happened to me.

It might seem strange to be scared of a city, particularly a metropolis like Mumbai, especially when the darn thing is just a hundred or so kilometers from the place you've lived most of your life. And yet, fear is the emotion that comes first to my mind when I think of Mumbai. Seven months in the city has taken the edge off a bit of that feeling, but I still feeling an intense wave of restlessness whenever I come back from anywhere else.

So when I'd got into the IIMs, I'd made one promise to myself, and to a few close friends, in the vain hope that telling somebody else about it would make me keep my word to myself even more. I'd said that no matter what happened, I would not take up a job in Mumbai. I'd take a pay cut, a hefty one, but I wouldn't come here. And I continued in the same vein all through the MBA, baffling a fair number of people. After all, around half of the batch from any B-School ends up in Mumbai. As things happened, I did end up away from it, landing up in Bangalore. Unfortunately, as things also turned out, within a few months I realized that that wasn't quite the role I wanted to be in. And left with little choice and a lot of trepidation, I decided to haul my ass over the big bad city, scared out of my wits.

Seven months have passed by since, and I still don't understand this city. It's like a parallel India, one which exists in it's own universe. Mumbai is to India what the US is to the world - everything outside its boundaries is just an annoyance, to be 'managed'. Its residents live in astonishing ignorance and indifference to world that surrounds it. Its residents live in unbelievable squalor, grime and congestion. And yet, they choose to continue living here, of their own will and accord. As I said, I don't really hate all that Mumbai is - I just don't understand it. Why? Why would anybody choose to live the way they live here?

I've never cared too much about money. I've always respected it and been careful about it, but I've never lusted after it. Two weeks in Mumbai and you realize that if you do want to live a decent life here, all such silly theories have to go out of the window. 'Money is the lubricant of life', I said to myself one fine evening, and was instantly appalled by what I said. And yet, that cannot be more true anywhere than in Mumbai. Nothing else really matters in this place. You either have the stuff - and therefore the choice of getting what a decent life demands - or you go about trying to eke out a miserable existence, commuting like a tinned sardine for hours, living in rooms the size of closets, in buildings with no facilities, no conveniences, held together by an outside structure covered in grime and the black stuff which covers any undisturbed surface during the months of the monsoon. You just need to visit another city - and it hits you. You gotta be daft to actively choose this place. And yet, so many people do. You fear what you do not understand, and this is exactly that.

You have to be very clear about life in Mumbai. It's straightforward. You earn lots of money, and you live comfortably. And the scary part is that the city starts changing you bit by bit, by driving home the same thought every day, an insidious little worm of thought that keeps going on and on and on. It's not overnight, it's not perceptible, until one fine day you wake up and realize that everything that you've held sacred in life is slowly looking silly or unnecessary, that the only thought you have is how to earn more, save more, so that you can probably buy a house at an atrocious price and use the rest of your otherwise useless life in paying back the loan. Your hobbies, interests, dreams all get rudely chopped at the extremities and fitted into one sanitized, neutralized heap of crap.

So here I am, seven months down the line, settling uncomfortably and edgily into the place. Winter, surprisingly pleasant, has gone. So has the dreaded summer, the insane heat and humidity. Now comes the last part of the lap, the crazy monsoon. Today is day 2. They say you've gotta experience the rains to really experience Mumbai. So well, here we go. After resisting and fighting for 27 years, I sit in my room and wait for the crazy showers to take over. And then once it all ends, I fervently hope that the I see the next monsoon in more hospitable climes, though that is more of a desperate wish than a feasible reality. Mumbai, you have me by the scruff of the neck for a bit. Damn. Me and my stooopid proclamations.

The Corporate Douchebagization of an erstwhile decent old chappie

2011-06-01T23:18:00.001+05:30

I guess it had to happen sooner or later. It's just how systematic and step by step the process is, that gets to me. The corporatization of an individual, that's what I am talking about.

I've always been a sort of a scraggly, unkempt kind of person. Not unhygienic or smelly (clarified with whoever I can ask such a thing!), mind you, just not somebody who liked to keep every strand of hair in its place and be all prim and proper all the time. Sort of bored me, the whole thing. Especially because coupled with my completely unspectacular looks, that sort of a thing would have made me look completely boring. Atleast this way I could get some attention, even if it was on the lines of 'How could he have hair like that?!!'

B-school was perfect for something like that. I grew my hair for months, and the omnipresent humidity of coastal Kerala (is there a non-coastal Kerala?!) made it turn into curls till I had difficulty convincing people that, I had, umm, straight hair. Yes, perfectly straight, not a wee bit curly. And there it was all round and round, till I had people asking me what did I do to make it look like that because they wanted to do it too. Guys. Don't ask. So I had this majestic basket of curls in Term 5, and it looked awesome.

I never really bothered too much with clothes too. I mean yes, I did try to look presentable, but I was too bored, not to mention stingy, to go out and buy really good clothes. And so I wore the same old faded tees and bored jeans and a couple of comparatively jazzier 'party' shirts which I repeated for every goddamn party on campus, till I started having trouble remembering which was which when I saw the pics. Until Term 5, of course, when the length of my hair made things pretty clear. Some forceful cajoling by some batchmates did add a whiff of fresh air to my wardrobe, but I got bored of maintaining those darn things. I mean who's going to troop half a mile to give the thing for ironing and then troop back the other way, when I could sleep instead and wear it crumpled. All of it looked the same after a couple of ones anyway. Even to the others! Worst, on the rare occasions that I did give it for ironing, I promptly forgot everything about it, only to turn my room upside down trying to look for it when there was a occasion for which it was the *only* decent thing by miles. That was followed by a visit to the ironing place, where I would find it in some dusty corner, looking much worse than it would have in the first place if I hadn't bothered. In short, it was all too much work, I didn't particularly care, people around me did not too, and all was well in life.

Until, I came back into the corporate world.

Now, Mu Sigma wasn't that bad a place for this. Sure, there were a bunch of folks who really dressed up and came looking all swanky, but most of them were just overworked, bored freshers (add a year or 2 for some) who had enough trouble keeping up with the official formals from Monday to Thursday rule. Interpretations of the same were fairly liberal, and that kept things easy for me. Just a bit of a nip and tuck and I was fine.

Alas, L&T is a completely different ball-game. Not that I was expecting anything different, particularly in the Corporate Strategy team, but what I had not reckoned for was the fact we would also have a fair number of consultants from all those fancy firms swirling all around us, in their fancy shoes and never heard of labels, looking all chic and suave. And next to them were specimens like yours truly and Sanket Bhale. These scallywags raised the stakes considerably, and sooner or later I knew that I had to fall in line. Not that I agreed with it in principle, mind you, for I simply do not see the point in dressing up just to come to office, unless you have clients to meet. Looks all a bit like a fancy dress party to me, to be honest, dressing up only for the usual office people. Kinda pointless. Anyway, so things inexorably started moving that way.

First came the hair. I came out of b-school with the fierce determination that I'd regrow all that I'd chopped off for placements, and whoever had a problem who do the whole bridge thingy. Well, too much talk and too little action. It all went off in a few weeks. The few times that I did manage to grow them beyond a couple of months, the bloody things started twirling towards their ends, no, not like proper curls that I had on campus, but just an inch or a half towards the end, which made me look, to save on adjectives, really silly. Imagine a fella who's supposed to be helping you out with your Working Capital or something similar having hair which kind of bobbed when he moved. Bad idea. And so, with a silent sigh, I subjected them to the barber, who gleefully asked 'Shorter?' with a broad grin every 5 minutes or so, until all I had left was a fine sprinkling of stubby growth on my pate. Now, to counter the mess that the top was, I'd also grown a sort of a goatee. Unfortunately, that also decided to stop behaving itself and grow all over the place, until I started looking like I had a kitchen sink cleaner attached to my chin. Again, does not go so well with the whole image I was supposed to have. Out that went too, after a 3 month struggle in taming it.

And then, how could I forget the clothes? Now I have somewhat decent clothes, nothing exceptional (refer para above. I do NOT see the point). Unfortunately, the few costly brand shirts I did have, had the amazing tendency to look like I'd worn them straight out of the washing machine, a few hours into the day. Even when I'd actually got the darn things ironed (I do iron all formals, I'd be stretching things too far if I didn't!). Amongst other clothes, I had a combination of shirts with their collars scuffed (doesn't it hide behind the hair? No, I learnt, especially when you have a sodding hair cut), a few ones with slightly weird colours (gifts) and a variety of trousers of various lengths. I have trousers which can fold up and reach my knees, ones which mysteriously shrunk the week after I got them (unless I miraculously grew a couple of inches at the age of 27), trousers which looked smashing when I buy them and then catch all the lint in the world with every single wash. What I have also realized that the bottom of the class from tailoring schools goes to altering departments in malls all over India. And so, I decided that enough was enough. I was going to join the club, simply because I was too bored to worry about something like this all the time. This is perfect fodder for a neurotic soul like me :| I proceeded on a shopping spree and got some fairly good looking stuff.

Last came the accessories and habits. No, not good looking belts and I-just-made-another-species-extinct leather wallets. But stuff like the small comb which you keep in your back pocket. The habit of actually using shirt pockets to keep stuff like boarding passes, bills, and other random paraphernalia. Switching from a nice informal-looking, actually useful and really comfortable backpack to a stupid, pain-inducing shoulder laptop bag.

In short, I have been reduced to a well-dressed, decent-looking, clean-shaven guy with short hair, a laptop bag, and a small comb lurking out of my back pocket. The lowest point was when somebody at work actually complimented me for looking really good today. I, Harshad Karandikar, am now officially a Corporate Douchebag. Aaaaaargh.

The one without a title, agenda or direction...

2011-05-30T23:54:00.003+05:30

Spirals. That's what the world is made up of, I am convinced, even if this conviction is merely another one of the theories I manage to convince myself with on a weekly or fortnightly basis to explain the inherent randomness that life is (Last week I called it destiny). Borrowing from a blog post by my friend Arslan, everything moves in continuous spirals in some particular direction, until an external force comes along to disturb status quo, and sets off another spiral in a completely new direction. There is no other way I can understand how things move from 1 seemingly obvious, there's-no-other-way direction into something completely tangent or opposite, leaving the person in the midst of it completely confused and bewildered.

Obsession comes easily to neurotic personalities, I guess. I am one of those. And so when I get into things, I really get into them, surrounding myself with a false reality which I believe will last me forever. I make it my world, whether its a material object, a person or more commonly some form of activity which I enjoy. I dream and day dream about it, and take it to ridiculous lengths, imagining myself doing it for the rest of my life, wanting to do it with every living breath, wanting it to occupy all of my faculties. It's a strange sense of addiction, but something which is completely overpowering. The spiral has started. On and on it will go, taking me to new highs. Things fall into place, everything seems to be working just the way I want. The world deceives, it seems to conform to my rose-tinted view. It tempts and it taunts, events happen which fool this eternal romantic into believing that it is happening because it was supposed to, or some such jazz. On and on it leads the unsuspecting fool, till he is ready to give everything for it and take the plunge. An ocean of clouds await below, just beyond the edge, as if waiting to embrace the jumper in their arms and take him higher.

Suddenly, as quickly as it all started, a switch goes off somewhere. Standing at the edge of the cliff, a little bit of soil crumbles underneath and rolls off. I move back with a start. Woah! What was I doing there? The spiral is broken. No matter how hard I try, the cliff edge is too far away, the jump seems crazy. The fluffy clouds have disappeared to reveal a forbidding (from a jumping point of view!) valley. Yes, the winds might carry me, but what if they don't?

It's as if you've just got out of a dream. Suddenly, it all looks different. Try as you might, you cannot feel the way you did before. The world suddenly seems completely different, the colored glasses have disappeared. Life is the disjointed, random mess that it always has been, now that the trip is over.

Broken spirals are darn tough to mend. They sit like obstinate schoolboys with their hands crossed over their chests, refusing to be cajoled into action. You try everything you did earlier. You push, you plead, you try to summon the biggest of external forces to create that push. And yet, nothing happens. You take another half-hearted shot at what you believed you wanted for the rest of your life at one point in time, only to realize that your heart is not in it. You still produce good work, stuff that makes you happy, yet you cannot resist the overwhelming urge to stop. The camera gathers a layer of dust that would have appalled you a year ago, the lenses become habitats for micro-organisms. The blog becomes a forgotten page with memories which seem to come straight from a lifetime ago.

Why?

Iyer Check!!

2011-01-21T22:39:00.001+05:30

I was always afraid that MBA would make me a stuffy old bore, who took life too seriously. If not the course, then at least corporate life after that. A quick trip to campus has convinced me that far from being afraid of that, I should wonder whether I've gone quite firmly in the other direction!

IIMK's annual cultural fest cum alumni meet beckoned, and 5 of us from Mumbai decided to go together. And so we met at the airport, all excited about making a trip back to the alma mater and miss the good ol' days when we rotted around on a campus which beats the bleeding hell out of most resorts I've seen. So far, things were normal. But then the old K spirit started coming up and we all started getting into a jolly swell mood, ragging each other to no end and generally being rather boisterous. After some mucking around in the airport CCD, we proceeded to the check-in counter, and requested 5 seats in a row, so that the fun could continue. The girl at the counter shook her head sadly, as if disappointed that she'd have to be the party pooper and break us up. The only combination possible was a 4+1, unless we wanted to further fragment ourselves. Luck (or so thought the bugger who eventually got it) would decide who had to sit separately, we all said. And so, it turned out that Tinka would be the fall guy, with a seat 2 rows behind the rest of us. Tinka, however, had other plans. So did I. I wanted a window seat, come what may. After discretely checking each others seats to know what exactly we'd been allotted, we proceeded ahead.

Things stayed normal till we hit the queue at the boarding gate, when I announced that it was a free for all, and if anybody wanted a window seat, then they'd jolly well have to get there first. Bhale, Tinka and Gaay took to this idea rather gamely, while Dinesh Iyer passed it off as a joke. Now good ol' Iyer is a very propah fellah, who wouldn't dream of anybody sneaking up and taking what was rightfully his (or what he thought was, atleast). After a fair bit of pushing and shoving and elbowing (between ourselves), we managed to settle down in the bus taking us to the plane, each of us watching the others.

As soon as the doors open, the 4 of us jumped out, and started a sprint towards the aircraft ladder. Unfortunately, Dinesh hadn't really expected this, and before he could really understand what the hell we were up to, we had a good, solid start on him. Being the propah fell that he is, I doubt he would have condescended to join us even if he knew what we had in mind, so all was well.

I handed out my boarding pass to a rather amused ticket checker, who couldn't quick figure out what was happening, stormed up the ladder, startled the dickens out of an airhostess, who dropped a huge pile of tissues on the floor, and went and caught the window seat. Bhale, Tinka and Gaay soon followed, as we filled up the 4 adjacent seats we had. Behind them, minutes later, arrived a rather not-so-amused looking Dinesh, who proceeded to sit in half a dozen places before being rudely informed each time by a new chappie that that seat was his, and could he please buzz off? Finally, he found his bearings and his seat and apparently his temper, for he a flashed a weak smile at the 4 inanely grinning faces 2 rows ahead of him. Things were just heating up, unfortunately for him.

The take-off queue at the Mumbai airport is awfully long, and we soon got rather bored of the proceedings, especially in the mood we were in, and decided to have to fun. And thus came in 'Iyer Check!'

Every 5 minutes or so, all through the flight, we'd all look at each other, the 4 of us, count till 3, ask in an animated way 'Iyer Check?', bob up like meerkats above our seats, turn around, look at Dinesh, give him a wide, toothy grin and a jolly ol' wave, look back at each other, and confirm that things were, indeed, and thankfully, fine, say 'Iyer OK!!' in a loud voice with a thumbs up and a nod of the head, and bob back down, to burst into a fit of giggles.

This routine perplexed passengers around us to no end, especially since Gaay and I were wearing our IIM K tees, and embarrassed Dinesh to no end. He could do little about it though, and continued to give us a weak smile each time.

After take-off, it was donut time. We'd got a dozen of those incredible thingies from M.O.D at the airport, ostensibly for one of our junnies who was having a sudden craving. Staying far away from civilization does do that, I remember me having a 3 month long Subway craving in second year :| So we tucked into the box, gobbling it down, showing the open box to Dinesh and refusing to pass it, and so on. Eventually we decided that was too cruel a deed to do, and decided to pass the box to him. Then suddenly, the food cart came in between as the hostesses did their routine, and we had to pass in over the cart to Gaay.

And so on we proceeded. It was one of the most fun flights I have ever had, one in which I didn't sleep a wink, and one I didn't want to get over. It was like the good old days of campus back again, a bunch of us who didn't care how silly or crazy whatever we were doing was, what people around us felt or thought of us. At the end of it all, I couldn't help but wonder - do we just take life waaaaaay too seriously? Shouldn't we be having fun, as much of it as possible, when the times are good, when we're surrounded by people we like, and when there is nothing, nothing except a strange kind of ego and self-consciousness which holds us back?

The moment of the evening, though, was when the airhostess announced at the beginning (and the end) of the flight 'Ladies & Gentlemen, Boys & Girls, welcome to Indigo.....'

And thus started what I hope becomes an annual pilgrimage :)

An Unequal Fight

2010-09-12T22:50:00.001+05:30

I think the fella up there sometimes just sits around, waiting for people to make silly proclamations, and then proceeds to systematically prove them wrong, one small step at a time. As much as he'd be having his hands full with all the zillion important things he has to take care of, I am beginning to feel rather convinced that this is one thing he rarely misses out on.

A regular income, or even the promise of one, is a funny thing. Not a week had passed since I'd started out in my new job after the yem-bee-yaaay, and I was tempted to buy a new phone, a nice, shiny blackberry. Not that I needed one, mind you, but then since when did that become relevant? After trawling through a few dozen sites and gawking at models which promised that I'd be able to read that life-changing mail the minute before the sender sent it, a wave of shock and nausea went through me. Why, on earth, did I need a new phone? I'd got one just over a year ago, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with it. Baah, I said to myself, its time to walk the talk, I can't call myself a tree-hugging-hippie and go out and buy phones every year. And so, I made a promise to whomsoever it may concern (I like this phrase, it's the perfect mix of bluntness, a hint of rudeness, and an overwhelming indifference to whomsoever is relevant. I think it must have been invented in India) that I shall desist from buying a new phone for atleast a year.

I think this rather rash proclamation caught the attention of the fella up there, probably since it was said during a moment when nothing remarkably bad seemed to be happening anywhere on the Earth, on a monstrous scale, at least, at that point in time (On second thoughts, is that ever possible? :| ). Within a week, the bottom left corner of the innocuous looking metal plate which comprises of the 'keypad' of my phone, started twirling upwards. No amount of coercion would make it flat again, short of smashing the thing against the wall, which I avoided since I wasn't dealing with a Nokia. At first, I ignored it, which didn't seem to go down well with whoever was behind all this. So then, one fine day, while trying to retrieve the phone from the confines of my jeans pocket, I received a nasty gash on my finger. The offending corner was promptly swathed in tonnes of cellotape, which didn't help its looks, but took care of the problem - until I wanted to, err, use the stylus to write a message. After de-taping and re-taping, I thought I had solved the problem for a while, till the weekend, when I'd take it to a repair shop. Unfortunately, my laziness and a tendency to procrastinate, coupled with the fact that half of Bangalore does not seem to believe in repairing things (the US ain't just outsourcing jobs, even attitudes seemed to be getting Bangalored :|), meant that it stayed that way for a while.

Well, unfortunately, grime and a sticky surface go along rather well, which meant that within a couple of weeks, my contraption was looking decidedly ugly, with some specks of what looked like yesterday's lunch (it wasn't that, I swear) adding to the otherwise nondescript mess. I was beginning to get tired of my lame 'oh-my-phone's-all-broken-since-I-dont-get-paid-that-well' line too, and decided to do something about it. After trawling through half the town, I located a Motorola authorized service center, which demanded 2000 bucks as repair charges, telling me with a poker face that well, they couldn't take chances, and would have to change the darned touchscreen, the keys, the board inside, and whatever other components they had in spare and they could get rid of through me, since that model was no longer manufactured, and all of that inventory had to be sold profitably. For some strange reason, with my rash proclamation in mind, I said a hesitant ok, and offered my phone to them, when the lady at the counter shook her head sadly and said that unfortunately they didn't quite have the keypad in stock. The rest of the body was there, though, would I want that? That doesn't have the keypad included, does it, I asked wearily, fully knowing the answer. Oh no, sir, that we don't have in stock, she said, with a cheerful smile. I guess she was due her full marks for excellent customer service with a smile.

Another few hours of driving around aimlessly, and I was in some place which looked like a commercial area, with all sorts of tiny shops - a typical urban bazaar, where you can pretty much get anything. A quick check with a small corner mobile repair shop ended on a positive note. Yes, it could be changed, for a few hundred bucks. I ordered the piece, and rather smugly went home, feeling all happy with myself. 1-1, I thought.

Since that day, everything that could go wrong with the phone has gone wrong. Firstly, the replacement part didn't quite fit. It sat a nice mm or so above the rest of the phone, with edges sharp enough to wreck all my fingers at one go, and creating a perfect place for all sorts of rubbish to settle into the wedge that has been formed. Well, I'll deal with that, I thought. Then, the phone decided that it wasn't going to charge up through the socket charger. Oh darn, I thought, and started using the USB charger, which took ages, and annoyed the hell out of me by making all sorts of irritating noises every time I plugged it in or out. Then, the USB charging stopped. In desperation, and with full knowledge of fighting a losing battle, I took out the mangled body of my old MotoRokr (yes, I had the same model before this), put the battery into that and charged it. Luckily, I had a spare battery (from that set), so I could alternate between them like camera batteries. All was fine for a few weeks. Suddenly, the phone started switching off randomly every few minutes when I was using one of the batteries. So now, every time I want to charge the goddamned (literally!) thing, I have to switch it off for a few hours, charge it in the old set, and put it back on. Such bliss.

I guess I am going to be thoroughly tested over the next few months. I do hope that bigger matters catch his attention, and he leaves poor souls like me trying to achieve their small victories :)

Campus Memories....

2010-04-28T21:01:00.000+05:30

It's 1 in the morning, and I have bucketloads to do for tomorrow. Sleep is a constant temptation. I stay at the comp, trying hard to concentrate. I start feeling a bit peckish, and a trip to the fridge lands me nothing interesting. I come back to the comp and feel that something is wrong, something is not the way it should be.

Its these moments when I realize how much I miss campus, the freedom, the constant companionship, the food at strange hours, the 'always on' status that campus is in. Sure, I have a great flatmate, but he is human, and admits defeat to me by around 11 pm, just about when I am getting into the flow of things and reclaiming my day. I have no Bhale next door to knock on the door of, with the sure knowledge that he'd be as hungry and enthu as me to go grab a bite. There's no NC, no hot cheese sandwiches and steaming maggi till 1.30. I have to play the music at an ever-decreasing volume lest I piss off the neighbours. Within an hour or so, I will also have to admit defeat. Not because I am tired, but simply because I am in a jet lag of my own, with only the mosquitoes for company. There's no Nammi to bug or to go hang around with in her room, nor the ever-reclining Kaveesh with his hukkah, nor Sam chatting up the girls. No impromptu intellectual or silly conversations on the hostel floor, no hollering for Virapandy to come for a cuppa. No going for an occasional solo walk around the amphi, half enjoying the fantastic atmosphere and half watching out for the crazy dogs that have suddenly made campus their home. No ghostly hauntings of the library till the wee hours, catching up with the weeks' newspapers at 4 in the morning. No half a dozen cups of coffee, no chats with the canteen guy playing the randomest selection of music.

Crap man. Its all over. Bloody hell. The outside world seems so boring, so staid, so.. dead. I love these wee hours, staying up till dawn, but I can't do it anymore. Days count, and matter, and cannot be trifled with. Each day goes into a ledger, to come back to haunt you if you have been lazy. Oh, how I loved those countless, senseless days which seemed to go on and on and on... God's Own Kampus, I miss ye :(

Something amiss, something scary...

2010-04-26T01:30:00.002+05:30

There's something very scary about Bangalore which freaks the hell out of me. At first glimpse, it seems like a pretty nice place, full of parks, greenery, a cosmopolitian culture, and a populace which does not look at you like an unfortunate alien when you speak in Hindi. And yet, just when you think you're getting comfortable with this place rather quickly, you sense something amiss.

Maybe I should switch over to saying 'I' rather than 'you', for I guess it is a somewhat peculiar thing which most other people might not feel. Since landing up here, I've ended up going to a couple of malls, more for their extensive grocery stores than anything else. Whenever I go to any of these places, I sense a strange feeling of indifference in everybody around me. COmplete, utter indifference in anything and everything save for themselves, this satiated kind of look and demeanour. It feels like they have reached some place and don't know what quite to do with it, what quite to do with life now. Most of this is my generation, or the one a few years older than me, the ones who've earned inordinate amounts of money through the software boom. I sense a sense of hardening in them, in their glazed faces, their overflowing shopping bags, their branded clothes and accessories. And as I walk through them, I suddenly realize that pretty soon, I would be one of them. It's a scary feeling. I feel a sense of dread and utter panic every time I walk through these malls, and a residual depression after I leave them. There is something in them which affects me deeply, making me feel that we, as a country are going in the wrong direction. We might have more money than ever before, even accounting for inflation and all that jazz, we might have better career oppotunities, but we seem to be more unhappy, more bored and more lost. We have glitz and glamour all around us, but the core seems hollow.

I picked up the week's groceries from one of these places, and reached the fruit and vegetable weighing counter, where all the green stuff had to be weighed and labeled by an attendant before the final billing counter. A young girl in her late 20s was (wo)manning it. Another girl, a well-dressed young thing handed over some apples and waited impatiently, getting worked up as every second passed. The attendant apparently couldn't read very easily, and had trouble going through the list of farm produce. With a hesitant finger pointing at the sheet, she read each item in the list, taking a second or two to move on to the next one. After about half a minute, during which the well-dressed girl was getting more and more worked up, she lost her cool, and yelled at the attendant, saying 'Can't you read? It's this one!!!' The attendant got all flustered and started taking even more time, until she finally reached the particular item, confirmed it a few times with a shaky finger, and gingerly punched at the printing machine.

I handed over the stuff which I wanted to get weighed, and waited patiently for the attendant to label it. The poor girl was on the verge of tears, and probably wanted to just run away. I couldn't help wonder - What is her fault that she couldn't read well? What are we turning into? It might seem like an isolated case of rudeness, but somehow I get a feeling that this is something which is pervading through our society at an alarming rate. I see the same kind of indifference and 'how can you not know/do/think' feeling everywhere.

At times, I just feel running away from it all. But where do I run off to? How do I escape this? This is India, modern India, whether we like it or not. This is what the rest of the urban centers of our nation are going to turn into within a few years. I get this strange, absolutely terrorizing feeling that I am going to be horribly lost amidst all this, with my slightly left-leaning, conservative (about capitalism) views, about wanting equality and equal growth opportunities for everybody and not being too thrilled with 'development' as it is happening now :|

The Fat war begins!

2010-04-26T01:30:00.001+05:30

Repeatedly, the fella up there proves to me that many of the things that I take for granted are something that can change very, very quickly if I am not too careful about valuing and taking an effort to keep them. For years, I have taken the lack of fat in my body for granted, arrogantly laughing at anybody who tried to warn me that there would be an inflection point beyond which I would rapidly start resembling a sea lion or a sea cow or whichever one of those creatures that looks like a genetically-modified-sausage-experiment gone wrong.

Well, as things turned out, a combination of laziness, lack of any kind of exercise, a new mess contractor in the last few months at IIMK who was probably in cahoots with exercise equipment manufacturers and the all-india bypass surgeon's association, and an eat-sleep-eat routine whenever I was at home have ensured that a nice layer of healthy-looking fat has amassed all over my otherwise lean frame, resulting in me reaching an all-time record of 59 kgs. Most people, when they weigh an elephantine 55 kg would be rather happy with this, but not me. While this does make me look a bit more human and less like a scarecrow in a particularly drought prone area, it does little good for my running timings, something which has pissed me off to no end. For while I don't mind being told that I look better than I did before, having to huff and puff my way through a mere 3 odd km run is not something that I take kindly to. So, despite what would seem like a nice progression towards an 'ideal' weight of 70 odd kgs, I am going to war. Nay, love handles (however tiny they are) and a 30-inch waste don't go with me ;)

Dude, where's the ink???

2010-04-18T02:41:00.001+05:30

It's a funny and yet sad way how things change so rapidly. I was in a mall in Bangalore the other day, picking up some essentials. I was passing by the stationary section, and a rather large stationary section it was, with its zillions of rolls of coloured paper, filing equipment, and the usual assorted collection of random stuff which somehow makes everybody want to walk through the area even if they are perfectly satisfied stationary-wise in life. I am still quite the old world types in some aspects, and I love my fountain pens, especially a older than a decade and a half Lamy beauty which still writes smoother than any darn piece of writing equipment I have had. I needed some ink, having left my campus ink pot in my room while leaving, not wanting to take a chance of turning everything that I own to a spectacular shade of blue.

And so I ambled along to the sales guy who was manning the place and asked where I could find some ink, wondering whether I should continue with Camel or splurge on Parker or try something more exotic, and whether I should finally succumb to my long-unfulfilled ambition of writing with green ink, when I got a stare and a 'what??' look. Ink, I repeated, for a fountain pen. 'Sorry sir, but we do not stock ink', was his bemused reply. I was a tad confused, for I had just seen a row of shiny, expensive Parker fountain pens. 'The stuff that goes with these, you know,' I tried explaining, knowing that I was growing old and couldn't expect the newer generations to quite follow what I was talking about so easily. 'Yes sir, but nobody buys that, so we don't stock it', he replied with impeccable logic. 'So what do the folks who buy these -pointing to the offending pens in question- do with them?' Anyway, I knew it was a fast-losing battle, and I walked out of the store a dejected man. Really? No fountain pens? Does nobody find the bother of putting that messy stuff into those thingies worth the simple joy of the smoothest way man can write? Bloody hell, the moment I get a little bit of extra dough, I am stocking up on enough ink to last me for the rest of my life. And take my Lamy with me to the grave. Baaaah, to all you ball-pen scribblers!

Bangalored

2010-04-18T02:40:00.001+05:30

I've never been a fan of big cities, though from my K experience, I can't seem to survive the small ones too well either. Pune has spoilt me by being neither here nor there. The IT boom did just enough to keep it apace with the rest of the booming urban centers of the country, but not enough to make it the overwhelming mess that larger Indian cities are.

Its been 2 weeks since I've been in Bangalore, and it has, very quickly, started getting to me. I feel somewhat out of sorts here. Thankfully, work and home are a mere kilometer or so apart, so from Monday to Friday, my world starts and stops in a forgotten, obscure little corner of Bangalore called Chalaghatta. Most Bangaloreans seem completely bewildered when I mention it, and the conversation very rapidly shifts to other topics, either due to a determined effort by them not to show what they really feel about the about the fact that I live in a place which they have never heard of, and would be, by consequence, not-so-great, or, more possibly, due to mere lack of interest. Chalaghatta seems to be in a bit of a time warp, a village inside a bustling city. So I have the worst of both worlds, a small village like place with no streetlights nestled in the middle of a city which comes to a standstill twice a day at its traffic signals. The city is a mere 5 minute drive from my house, but I have mustered the courage to do that drive only a couple of times so far.

I don't know how I can and would want to continue with this life, but as of now, I am pretty happy with this arrangement. Having ventured out a few times into the real city, and consequently getting stuck in the dreaded Bangalore traffic, I have no intentions of doing that twice every single working day.

My India

2009-12-13T20:48:00.000+05:30

Early morning in the Pune Ernakulam express. A groggy-eyed me watches the world go by, bathed in the golden rays of the rising sun. Small hamlets rush by, their occupants just beginning their days. Small mud houses with thatched roofs and acres and acres of farmland all around. The sun continues its rapid ascent in the eastern skies, a blob of fire fast being tamed by the haze and fog of the morning. The wind rushes in through the open window, making me raise my jacket's zip upto my chin. It's the middle of winter. A train whooshes past, shrieking away to glory. The cold in the wind adds to the magic of looking out of the window, there's something quite inexplicable to it. A falcon starts the day's hunt in the distance.

The occupants of the train slowly start rising from their slumber, and start going about their morning duties in leisurely fashion. Such luxury would be rare for many of them in the normal course of their lives, and the sudden abundance of time seems to make many of them a bit confused. Or maybe it wouldn't be. I should stop looking at others through my rather clouded lenses.

A group of Sadhus are traveling in my compartment. They suddenly burst into prayer, performing their daily rites. The rest of the bogie looks on curiously.

A group of kids, just up, wave at us from another small hamlet we pass by. Cows and buffaloes roam around near houses, waiting to led to their daily pastures. A farmer pulls a lone reluctant bull towards some task which it is loathe to doing.

Small hills and large mountains escape by, as the train passes through a more or less barren landscape. Suddenly, as I've just got used to it, the forest closes in. How could I forget? The forests of Eastern Goa, the stunning evergreen forests in which a decade ago, I'd spent an incredible week. Down and down the train goes, leaving the deccan plateau towards the coast, skirting past the awe-inspiring Dudhsagar waterfalls, the rails a mere thread over the vast expanse of the valley.

As I sit at the window of my 6 Euro-for-24-hours, non AC seat, I look outside and think... this is India. My India. As I contemplate my future and wonder where I want to be, these are the moments which will drag me back, from all the wonders and magic of the outside world. Where a simple train journey will give me that unexplainable feeling of everything's-right-with-the-world, even when it isn't.

Last term at IIMK beckons...

2009-12-05T19:14:00.001+05:30

It's the last day of the break between Term 5 and 6 of my MBA, and as I pack up and try to collect all the mess I have systematically spread all over the house, the myriad collection of chargers, cables, devices and accessories that our lives have become intertwined in, I am at a loss to understand my emotions. Am I happy or sad? Happy to be heading back to what would be the last few months on campus, or sad to leave home again, this time with the rather scary feeling that I have no idea when I would call this place home again. Leaving home for the MBA was different, there was a time frame attached to that, there was a fair bit of certainty involved. As I leave for campus this time round, I am staring at a lot of uncertainty. Where would my job take me, how far would it from what I call home now? Should I be happy and excited at the change and look forward to another new beginning, welcome the differences and new things, and try to get a role which would take me to new places and destinations and let me carry forward the experiences I so loved during my summer internship, or should I try to come back to what is essentially mine; my city, my people, my friends? These are tough choices to make, especially after I've spent a fortnight at home, experiencing so many of this things that made my life nice before all this circus started. How much of change is good, and how much is too much? When would I get tired of things being different and crave for the things back home? Do I make new friends and move on, or do I come back to the ones I have here, who, although having understandably moved on a bit with their lives, are still more or the less the same old folks I remember from my engineering days? Sometimes I crave for the awesome experiences I had in Europe, the feeling of instant friendships and deep connects that I experienced in a matter of hours, at other times, after a party or two in Pune with the old gangs, I tend to forget that this is not reality, not my present, but a fast-receding past which I am still fortunate to visit once a while.

Should I try to make my past once again my present and future and wallow in the comforts of known vistas and horizons, or should I step out and leave it all behind and move ahead? As much as I loved my experiences at IIMK and in Europe over the last 18 odd months, I do believe that change is often over-rated, and the known and comfortable past too vilified and under-rated. Should one keep striving for change, for novelty, for new experiences all the time, or is it fine to come back to what one loved after experiencing a fair bit of it?

Its a matter of weeks before my time at IIMK ends, and before I (hopefully!) make a choice about my work and location after my MBA. How do I even begin to tackle these questions is beyond me, and what I will do and how I will react when it comes to crunch is something which pretty much scares the stuffing out of me!

Messed up!

2009-11-13T02:07:00.000+05:30

Ever since I've moved into a hostel, I've wondered what motivates people into maintaining their rooms like hospitals. The strange part is, everyone here seems to be like that. I came here, a year and a half ago, thinking about how awesome it would be to half my few square feet where I could live in as squalid conditions as I liked, irrespective of what anyone thought about it. I've always thought that being orderly and systematic was a wee bit too over-rated, and disliked it with passion. So I came here with dreams of squalid splendor, with nobody bothering me about the state of my room. Turns out, that's sort of true. The only bad thing is that rather that leaving me completely alone, they've started making trips to my room to convince themselves that theirs is so much cleaner. Which it is. Which I would happily go and tell them myself if they wanted the pleasure. But no, they insist on trooping down, walking through my mess, murdering a few paaavam (the disadvantage of hanging out too much with a tamilian :|) ants and making me rather annoyed. Worse, a few such trips, and I actually start doing something about my room.

So you have me, once every weeks, cleaning up the whole darn thing and turning it all upside down. Yeah, it does look much cleaner and better organized when I do that. Looks. I've no idea where my second belt is after I cleaned my room the last time, which is a bit of an annoyance since Max, the only clothing store in calicut randomly labels jeans with any size tags that they can catch hold of, with the result that unsuspecting customers (and also lazy ones, who do not try out everything they buy) end up having an assortment of stuff, half of which threatens to stop the family genes from going any further, and the other which makes me a fervent believer in the fella up there when I end up wearing it some groggy morning and praying that it doesn't come off till I am in the safety of my room again, all labeled the same waist size (am not telling ya what that is x-( ). And the other day, I drove myself up the wall looking for my pair of scissors, and found it half an hour later hanging on the softboard, apparently an appropriate place for scissors, as I had thought in the moments of insanity that take over me when I am in a cleaning frenzy.

Now the thing is, it would be understandable if folks maintained a bit of consistency in this fastidiousness about cleanliness business, and applied it other matters too, like, for example, hygiene. But no. You see those same buggers with sterilized rooms moving around in the same tee for a week or so. The reluctance to wash clothes and wear fresh ones is remarkable for a place which boasts of 100% humidity almost the year round. It would quite in line for a pig like me, but hey, those hospital keepers ain't allowed to do that!

It's downright funny when some company decides to distribute freebies to us on campus, during a pre-placement talk or some competition-related promotion stuff. Obviously, being free, most people make a beeline for it, irrespective of what's on it. And then, for the next week or so, you have half the campus as if in uniform, wearing the same stuff. I also fall in that category of freebie-lovers, and one morning as I walked to class, a friend asked why I was wearing the tee. I told him that it was the only clean thing I had, so that made it a simple decision. He said that he had received the same answer from a dozen people that day, and was going around checking how many were wearing it for the same reason. It did make me wonder about his sanity and what the hell he'd been doing all this while here if he had to ask people about such stuff.

All in all, I am rather peeved with these hypocrites. And rather disappointed with this aspect of hostel life. I mean whats a 4 by 4 (ok, they're quite nice to us, we have an 8 by 13) without there being no space left to walk in? Kind of takes the charm out of life...

And I reclaim all those comments :)

2009-11-13T01:17:00.000+05:30

For a long, long time now, the comments site that I had entrusted the job of handling the comments on my blog was messing around with me. Or, I have moved from being techno-aware to remarkably techno-dumb in a short span of a few years. As much as I would like to claim the former, I have a strong suspicion that it was the latter.

Whatever it was, it meant that I no longer had access to moderating comments on the site. Which was all right, except for the fact that I started getting a few rather annoyed comments from people who were a tad unhappy that I had not approved their detailed comments on my post (not true, I just couldn't!!). So for all those folks, thanks for keeping the faith, and all your comments have been approved :) I've no idea how, but I managed to log in into the site after giving up the last half a dozen times, after trying an obscene combination of passwords and usernames and stuff. The thing is, every time I visit their site, they seem to have changed everything, which makes me rather confused (I have a strong feeling that business education is not too great for the grey matter up there :| ). And when I give in and tell them that I have lost my password, my username, everything, but I do want the site back, they throw some strange html code at me and ask me to put it some unheard of place in my site, stuff which I obviously have no clue about as much as I have done my own share of tinkering around with the template's html code (isn't half of it useless? I keep deleting and adding code and it doesn't seem to make any difference whatsoever :|).

To cut a long story short, and let you move on to the real short story if you haven't read it yet, I am now the supreme commander of arbit globe again :D Err, not a challenge to some bored hacker there... please... I love my site and respect your skills :|

Trapped!

2009-11-10T05:05:00.002+05:30

I am not very good at writing fiction, but do keep making the occasional feeble attempt at it. This story is one such attempt, originally written in an hour for a course in Term 5 at IIMK. I've made few modifications to the original draft, with the result that I am not overtly thrilled with the way it has come out, but the underlying theme is something which has been bothering me for quite some time.

The door of the cage shut behind the keeper, and Mordy waited for the familiar click of the lock that followed it. No sound came, however, and after a few minutes, Mordy couldn't resist his curiosity, and ambled his way across to the door. With his large paw, he nudged it, and it slowly opened a few inches. The keeper had gone, his duties done for the day. Dusk was rapidly losing its daily battle with the night, and a blanket of darkness was quickly engulfing the zoo.

Mordy pushed the door open and walked out a few feet, when a wave of terror hit him. Suddenly, he was petrified, and blanking out of fear. A cold wind had up, giving him goosebumps. He fled back into the cage and hurried to the farthest corner. He tried to ignore the open door, but it stared at him, tempting, confusing, seducing and utterly terrifying. He started pacing up and down in the cage, his mind a chaos of emotions and thoughts. He remembered his days in the lush, evergreen rainforests of the Malabar coast. Life had been a daily battle then, struggling for food, chases gone wrong, the unbearable pangs of hunger when the prey had been too wily, and, often, intensely satisfying too, the incredible feeling of being satiated and not needing to chase those darn bucks for another week or so, long afternoons spent on the warm rock on top of the lone hill in the forest and those intensely heady days with Kayra. The thought of Kayra sent a tear down his now increasingly scraggy face. Where was she? How would she be? Would she be still roaming those paths with his children? Or would they be out on their own, intimating the forest that a new predator was on the move, and that they had become a force to reckon with on their own? Life had been tough and exciting, frustrating and rewarding, stressful and leisurely, all at the same time. The constant struggle to stay away from that two-legged ape who could magically kill you from a hundred feet away, who would kill and then not eat, for some reason, who would kill for reasons Mordy could never understand. And yet, they had been so magical, those days.

A deafening crash brought Mordy back into the present. Thunder, followed by a heavy shower. He couldn't really complain about life at the zoo. There was absolutely no struggle. Food was regular and plentiful, and brought to him chopped and cleaned, everyday precisely at 7 in the morning. The zoo was well off and treated its animals well. The cage was clean and comfortable. And yet... Mordy missed the jungle. Years of lazing around and doing little had blunted his wild instincts. Even the children didn't seem to be too scared when he growled at them anymore, they laughed and pointed it out excitedly to their parents. He was bored to death. Life had become a meaningless chore and an orgy of sleeping and eating. His rippling muscles, primed for the kill in his forest life had been smothered in layers of fat. His keen, taut face had turned aged and scraggly, the wear and tear of years of having nothing to do and thinking about it showing clearly.

Yet, life in the zoo represented security. He liked the keeper. He got food regularly, didn't have to worry about the next kill, didn't have to fret over whether he was becoming too old to chase down prey or whether his tactics were too outdated. He didn't have to freak out, seeing his dad die of hunger, not being able to chase prey on his own, and refusing to accept charity from his son. Mordy thought hard and long, but just couldn't make up his mind. It was easy getting back to the forest, he had the night in front of him. Several times, he walked to the door of the cage, stepped outside, only to have the same, gnawing fear hit him like a thunderbolt. Several times he walked to the farthest corner and refused to look at the open door, but it refused to let him be. The clouds disappeared as soon as they had formed, and a full moon shone over the horizon, flooding his cage with white light. The wind picked up again, and hit Mordy in the face as he gazed at the moon through the bars of the cage, contemplating his past, present and the future.

The open door of the cage greeted the keeper from afar, as he walked in after signing his name for the day. Wild panic set in, and a bead of sweat trickled down his spine. Mustering all the courage that he could, he approached the cage slowly, anticipating a charge any moment from the thick shrubs spread all around the cage. He tiptoed to the door, and peered inside, trying to get a view of the farthest corner, the only one not visible from outside. With a sigh of relief, he saw Mordy looking at him, spread peacefully on the floor, his tail involuntarily swatting the half dozen flies which always seemed to be bothering him. A strange look had spread over his face, placed on the floor between his front paws - the look of an animal truly trapped.

Nostalgia...

2009-11-04T02:41:00.001+05:30

Nostalgia is a funny thing. I have to admit that over the last few months, I've been a tad frustrated at various developments on campus. These things are inevitably a part of campus life, but when you are living through them, they tend to look much larger than they are - as is very often the case in life. I've tried hard to not let myself be affected so much by these small things when all this is going to end so soon, but I have to admit that I've failed. Slowly but surely, I was turning bitter, a state I hate. I don't mind being livid or really upset, but being bitter seems rather a waste.

Tonight, I sauntered into the Night Canteen for what has become a daily routine - a around midnight shot of cold coffee. The far corner table was empty, and I settled there. A rare wind was blowing from the east, cold and crisp. Within minutes, there was thunder and lightning, and the usual pitter-patter of large rain drops smothered most other sounds on campus. An unseasonal shower.

I finished my coffee, went down and stood at the cross-roads. Water dripped over the tall roof, glistening in the amphi lights. The wind brought the rain in in the form of a fine mist. And suddenly, from nowhere, it struck me - I was going to miss this place so much. I stuck my hand out, and wondered - is this the last one? I heard a deep, scary voice within myself saying that it is, indeed.

A short walk down from harvard steps with Rupee, Nami and Tanu, and I started feeling if I was going to leave tomorrow. Oh my god, this is getting over...

I have to cherish these moments. Cherish them for posterity, for a lifetime. Yes, times have been rough, but these times here have taught me lessons about life and myself that I will probably keep discovering for years. I have to be positive, not be petty and not hold silly things against people whom I probably won't see again in my life or if I do, will probably end up having a good laugh over. I have to be a larger person, I have to think big. I have made friends and lost friends here, but I want to take back only the good memories from here.

Can I...Will I?

Where the hell have I been?

2009-11-04T02:22:00.001+05:30

I've dared to see my blog home page after what feels like (and turns out to be) an eternity. I see the last post on the 8th of October and wonder what the heck I've been doing all this while. I've really not been around, from the fact that even blogspot seems to have dumped my cookies and is asking me to sign in!

It's strange how you just stop doing the things you love so much for no apparent reason. I went through the first year like the clausial (that's not a proverb, so what else do I call it?) headless chicken, and yet managed a decent frequency with my blog. And then along comes second year, and there is this tremendous lethargy in me. I have a zillion topics buzzing in my head, a few hundred mentally written articles, but I just don't seem to get to putting finger to key (bah, oh, the old days when it didn't sound so ghastly!) to punch that piece down.

It's also strange how after dishing out stuff fairly regularly for a while, and then suddenly stop. It's not that I've been writing elsewhere (as one regular reader assumed). It's just that I've stopped writing. Period.

As I started off writing an essay the other day for a competition, I realized how rusty I was. I wrote the first draft and balked. What the heck was I writing? Right as I was punching out the words, I was going, oh god, what is this? Atrocious stuff.

And so, I make another attempt at a comeback. I am not very good at comebacks, though. My last one in photography ended up with me being in the field with a camera and desperately hoping for some inspiration. I dread to think of a time when I look at a blank screen and feel sweat running down my temples, or worse, nothing at all...

What, in the world, are they selling?

2009-08-08T04:15:00.003+05:30

Going shopping for something specific is an adventure in itself in good ol' Kerala, especially in a suburb, which is the best way to describe Kunnamangalam. It's almost impossible to decide what exactly the shop-keeper intends to sell in his shop (not intending to be sexist here). You have the most odd combinations here. Bananas and hardware. Real gold jewellery and children's cheap plastic toys, the ones which leave you in no doubt about the toxicity of the materials used. Model wooden KSTRC buses, stationary, and a huge lot of something covered with a LOT of dust. Seriously, retail is a very interesting concept here. The selection of goods that a single shop will have is fascinating and mind-boggling.

Shopping here is one of the most entertaining activities you can think of (Yeah, I need to get a life :|). Of course, you need to be a bit flexible with what you want. And ready to have a bit of fun. I wanted a couple of nice plastic baskets, the types which are open and have a grilled bottom. Basically something to store all the paraphernalia I have which ends up hogging all the space everywhere. Also to keep some bananas to rot. I prefer them rotting in the basket, rather than in the plastic bags. That they would rot is beyond doubt, my timing of purchase is perfect in that sense. I go out and buy enough bananas to last a week, after not having any for a month or so, and whaam, next day I have a cold bad enough for me to stay away from even smelling the darn things.

So I went off to buy the baskets. A couple of plastic-thingy-selling shops had everything in baskets but the type I wanted. A couple of shopkeepers gave me strange looks when I asked for them. Maybe they drew the line at selling baskets in mobile phone shops, I realized when I looked at the boards after coming out. A couple of others tried to sell me an assortment of mugs, the types you use in the loo, a wastebin, a plastic bathtub and a plastic pot which looked suspiciously like one of those potty thingies, though I think it was merely for keeping potted plants. Finally, I saw 2 dusty looking things in a stationary shop which looked suitable. They didnt have grilled bottoms, but didn't wanna be picky. Atleast I could watch the bananas rot in their full glory now :)

Chikungunya Sucks :|

2009-08-08T04:01:00.003+05:30

I always thought that the whole thing about getting tropical diseases when you live in, err, the tropics and close to large forested areas was a bit of a stretch. I don't mean that there don't exist ghastly diseases which cause some amount of rather unpleasant stuff, but I always though that the odds of getting one were rather remote, and that it was something that was more talked about to get the sympathy vote rather than anything else.

Well, as the fella up there has been trying to make me understand in some rather unpleasant ways, I admit that I was wrong. As wrong as I could I ever be. Wholly, completely wrong. Now could I, please, have the joints of my body back? Yes, it does seem like I don't have them anymore, atleast not in the way I remember they used to be a long, long time ago. Now all they do is stiffen up and pain like somebody's been rolling over them with those cricket pitch rollers. And then they pretend to get well, when all they've done is just pass the buck to some other random joint. Darn, I hate how many joints I have, especially when this bloody disease seems to be on a mission to remind me of all the ones which don't come to mind very often.

It was some time in the end of June or the first week of July, I forget what, when I woke up feeling rather strange. Each and every joint of my body was paining, paining like the dickens. I thought I'd messed up with the whole running thing too much, and my body was wrecking revenge on me. A couple of days rest and I'd be ok, I guessed. I was wrong.

There's something about this disease which makes even the strongest of folks want to break down and cry like a baby. Now I don't claim to belong to that tribe by a long margin, so I got that feeling pretty much every morning when I got up and *tried* to wear my chappals to go to the loo. There isn't a simpler activity and a more painful one when you have Chikun%*(&&%^$^&gunya. One by one, the nasty bug affected every part of my body. Except for my feet, which got special treatment, where the darn thing holidayed for like ever.

Even now, I am not completely over it. A couple of hours of less sleep in a night, and the next day it starts inching back. Asking for a full 10 hours sleep every single night in a b school is a wee bit too much, so every week or so, the virus is back. Add to that the fact that the campus doctor refuses to acknowledge the pain I am going through, and keeps on referring the condition as some 'minor' local viral strain, which does not qualify for medical leave, and I am left frothing out of anger. I only wish, from the very bottom of my heart, that he is visited by the nasty 6 legged flying bug which gave me this hideous thing, very, very soon. x-( Ok, I don't. I seriously can't wish this upon anyone. But atleast he could have given me some leave :(

Blog Updates... or the lack thereof

2009-08-08T03:43:00.003+05:30

Sometime around mid-July : Darn, haven't updated my blog for a week now. Uh Oh.

A week later : Gotta update blog. Gotta update blog. GOTTA UPDATE BLOG. Tomorrow, pakka.

Another week later : Darn blog :|

End of July : My worst writing month ever. ONE blog post. Tomorrow, update, pakka.

August 1st week: What blog? :|

And that's been the state of affairs for a while now. God knows what got into me since I've returned from Europe. I'm having an allergy towards my blog like I've never had for even other people's (kidding, no really, I love them all, please don't stop reading mine :) ). Yeah, it's been a crazy trimester, but I've seen crazier. It's just that as I progress through my MBA, I get worse and worse with this whole procrastination business. I have a sinking feeling that I am going to end up being an absolutely worthless imbecile by the time I am done with this place. Not that I am very far away from it, but the final shove, yeah, that's happening very soon.

A crazy day!

2009-07-07T04:33:00.003+05:30

I am still hunting for the senior who told me that second year was going to be a 9 month long vacation. Especially since having 20 hour days is not my idea of a vacation. How does it happen that the exact combination of subjects that you have chosen is the worst possible amongst the couple of hundred ones possible (possibly more, I suck at P & C)? So here I am, stuck with enough coursework to last a year, while the guys who've taken fin are having the time of their lives. They seem to be lounging around everywhere, cracking up when I run past them, rushing from one group meeting to another.

The last day of June was the pits for me. This was the exact sequence of events :

00.30 hrs : Wake up in a completely confused and bewildered state after having fallen asleep half-way through reading some case. Cannot fathom where I am and why it is dark outside (I dont recall the last time I woke up when it was dark outside)
00.45 : Continue with reading the case
02.00 : Get a call for a group meeting for discussing a marketing case, submission due the next day
04.00 : Finish case analysis after tearing half of my hair out (group meetings, AAAARGH!)
04.00 - 05.00 : Reply to some emails which have been dropping lower and lower in my inbox, wonder whether it really matters that I reply any more, especially since it's quite possible that the recipient has forgotten everything about the matter and me.
5.00 : Fall asleep at the comp, get up with a start to check if I've caused any permanent damage to my precious mac. Having dandruff sucks in ways more than one.
5.00 -8.00 : Sleep. Thank god for small mercies.
8.00 : Wake up in a completely confused and bewildered state again, look at my watch and try to figure out if its 8 pm or 8 am. It's bloody dark outside due to the rains. Fight with myself whether I should get up now or sleep for another 45 minutes.

Wanting-to-be-good-me (M1): Get up, you lazy slob.
Lazy, sleepy me (M2): Zzzzzzzz
M1: Get up now or you wont be able to have a bath.
M2: Dont wanna have a bath....
M1: You didnt have one yesterday. Or day before.
M2: Nobody knows...
M1: You don't even have a deo.
M2: Nobody knows.
M1: Nobody will want to sit next to you in class.
M2: (a) Everybody else is as sleepy / stinky / indifferent as I am
(b) I always sit in the last row; nobody is gonna leaving a precious last row seat empty to avoid sitting next to a stinking pig
(c) I don't sodding care
M1: Go have breakfast.
M2: Dont wanna have breakfast...
M1: GET UP, YOU STINKING MONKEY
M2: Huh?

8.30: I trudge into the bath, slip over the soapy floor and almost ensure that I don't see the place again for a while
8.45 - 8.55: Gobble down breakfast while watching completely bewildered looking fachchas wander around aimlessly with their breakfast plates.
9.00 - 12.20: Marketing Class, and we end up playing the Beer Game. Without any beer, of course, if only our educational institutions were a bit more fun, I would have taken to this game rather wholeheartedly. What's this balderdash about too much inventory and all, gimme the real thing and all you'll have are backlogs. I guess they'd figured that out and thought matchsticks were a better idea after all. Can't have stuff disappearing half-way down the supply chain, can we? Anyway, the game itself was pretty good, I guess.
12.30 - 13.30 : Another class of marketing, though it's a different course. Nobody's read the case, so we have to do that in class, and get into groups and answer some questions which will be graded. More work.
13.30 - 14.00 : Lunch, thank god for another small mercy.
14.00 - 15.00 : Work on a write-up due in Strategy class at 15.10. My brain's dead, and I just can't think of anything remotely innovative to write. Finally end up writing something.
15.00 - 15.10 : Mad dash from room to computer center to print out the assignment. It's in .docx format, unreadable, damn you, MS. Have to get a print fast and reach class before 15.10, the strat proff locks the door and leaves you outside feeling like a real jackass if you miss getting in on time. Finally manage to get a print, and sprint through the rain to class in time.
15.10 - 17.20 : Strat class
17.20 - 19.30 : More submissions and assignments and readings for tomorrow, try to read up for the fin class later, but I am brain dead
21.30 : Fin class. Good proff, and sounds interesting. Am still following what he's saying, which is a great deal for me.
21.45 : Fall asleep, head on table.
21.55 : Get up with a start, get angry at myself for sleeping when I so badly want to listen.
22.00 : Fall asleep again.
22.25 : Get up, listen to proff for a few minutes, realize I already have no clue what he's talking about. Get really annoyed for having slept off, then mad at the whole world for getting me into this state. Sulk till end of lecture.
23.40 : Lecture ends, walk back to room, angry, irritated and very tired.
23.45 : Go to bed, beyond the point of caring whether there was anything to be read for the next day. Baah!

Does Apple have a self-imposed maximum market share limit?

2009-06-29T03:08:00.001+05:30

With the kind of cult following that Macs have amongst their users, one would believe that Apple’s market share in the PC + Notebook category would be steadily on its way up, since their resurgence as a formidable player in the computer market in the early 2000s. Almost anybody who has made the move to a Mac (yours truly included!) swears by the fragile beasts, and wonders why they didn’t move earlier.

Read the complete article at : http://strat.in/2009/06/does-apple-have-a-self-imposed-maximum-market-share-limit/

Chill second year? Baah!

2009-06-28T06:55:00.003+05:30

Second year is supposed to be this really chill thing... or so I'd heard. Unfortunately, the proffs here had something else in store for us. Couple that with my bad luck that all courses I had opted for had most of their sessions in the first few weeks itself, and you end up having a crazy, crazy start to what is supposed to be a time you enjoy and waddle around in and generally have a blast. So here I am, running around like I used to a year ago, except for the fact that I look at the juniors now and wonder why they never seem to have anything to do; they seem to be having the time of their lives. I am sick and bored and tired to death of case studies. A serious overload of these obnoxious things have completely blocked my ability to think of any solutions other than the mundane for them. Which is kind of sad, since it would be fun to really sit down and brainstorm, and come up with something good. Unfortunately, that kind of thing cannot happen when you sit down to do the case after 8 odd hours of classes and 2 more cases pending for you to tackle right afterwards.

Oh, how I long for the previous trimester... And fervently hope that the next ones will let me go around campus without feeling like somebody's run over me and then turned around and did it all over again.

Kampus calls again!

2009-06-28T06:54:00.000+05:30

A year ago, I landed up at IIMK, naive and excited, eager to enter the big bad world of business, eager to be in the 'big league'. A crazy year it was, with ups and downs that a roller coaster couldn't come close to. The crazy first trimester, the unbelievable amounts of work, the awesome times spent with an amazing gang of friends with a cup of coffee and a plate of maggi in the Night Canteen, the senseless mugging before exams, days and nights merged into one and another and another till it stopped making sense to consider them as separate entities. The stress of summer placements, the joy of getting something you've dreamt of. A long and never ending yet chilled third semester, probably meant for us to destress from the crazy times of the first and second, and before I knew it, 1 of the 2 most awesomest years of my life were over.

20 days ago, and I step back into God's Own Campus. I fall in love with the place again. This time I come back as an experienced campaigner, but the excitement is not gone. Things will be different this year in many ways, we're used to the system, the seniors, our mentors are no longer around, placements are no longer something which can be forgotten about as something far away into the future. Plans have to be made, questions have to be asked, the mind has to be probed, harsh realities have to be faced, to decide... what do I do after this? What, after Feb 2010?

It's been a crazy 20 odd days here, the proffs probably want to ensure that we shake off all the rust built up over the summers properly and get down to work. But it is, as always, fantastic. There is, of course, a sinking feeling at the back of your mind that the clock is ticking, and before you realize it, your time will be up. So I have to make the most of now, enjoy these precious moments and store them in the recesses of my memory, moments which will have to last a lifetime....

Here's to another rocking, awesome year at IIM Kozhikode!

Disabled Thinking

2009-06-07T15:59:00.002+05:30

Why, as a nation, as a society, as individuals, are we so callous to the plight of our disabled?

A week or so in Germany, and I was wondering, why are there so many disabled people on the streets? People bound to wheelchairs, blind people, people on crutches, they seemed a common sight, a tad too common for me. I saw them quite often in public, crossing streets, walking on the sidewalks, getting on and off trains, and getting on with their lives like everybody else. A few more days, and I was crossing the street in the square below my apartment, watching a wheelchair bound guy crossing the street at his own pace, when, like the sudden realization of a ghastly fact, it struck me. There aren’t more disabled people in Germany. It’s just that, unlike back home, they are given the chance to live life as normally as possible.

Turn the page...

2009-05-27T04:18:00.001+05:30

A post which deviates from my current mission of not gassing my readers to death with senti stuff, but I got to get this off my chest.

It's funny how things work out. I think the fella up there has an incredible sense of humour, I can see him tilt back and laugh loudly, watching me down here below. Every time I have questioned him, questioned his actions, asked, 'why?', it's as if he's just saying, turn the page, dude... there's something else waiting for you.

27th April, 2007. One of the lowest days of my life. 5 IIM rejects in the space of 3 hours is enough to shake the confidence of anybody, especially somebody who already doesn't think too brightly of himself. Never in my wildest dreams would I have enough mulled over what would be reality in just over a year - that I would make it through almost all the places I was interviewed for. A year later, and as that undreamable dream turned into reality, I wondered whether I should be taking my passport along to campus. For what, my cynical self asked. One day before summer placements began, the idea of getting a foreign summers in a batch of 250 fellas, with a profile as average as mine, in one of the worst placement years sounded ridiculous. 7 months later, I stand in my room in Germany, wanting to go back the day after I reached here. Turn the page, dude, a voice inside me said. Just under 2 months later I wish I could not go back, I wish I could continue this awesome journey forever. My second weekend trip, I got bored stiff in the space of 2 hours, and thought that maybe I should just stay at home for the rest of the summer. And then, a page turned, and I ended up wishing I had more weekends. Especially since I had traveled during ALL of them.

Sometimes, I think I missed out just because I didn't turn the page, till somebody ripped the book out of my hand, conked me on the head with it and stuffed a new one back in my hands.

Maybe I need to hear it again. It's time to turn the page. And discover something incredible, beyond my wildest dreams.

Why?

2009-05-27T03:47:00.002+05:30

Why would a guy from a city in Eastern Europe, throw the doors of his house open for a random stranger who wants a place to stay for 2 nights, then welcome him in and hand him the keys to his house after knowing him for an hour, so that he could come back whenever he wanted from the party that night? A stranger who doesn't speak his language, who is differently coloured, who comes from a culture so completely different, a stranger he will, in all likelihood, never see again in his life. Why would he offer him dinner, breakfast, anything and everything he had in his kitchen, then help him with anything he needed in the city, give him 2 gifts and one awesome home-made cake, and then carry his luggage to the bus station just before his bus left so that he didn't have to lug it around when he went around the city?

What makes more than a million people across the globe open their minds to this concept?

My couchsurfing experiences have left me overwhelmed by the generosity of the human spirit, and the kindness of souls which I have done nothing to deserve. It has raised more questions than answers, but happy questions, questions which make me ponder over the way we lead our lives, scared, afraid, wary, fearful of the unknown, whether it's a place or a person or a community.

I owe you big-time, Marek. And I owe so much to Couchsurfing. I've reached the end of my travels in Europe, but it has been an exceptional and life-changing journey. In the space of 7 weeks, I've discovered a concept which I hope I can use and contribute to as much as possible for the rest of my life. I am sad that I will be leaving Europe soon, but even more that I will not be able to continue this breath-taking journey which is shaking the very foundations of a dozen assumptions and prejudices of mine.

Kabaddi!!!

2009-05-27T03:10:00.004+05:30

I hit the ground hard, and my head bounced violently off the concrete floor, as the American football player who'd been the reason for me hitting terra firma watched me with a bit of concern. It was my mistake, really, I should have realized that while, in theory, helping the sole Indian girl teach a gang of 200 foreigners the amazingly docile and gentle game of Kabaddi looked like a good idea, in practice, it was rather unadvisable, especially when the group of a hundred foreigners also included some hefty, tall men, apart from a lot of good looking girls. Especially since after teaching them, I couldn't very well not participate, and after participating, not quite take the lead and show them how it's played.

So after the explaining part was over, and it was time for a bit of action, I went into the ring, and well, tried to play the game. The next moment that I remember was the one I described in the beginning. From being the guy who showed them how to do it, to being one whom everybody was looking with the look usually reserved for a quadriplegic, was a rather rapid transition. And boy, it hurt. Not just the bit that my leg was so badly hurt that I could not walk later that evening and could just about hobble around the next day, but because of the realization that a mere casual tackle from that bloke had caused so much damage.

But, I guess I'll take it, for the gang loved the game (so much for it being looked down at in India as uncool and a 'rural' game!). I was in Krakow, Poland, for a couchsurfing meet, and we were picnicking in a small garden. Afternoon was turning into evening, and half the crowd was satiated with gallons of beer and all kinds of food, and wanted something new. And that's when Oindri, the Indian girl who started this stuff came in. It was kind of a tough end to my participation in the proceedings, but then it was looked upon as the highlight of the afternoon by many, so that's fine.

I wonder whether just over a year and half a month ago, I would have, ever, in my wildest dreams, dreamt of me teaching Kabaddi to a group of around a hundred foreigners from around a couple of dozen countries, in a small, unkempt university garden in an east european city which, to be frank, I had never heard of before, and having the time of my life inspite of almost being taken out of circulation.

Life can be the stranger than any, any, any fiction you can think of.

German websites and other such pure evil...

2009-05-12T22:25:00.000+05:30

German webmasters seem to derive a significant portion of their everyday joy from the vile act of sadism. They design a site, all in German, of course, which is fine with me, an act which I don't highly approve of, but which I understand, since the number of customers who will take their business elsewhere is negligible, especially when there isn't much of a choice where to take their business. But why do they then lull these wretched users into a false sense of complacency by putting up a nice, small little link at the top or bottom of their pages saying 'English' is beyond my assumption that most people usually tend to be nice and not mean. The unwary or unaccustomed user, by the lack of his ability to understand a language which he has not been fortunate enough to be born into, tends to click on these things, under the false impression that it will, actually, lead him or her to an English version of the website.

He does that, and sees a page which makes his heart leap with joy; here is finally a business concern which actually values every single customer, and understands the trauma that a visitor goes through when overwhelmed by a string of familiar letters which make no sense to him. He clicks here and he clicks there and makes full use of the multiple tabs options in firefox, only to be suddenly struck by the magnitude of the vile fraud that has been pulled off. For what promised to be an English version of the site was but an English version of the page, and he is stuck with half a dozen brightly coloured and beautifully designed pages in German. Thank god I have a mac which provides me with an otherwise very nice computing experience, for the combination of German websites and annoying windows balloons kindly informing me that my wireless internet connection has now connected would have resulted in one hell of a broken LCD.

Of paid loos and cleaning streets...

2009-05-12T22:22:00.000+05:30

Why does a country which has enough money to clean its roads, not the sidewalks, not the signposts, no, the very road surface itself, ask you for money to use a loo? Especially when it's so frigging cold all the time that you start wondering if they forgot to take the stuffings out of your bladder when they rolled you into use, somewhat like trying to put on a shoe without taking out those balls of paper they put inside. Ok, bad analogy, but I'll get on with it. The point is, you need a loo rather too frequently, and it rather annoys me to pay half a euro every time I need to take a leak. I have no fundamental problems with parting with the money, but why they would charge people for facilities as basic as this, WHEN they seem to have so much money to do things which, frankly, seem ridiculous is really astonishing. I can understand the logic in India - if you don't charge money, you get a stinkpot which will put you off food for half a week - and I am ready to pay half a euro even there to use a decent loo - but doing that in a place which is (was?) rolling in the stuff beats me. I see those funny machines BRUSHING the road surface clean, and it makes me realize that there's another addition to the list of things that I just don't understand.

Strange encounters

2009-05-09T11:26:00.003+05:30

It's funny sometimes how somebody reacts to your acts in a manner which is completely unexpected. I was roaming around Stuttgart station, waiting for my train connection. It was slightly late, and I had nothing to do, which meant that I went around in circles, window shopping, all over the place. Stuttgart Hbf (Central Railway Station) isn't very big a place, so I ended up going across the same places a few times. This attracted the attention of a couple of policemen, who looked at me curiously. A non-white guy, lurking around just like that, with a rather large bag on his shoulders should expect that, I guess, in these times. So then, he approached me, and asked for my papers. He stood at a distance of around 3 to 4 feet from me, which necessitated that I took a couple of steps towards him to hand it over, unless I wanted to play catch with the thing. So I stepped closer. An alarmed look spread over his face, and he stepped backwards. Sometimes, you don't quickly understand what is going on, and this was one such occasion, so I stepped ahead again, following which he stepped back a further 2 steps, and we started enacting some sidey Hindi movie song dancing step.

Suddenly it all became very clear, and I couldn't resist a chuckle, and stepped back with my hand extended, passport in it. I understand that they might fear somebody with his hands in his pockets, for what he might pull out from there, and it's consequences, could vary considerably, but to fear a guy with a 170 cm x 55 kg frame who's approaching you with his passport in one hand and very clearly nothing else in the other is somewhat beyond me. Especially when you are a policeman. And a German one.

We need change :|

2009-05-09T11:26:00.001+05:30

There seems to be a worldwide agenda against the act of giving change. I mean wherever I've been, across India, Nepal, and now Europe, asking for change gets you a reaction where you wonder if there was some grave mistake in the other person's interpretation of what you said, and whether your words sounded like an invitation for indulging in activities which respectable people - giving the other person the benefit of doubt - do not indulge in with strangers.

I just don't get this. It's not as if they are spectacularly rude or selfish otherwise, but when you request some change for a 500 rupee or 100 Kroner or 50 Euro note, they will all refuse to co-operate with a vehemence which is quite astonishing for an exchange which does not leave either parties worse off, and one of them slightly better. I guess there's something about this fundamentally coded in our DNA. Oh, well...

Of English and the lack of it

2009-05-09T11:24:00.000+05:30

Prague is so incredibly tourist friendly... Almost everything is in English apart from Prague, and it's such a relief after visiting some of the bigger western european cities... which seem to be under the erroneous belief that everybody in the world knows their language or the pompous one that everybody who comes there should learn it. Now, I don't mind a country being so proud of it's language that it refuses to have anything else almost anywhere. But to have all sorts of vital information in spots where usually only tourists would read it, only in their native language is rather pushing it and defeating the purpose.

So I was actually thrilled when I kept discovering that they had taken the effort to explain things almost everywhere in English. Even the ticket machines at the small tram stops had English instructions, which, ironically, did not help a group of German tourists at all, who were wondering what to do when faced with a choice of 2 languages, neither of which they seemed to understand much of.

Subway stations in Prague have these large LCD screens which keep showing some videos on subway etiquette. I ignored these, initially, since all of them were only in Czech, but a curious look on the last day made me wish I had observed them properly, for they were the amongst the most brilliantly funny and cute ads I have ever seen. It's remarkable how something as dry as subway etiquette could be taught in a manner so entertaining that you want to let the next train go and keep watching. I was cracking up after watching them one after the other, something which amused Lydia a bit, I think. All the text was in Czech, but it was fairly obvious what they wanted to, for there are not too many different ways in which you can interpret an ad showing a bunch on youngsters occupying all the available seats, and an old lady flying like a flag, holding on to a pole desperately as the train starts, or when a football bounces over a line of passengers' heads on it's way from one youngster to another. Why these range of ads should be only In Czech kind of beat me, but they were still worth watching. I wish I could get them from somewhere off the net, unfortunately, google did not really throw up much that I could make sense of.

Prague :)

2009-05-05T04:16:00.014+05:30

There's something unmistakably charming about Prague which you just cannot pin down. On the surface, there seems to be nothing. But there is something indeed, which makes you feel comfortable and yet bewitched by the old-world charm of this magnificent city.

Right : The Astronomical Clock in Old Town

I got off at the Florenc Bus station on the nippy morning of the first of May. A quick visit to the loo made me realize that it was essential to change my Euros into a few Kroner if I didn't want to pay a 20-30% premium for anything. My couchsurfing contact in Prague, Lydia was supposed to meet me at 6.15 here, and I had half an hour to kill, which I did by roaming around and taking wild guesses about any random female being her.

6.30, and still no signs of anybody looking even remotely interested in me, and I decided to send her a message. Well, she'd overslept, and were meeting at 9. That was fine with me, I could wait for the currency exchange to open at 7 and then drop off my stuff at the hostel. I had used the subway system in Paris and Vienna, so I thought this would be easy too, but the Prague subway takes a wee bit more careful attention. It is not too tough, but they dont have so many signboards and notices and arrows as the other ones. In Paris and Vienna, you would have to rather dumb or compete with a bat for blindness to really miss something, but here, they probably thought that it was not too bad an idea to let the occasional bunch of tourists see the Prague castle rather than have yet another round of shopping at Palladium. Maybe they'll change that, with the way the recession is biting, and make it the other way round for a while...

Right : One of the ancient Jewish synagogues

So I wandered out of some rather tough-to-pronounce-for-my-non-Czech-tongue railway station, and tried to proceed towards a similar tram station. Unfortunately, the council probably tries to keep the tourists off the trams - there are so many of them, or maybe I should say us - it's not a bad idea if you let a few of them rest for a while in the zillions of parks and benches they have everywhere rather than fill the trams. So there was nothing to indicate where I should be heading. I wandered down a street, and found a man walking along. He stopped when he saw me, and a hint of a smile covered his face. I offered a hesitant 'excuse me', to which he his face lightened up with a genuine smile and he went 'How can I help you?', and then proceeded to tell me just where the tram station was. Wow.

The Hostel was seemed rather nice, although I believe they had forgotten to put up a board outside which announced that this, indeed, was HostelOne, so I had to bear the risk of ringing a random bell and have a rather cheesed off Czech fella hollering at me for ruining his public holiday slumber in a language which I couldn't even read, forget understand. What they do with so many consonants and so few vowels kind of beats me.

A quick bath and dumping of my luggage in the luggage room later, I left for Winceslas square where Lydia was going to meet me. We were going to meet under the large horse, which seemed like a good idea, until I saw that the place was swarming with half of Prague's tourist population. A bit more of the guessing-whether-she's-the-one game, na she's looks a tad too old, na she's way too young, na, oops, she's actually a he, later, she walked up to me and introduced yourself. Sometimes it helps to be the only person who looks a fair bit different from the rest. It would have been jolly fun if I was also a white westerner, we would have played catch me if you can around the horse for a few times before realizing that we both had mobile phones and could call each other.

And so we roamed around, all over the place, seeing majestic castles and towering, err, towers and ancient clocks, and really ancient synagogues and a whole lot of a lot else. As usual, we discussed about a zillion things, the Czech Republic, India, Germany and since she was from there, Slovakia.

Right to Left : My right shoe, me, Lydia, Ondrej and Branislav

No, I don't have one exceptionally large foot... just an exceptionally awkward pose :|

It was 3 incredible days. The first one went in seeing the usual touristy stuff, which was rather beautiful, but a wee bit tiring because of so many
tourists. The evening was rather nice, at a Slovak students party, where they tried their darndest to get me drunk, by making me have 3 shots of some rather strong Pear liquor, neat, thank you very much, followed by Vodka and something else which I now find it tough to remember :P Unfortunately, just as things had started to get a wee bit wild, we had to leave to catch the last bus, since this place was somewhere rather far away from the city. We had a dozen odd Slovaks with us, all in different stages of inebriation, who proceeded to ask me anything and everything about India. They were incredibly friendly and nice, and there was never a hint of malice or a trace of superiority in their voices even when we talked about something about India which wasn't exactly nice. I really liked these guys, and it made me want to visit Slovakia a lot. I got off at my stop, and realized to my relief that I was in pretty ok shape to make the 5 minute walk back to my room :)

The second day was spent in sunbathing on the banks of the Vltava river, and soaking our feet into the water to remind us that it was rather cold, and it was not a very bright idea to have a dip in it. 2 of Lydia's friends joined us. They were really fun company and slightly crazy at times, which I believe is a very good trait to have, especially when I have it in abnormal quantities. We then went to this hillock which looked upon the entire city, and was surrounded by a small forest. It was a stunning view, and I wish I could just sit there for an entire day, taking in the sight.

Right : Moi on the hill-top

Sunday, and we had just a few hours left, for I had to catch a bus back to Germany in the evening. We went up the Eiffel Tower replica, not a bad effort, though I think they got bored of it after a while and decided that they needn't make it too tall after all. The view from the top is fantastic, though, and it's well worth the hike up the spiral staircase.

After a long walk down, Lydia decided that it was time to take me to a vegetarian restaurant. I was wondering what they would have in a veggie restaurant in eastern europe, when we walked into proper indian restaurant. A few bites and I couldnt believe myself... this was way better than what I would get in a few places back home! Superb food, and really authentic Indian stuff, not the rich, greasy stuff you tend to associate foreign indian food with. This was the stuff, seriously!

Right : Lydia and a rather zonked looking moi

Another hour spent on a park bench, soaking up the sun, and it was time to go. Prague and its people had left me enchanted and wishing for more. It was a beautiful place with really friendly people, and it left me wondering if I could change my travel plans for next week, chuck Zurich, and somehow find my way into Slovakia or Ukraine instead. I mean where else would some really, really nice girl troop around for 3 days with a twisted and strapped ankle (I realized the strapped bit later :| ) with some random stranger just so that he could see what was not even her native city? Oh, Eastern Europe!

Couchsurfing!

2009-04-24T14:13:00.001+05:30

Couchsurfing. Come again, I said when I heard of it for the first time. Couch..... surfing? Weird name. But well, that's best way to describe it. So this is this awesome idea which lets you meet, and stay with, complete strangers in a strange and unknown city. That's it. There's no catch, there's no punchline. And neither is this some new, weird way to hook up. it's not about dating. At all. It's just about surfing. Couches.

I had a look at the site, and was intrigued. This seemed very interesting. My Eurotrip (ok, Summer Internship) gave me the perfect chance to try this out. I came here, and somewhat developed cold feet. Stay in a strangers house for a night? Meet a random stranger just like that? I balked at the idea, and decided to 'not take a chance' and book into a hostel on the night I was going to be Vienna. But then I reached Vienna, and after half a day of trooping around in the sun and wondering what made me think of the loony idea of traveling alone in a city where I did not even understand the road signs, and where each beautiful monument made me go... hmm... nice... now what do I do with that?... and I thought of shaking things up a bit. I remembered the CS site, and decided to give it a shot. It was a long shot that somebody would respond so quickly, but having nothing to lose, I dropped a few messages to some interesting profiles, with the confidence that I would never hear from them.

I wandered around in the evening, looking for some place where I could decipher what went into the food so that I did not eat something which I did not want to, namely meat, sat in the underground and decided to get off at a random station, and spent the evening on the banks of the Danube. I came back, and to my surprise, I had a reply and a phone number. A call next afternoon and a few messages fixed things up, though I was still rather skeptical of the whole thing. But then what followed blew me away, it was an experience which was simply awesome.
And now I am in love with this concept. I think it's not just a fantastic idea, but very doable. I can hear the usual arguments - it's ok in Europe, it's ok for a guy, it's ok just for coffee, and such blah. But I say, for a moment, open up your mind and trust a person. Just for a little while. Maybe you can ask him or her to have a reservation in a hotel as a backup, and meet up over coffee to see how it goes. Why not? Sure, it would be a tad strange to tell a chap to buzz off after being with him for a few hours, but hey, if not that, you'd have stayed the same old you, closed and scared and not wanting to meet anybody. Maybe you can call a friend over to stay with you when the visitor is going to come, maybe when you stay with somebody, you stay with somebody of the same sex (which somehow does not make me feel any more relieved, though ;) ), there are a hundred things you could do. The CS site also has a reference system where previous surfers and hosts rate how their experience was. Yes, it's not risk free, but then what in life is? Bad things happen, irrespective of what you do, at times, but does that mean we close ourselves up completely? I mean you could take all this care and be safe and then get mowed down by a car the next day (which is quite possible for me in Europe, with my unerring tendency of going to the extreme left of the road each time I turn when riding my bicycle, and consequently landing up right in front of some rather startled motorist who is too freaked out to even be angry at me).
So then, I am game for this. Time will tell if that's a wise thing to do, but maybe I'll trust the collective wisdom of several hundred thousand people who use the website. And disregard that of some people who told me I was stupid to go to a city all alone without knowing anybody or anything. Maybe, I'll just let go and see what happens!

Why it is a big deal...

2009-04-24T14:12:00.000+05:30

Now, my reaction to all of this might seem to be a bit overboard. But then, what are the odds that one will ever end up having this sort of experience? When you meet a complete stranger, and have a fantastic conversation, and end up having a great evening, in a place far away from home, where you know no one, and are all alone. When you see a city the way it's supposed to be seen, unlike a typical tourist, running around and seeing strange edifices and articles, forgetting the last after seeing the next. Yes, I spent half a day from the mere 2 that I was in Vienna doing nothing but taking a walk along a river, but so what? I'd seen half a dozen of the typical tourist spots the day before, but had come away without feeling a thing - I mean, sure, they were beautiful, but so what, what do I do with that - half of Europe is beautiful that way. But that evening on the banks of the Donau - that I'll remember for a long time, as an experience which is indeed rare in a world in which we've learnt to be always wary and watch out for somebody - anybody - whom we don't know.

An Evening in Vienna

2009-04-24T14:05:00.005+05:30

We sat on the grass, inches away from the crystal clear waters of the Donau. The sun descended towards the horizon on the other side, playing with the clouds, turning the water in front of us into liquid gold. A large goose drifted towards us, in the hope of getting a last tidbit before nightfall. Cars whizzed by on the bridge, far enough not to ruin the scene, yet close enough to remind us that we were in the middle of the city. The towering skyscrapers of the business end of the town dazzled in the evening light, seeming incongruent with the rest of the place, yet reminding us that we were in a city, and a large one at that.

It all started with me standing outside Alt Donau station at 5 past 4 pm, wondering whether the girl who had agreed to meet me was going to stand me up, when Barbara came in in a rush out of the exit. I think I rather surprised her by offering to shake hands rather than the usual European cheek to cheek greeting which she was shaping up to do, which I must confess I still find a bit weird. I mean I guess there's nothing wrong with it, it's just that I find it a bit too intimate to do with strangers or friends whom I am not close to (still the quiessential Indian at heart ;)). A few hesitant questions and we were off. Thankfully, she was a fairly talkative person (and I mean that in a good way!), which made things much easier, for yours truly tends to be somewhat shy when around strangers, especially if they are of the female kind. She told me that she was going to show me 'Old Donau', which is what Alt Donau meant, and that we had to walk a fair bit. I was game, though how I was going to do the walk a fair bit part after running a half marathon earlier in the day was worth pondering over. Anyway, I could hardly refuse to walk when she'd so graciously offered to show me the place, so I went along.

It was one of those experiences which leave you wondering how nice life can be at times. I mean, here I was, wandering all alone in a strange city where I did not know the language, and there comes along this girl who takes out what must be the ultimate leisure time of the week - sunday afternoon - to show a stranger around, without having any idea who or how he was, and trusting him to not make her rue the fact that she did so.

So we talked and talked, and found out that there was so much in common that we had, our views towards consumerism, and capitalism, and food miles and dropping groundwater levels, and so many other things about the world, the environment, climate change and stuff. We walked to this nice little cafe a kilometer or so down the river. And then we walked back, and met up with 2 of her friends from portugal, and over some fresh beer, discussed everything from Vienna, Portugal, marriages and relationships in India, elephants and how we didn't quite ride them all the time, to how I had flown to Europe on a flying carpet, and how I had to leave my elephant back home because I couldn't get a carpet large enough for both of us, or rather, considering my size, for the elephant. In the meanwhile, Barbara proceeded to roll her hand-made cigarettes, which was a show in itself, and smoked them one after the other. Somehow I found the smoke from these things quite less unpalatable to those nasty looking productionized ones. The beer was great too, I don't know why we tend to put up with the crap that we usually drink in the name of beer. There was absolutely none of that disgusting smell which tends to put me off the thing here, and it was actually a very nice drink, something which I never thought I would say about beer!

After beer, I realized that I had forgotten by German - English dictionary back in the cafe, so we proceeded to walk back to the place again, and on the way back decided that the grass was too green and the light too beautiful to not enjoy it leisurely by the water, and proceeded to do just that.

The sun set at it's usual-for-here late hour of 8.30ish, and we walked back to the station. A few stops later, it was time for her to go. Just as I was getting over with thanking her, she placed a hand on my shoulder, did the cheek-to-cheek, somewhat startling me, said 'This is how we do it here!', stepped out, and vanished into the crowd.

Running!

2009-04-24T14:04:00.001+05:30

I started running in January this year, more out of interest in seeing how far I could go than anything else. I'd always wanted to run a marathon, but any attempts to do anything like running always ended up with me hobbling for a few days, courtesy my left knee. I decided to give it yet another shot this January, when, after measuring the distance on the IIMK football ground, I proceeded to do 52 rounds, or 10 kms non-stop, something which left me quite amused and thrilled to be frank. Of course, I was dead after that, but I made it a habit, running alternate evenings. I never had any set targets for running a marathon - or a half one -, running for the joy of it rather than anything else. A 16 run in jan end and a 19 km one in the first week of feb convinced me that I could give it a shot, though the 19 km one was an absolute nightmare in terms of the pain I endured to do it.

So then, first obstacle passed. Now for the biggie, the full marathon. That will take some doing, and some real work on my knees. I guess I can make it to the 30 km mark if the knee holds. As they say, when you reach 30, you hit the wall. I don't know how or when I'll reach 42, but it's going to be the same way as now.... enjoying it all the way :)

Running rocks! :)

Vienna Half Marathon 2009 :)

2009-04-24T14:01:00.002+05:30

The hooter rang, or hooted, there was a big roar from the thousands of runners waiting in nervous anticipation, and the crowd started moving forward, one step at a time. The first dozen or so steps were but slow walking, as the multitudes in front took time to gather pace. A few gingerly taken strides at a faster pace, as everybody tried to find their natural pace and rhythm. The walk turned into a slow jog, and then, by the time we ascended the flyover, more or less everybody settled down into their optimum speeds.

I was still trying to find mine, all the nervous energy and excitement of my first half marathon was making me go much faster than was optimum, at this rate, I would tire out very quickly, around the 7-8 km mark. I had to check myself and concentrate. Within a few minutes though, I felt fine, going at a pace I felt was slightly under what I usually started off with, but a conservative approach made more sense when the distance I was aiming for today (21.1 km) was something I had never done, although I had come agonizingly close once, although with too much of a fight and risk of injury.

Around 10-15 minutes later though, I felt a slight pain in my chest, this meant that I was going at a pace faster than was sustainable. This was surprising, but there was no choice but to slow down further. The pain stayed for 10-15 more minutes, and disappeared after some deeper breathing and lessening of speed.

It felt great to running, in Vienna, of all places, in great weather, amongst thousands of similar running enthusiasts, cheered on by so many thousands of people on both sides of the streets. It was a festival, and it felt great to be a part of it.

I reached the 5 km mark in just under 30 minutes, which was my target, so I had underestimated my speed. This was just fine, I was feeling great, things were looking good. A splash of water on my face and some water to drink at the 5 km mark, and I felt good. The next 5 kms were also fairly easy, this was the time when I had settled into my rhythm and warmed up well. The 10 km mark came up soon, again, I was just under 30 minutes, good going, though I had targetted a 25 here. Some more water to drink and splash around a bit, some powerade, and on we went. 11 came quickly, but the next one took a while, and I was wondering whether I was slowing down dramatically or had missed one, when 13 came along. I was beginning to feel tired now, It had been an hour and 15 minutes since the start, and it was getting to me. My shoulders and thighs complained, and a slight something in my left knee reminded me of the injury I was just coming out of and which had kept me away from running for almost 2 months. I was beginning to feel a trace of pain there, and was desperately hoping it wouldn't flare up quickly and prevent a finish, or make it too much of an effort. A similar thing had happened the last time when I had done the much shorter IIMK - NIT Calicut run, and I could barely walk for a few days after that.

The 15 km mark came soon. More water and powerade and a banana this time. 16 and 17 were quite tough, as fatigue started settling in quickly. I was feeling really tired now, and had to struggle to keep going. 19 came along in 10 more minutes, and while taking a turn, I slowed down, only to feel a sharp stab of pain in my left knee. After hobbling 1-2 steps, I picked up pace again, and the pain vanished. I had to keep running to keep it away. But the end was near, 2 kms was doable even in the state I was in, and the new found confidence and joy of the realization that I was going to finish made me increase my pace. I went faster, and overtook several runners who were slowing down. 20 passed, and I forgot all pain and continued along. Soon, the exit came into view. A few large strides as I ran freely and without pacing myself, and I was through and done.

So that's that. Vienna Half Marathon 2009, 2:02:01, after 1 sleepless night crouched in an uncomfortable train compartment, and 3 pizza slices for lunch and dinner together on the previous day (couldn't find anything that I felt like eating). Not great, but not bad either :)

The weirdly suited guy

2009-04-17T19:25:00.002+05:30

It's a funny thing to be wearing a suit and driving a bicycle. There I am, prim and proper, in full-fledged business formals, with a grey suit and a silk tie, riding on a mountain bike, with my trouser ends tucked into my socks to prevent them from getting caught in the chain. That would create 2 possibilities. The obvious one is that my trousers would tear, and the less obvious would be that I might fall. Now I don't know which one of these is worse; both would probably work out to be horrendously expensive. Pain and trauma from the fall does not even come into the picture, that would be small compared to the mental agony I would go through if I had to pay for either a new suit or get my head or hand or leg fixed. No, I am not being a cheapskate, it really is that expensive here!

Anyway, so there I go, driving along, and I get more than a fair share of stares and the occasional smile. I am sure I must be a funny sight! Well, at least I give passersby a reason to smile.

Attempts at cooking...

2009-04-17T19:23:00.001+05:30

So I finally experimented with cooking here. It wasn’t successful in the conventional sense, in the sense that I did not quite end up with what the directions were meant to make me end up with. I’d bought raw pasta which I thought should be easy to make. There were directions on the packet, which I thought I’d translate and use. Theoretically, it all looked fine.

So I did translate the directions. Problem is, they made no sense to me. Obviously, translating individual words didn’t quite give it the meaning they wanted to convey. There was also an assortment of stuff with the pasta, including what looked like Tomato puree, some herbs and grated cheese, all in individual packets. The herbs and cheese I left alone, it felt like too much work to open them, use a bit, and pack them up again so that they wouldn’t go bad. The puree, I decided to use.

So from whatever little I understood from the instructions, and what was kind of obvious in order to make Pasta, I boiled the hell out of the Pasta. Getting bored standing there watching the thing happily making gargling sounds and threatening to spill out, I decided to throw in some tomatoes and carrots, and of course, the puree. 10 minutes of boiling later and when the pasta was threatening to get a wee bit too chummy with the base of the pan, I sampled a bit of it. It was still raw, so I poured in more water, and repeated the cycle. It was a tad better now, but tasted horrendously bland, so I decided to put in whatever I could get my hands on. A bit of salt, lots of chilli powder to give it some colour, a slab of butter for no discernible reason, loads of tomato sauce (the puree and chopped tomatoes seemed to have disappeared with the water), and 2 torn-to-shreds slices of slightly pungent Holland cheese. Some vigorous stirring and scrapping off the bottom of the pan later, I was ready to go.

It turned out to be fantastic. The cheese melted and formed a rich, thick sauce like thingy, enveloping the pasta strands. It was yummy, and was washed down excellently with the last pint of Apple soda that I had left. Finally, a kind of filling evening meal!

Music to my ears...

2009-04-17T19:22:00.001+05:30

There’s this inexplicable joy that one feels when somebody speaks to you fluently in a language which you are good at, after a while. While almost everybody at work speaks good English, it is of course not spoken in the same way as somebody who’s spoken it as the primary language all his life speaks it. There’s this Irish chap here, a senior fellow, who’s been working here for several years now. He speaks excellent German – atleast from what I could deduce – but seemed to be much happy to speak English. Both of us kinda realized that we could speak English the way it’s spoken, and it felt great. I guess the high point was when, while departing, both of us said, exactly at the same time, ‘I’ll see you around’, something which a native German would almost never say, for it is as typically English a phrase (and by that I mean the language, not the people) as one could have, something which would make no sense in other languages.

The Dummy's Guide to using a Shopping Cart in Europe

2009-04-17T19:18:00.003+05:30

A trip to the supermarket here is like trying to figure out what they wrote on the pyramids. Row after row of colourfully packaged stuff, with things on it which I cannot fathom. It takes a real effort to figure out what is what, and I am pretty much clueless about what is there in 90% of the place. I struggle and find what I need - most of the time - and leave, without bothering about the rest. I guess one of these days I am gonna give the supermarket staff something to talk about by opening the german - english dictionary in the middle of the aisle.

Germans seem to want everything in big quantities. Nothing is small, and when you buy something, you wonder how many weeks or months this would last you. But there is no choice in most cases. Even the trolleys are huge, I would fit in one easily.

The first few visits to the supermarkets were hilarious, and we ended up behaving a bit like village idiots. We couldn't figure out how to unchain the trolleys, so we ended up making a circus of the visit, with each of us carrying around a dozen items on us, and trying our best to prevent the jam jar from hitting terra firma. The shop attendant gave us a curious gaze when we reached the till, wondering what the hell was wrong with us. Enquiries with one fella resulted in the knowledge that we had to insert a 1 Euro coin in the trolley to pull it out. Now, we were in no mood to put in 1 Euro in trolleys, especially after seeing the prices of stuff, and hence proceeded to ignore the looks that we got when people saw us lugging ridiculous amounts of stuff. It reached a point where it was not possible to carry all of it around. So we thought of what seemed to be a rather brainy idea. We deposited all our stuff on a stool we found in an aisle. One of us guarded it, and the other went around looking for more stuff that we needed. Then, the other stood guard, and the, err, other went around. Needless to say, this also resulted in a fair number of funny looks from people.

In retrospect, I can't believe how dumb we were. I saw daylight on a visit yesterday, when I found myself lugging too many things again, and decided that enough was enough, and that I was getting a trolley, even if it was costing a Euro. After dumping the assortment of items that I had collected so far in an empty corner of the shop with the hope that some over-enthu shop attendant wouldn't find it and place it back, I went outside the shop, and watched a young girl put out a trolley. She got a bit freaked out I think, so I sauntered off and came back after she was safely inside the shop and did not need to fear me any more. A girl with scarlet hair was placing a trolley back, and I proceeded to ask her if she spoke English. A positive response encouraged me to ask her how I pulled a trolley out, a question which I believe rather surprised her. If she were Indian, I am sure she would have thought "Kahaan kahaan se aate hain yeh log..." (Translated as 'Where the hell do these people come from, not to know even this...'). Anyway, she kindly explained the system, and gave me a what-else look when I asked her if I got my Euro back when I put the trolley back. I then proceed to hand 2 50 cent coins to her and take the trolley before she put it back, and sauntered off inside the shop. Victory was mine!

I think there must have been some rather desperate folks who ran off with the trolleys and sold them for scrap or something. It made no sense to me, otherwise, to have such a system in a country where almost everybody abided with the law and people left bicycles on the streets without locking them at times.

Paris...

2009-04-17T19:16:00.004+05:30

My first weekend in my internship turned out to be a long weekend. Now being a rather lazy sort of chap, a long weekend is something I naturally loved, but the prospect of spending one in a room which did not even have a ceiling fan for me to watch go around wasn't an idea which brought me much cheer. So I decided to visit Paris. With Keertida stationed there for her MBA, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to see Paris in a good way, and also for cheap :P

I reached Paris on Friday night after a stunning 4 hour train journey, which left me marveling at the technical progress and systematic nature of things here. The vistas were fantastic, the windows large and clear, and the weather great. 4 hours passed by in a jiffy. I had directions on how to get to the place she lived in, but I could make no sense out of them for the first 15 minutes. A visit to the information counter resulted in a sad shake of the head and a 'No English' remark. After wandering around in circles and getting exasperated, I approached a random stranger, who did not quite know what I should do, but knew where we could find somebody who did. With his huge bag in tow, he walked at a pace which made me run in order to keep up with him. We went all over the place again, but couldn't make much progress. Finally, he asked another random girl, who was busy smoking a cig. Finding that she spoke English, a quality that he lacked, he promptly deposited me in her care, and vanished before I could thank him. The girl apologetically asked me if I could wait till she finished her cig, which she proceeded to do in a state which made even me asphyxiate. After depositing the remains, she took me to another information counter, where we waited in a long line, before the attendant made me a ticket and drew lines on the metro map to explain what I should be doing. A quick round of thanks later, the girl vanished, and I proceeded to find my way. I had to ask another person, this time a young chap of African origin, who told me the way and shook hands in a hearty, happy manner and hopped into the train which had arrived as we were talking.

A few minutes later, I stood at the exit of Cite Universitaire, wondering what to do now. Keertida was not quite there as she'd said, and the public telephone seemed to accept only calling cards. Thanking my stars on my decision to get a mobile, even though it was a tad heavy on the pocket, I called her, wondering if I had enough balance to make an international call while roaming. There seems to be some strange system here though, calling locally within a country while roaming seems to be cheaper than calling it when you are in your home network. Anyway, it was a rather relieved keertida who took the call, having wondered for over an hour as to where I had vanished, and an even more relieved me, in the knowledge that I wouldn't have to spend the night on a park bench after all.

I later found out that Parisians are known for being snooty and unhelpful, but the experiences I had with 3 people - one of which was definite snooty material, being young, female and undeniably and completely hot - went quite against that, making me feel happy again. Maybe we tend to get a wee bit too cynical at times...

More about the Paris trip later :)

Danke Schön!

2009-04-17T19:16:00.001+05:30

Germans seem to be rather generous. So much that I doubt I would get the same sort of generosity in India. There was I, in the Subway in town, asking for the whereabouts of a payphone after a meal. The shop attendant asked me if I wanted to call India - I guess I look as Indian as anybody could - and then offered me his cell phone for me to take a call. I was a bit surprised and turned down his offer, which left him rather flabbergasted. It's not a tiny amount, 2 Euros, for a call to India, and the readiness to help, even when it cost him felt really good.
A similar incident happened in the loo in Mannheim station, where I was switching trains on my way to Paris for the Easter weekend. It was a paid loo, and half a Euro did not seem like too high a price to relieve myself in the state I was in, so I decided to use it. Now the machine accepted only coins of 50, 20 and 10 cents, and I had one 20, 2 tens and a whole lot of small change smaller than 10. The fella I had asked for help to use the machine saw that I was short of a 10 Euro coin, and promptly handed me one, and started walking off after giving me a hearty smile. He seemed rather surprised to see me run after him and hand over a 5 cent coin, and then again after a few moments, another 5 cent one.
I don't know, but I can't seem to come to terms with this. It's a great feeling to find people ready to help somebody who doesn't come from their land, doesn't look anything like them, and doesn't even speak their language.

First Impressions..

2009-04-17T19:14:00.001+05:30

Weinheim is a small town, and the proportion of non-whites here is rather small. Apart from us (there's this chap from IIM B who's also interning here), and the couple of other asians we've seen, and a few people of apparently Turkish origin who run a few of the eating joints here, there are very few people of other races. So seeing a non-white person seems to be a rare sight here. I wouldn't for a moment say that people on the streets look down at us or are racist, but there is a definite way in which they look at us. It's not a mean, why-are-you-here look, just a confused what-do-I-do-now kinda gaze. They look at you and suddenly look away, or look through you, both of which can be rather disconcerting. It isn't that they are unfriendly either, for I have ventured to talk to a few people on the streets, for some or the other form of help, and they have always been extremely polite and helpful and friendly, even when I talk to them in a language with which they are not comfortable at all.
So it's a bit strange, and you end up being confused too about what to do. If I smile, they give me a hearty smile back, but otherwise they just leave it at that. I guess I should break the ice with a few Guten Tags!

Germany Ahoy!

2009-04-17T19:09:00.000+05:30

Life does tend to surprise you. also pleasantly at times. I remember deciding to take my passport along when I was packing for joining IIMK, and I told myself, right, sure, you'll need that. Very, very sarcastically, of course! A foreign summers is rare, especially in a 'lower' IIM ( L/I/K ), and I do not have an exceptional profile, so the odds were low. But then...
So here I am, and it's been a week so far. A crazy but fun week. Most of my posts til May end will be about the European experience. I wish I could add photos, but I have severely restricted net access, so it's just text for now...

Hrmmmph

2009-04-07T20:28:00.001+05:30

It's as if the fella up there is just waiting for me to make some statements, so that he can go ahead and make me contradict them and look like a bit of an ass, or at least, make myself feel like one. I wrote that piece on flying and traveling by trains not a fortnight ago, and since them, I've taken 3 flights, and am about to take another one in a matter of hours. Some folks who, in spite of being regular readers of my blog, choose to stay friends with me - may god bless them :P - wouldn't let the irony of things escape me, with the effect that I have to get into this huge thing of explaining why I have been flying around like a bloody prince for a week or so. It's all completely justified and necessary, yet, it feels a bit weird to be flying around so much. I realized how much I was doing it when I couldn't care less today between choosing a window seat or an aisle one, something which usually is a no-brainer for me.

Half done :|

2009-04-02T20:21:00.000+05:30

And we're done. After 4 crazy exam days, the toughest bunch of papers I've written ever, we were done, done with first year. I'd looked forward to doing my MBA, to the incredible life that you can have at these places, to 2 solid years of fun and frolic interspersed with a bit of studies.. Most business schools have an amazing culture, and it's an absolutely crazily fun world. There are incidents good, bad and ugly, but then that is life, and there's no better place than a b school to give you a better microcosm of it. After waiting for it for so long, suddenly, half of it was over. It had been a long year and yet a very short one, one filled with countless memories of fun and awesome moments and memories which I would cherish for life and yet it had whooshed past us at breakneck speed. We entered a term with the knowledge that the first 2 or 3 weeks would be bliss, and sure, they were, but before we knew, there were over. A few more slightly work heavy weeks and then exams, and then back to the cycle. 2 such cycles and you go home, where the week or so that you have there passes by at an even faster rate, and you land up in campus again to start things all over again. It's tough to believe that half of this is already over.

Summers was going to be exciting, in a new part of the world, but I would miss campus like hell, especially the care-free aspect of it. Summers would be good from another point of view too, it would make me realize the value of campus life even more, especially given my tendency of taking it for granted by getting too used to it. In campus, you always have this incredible support system for you, especially in first year, when the seniors are there to guide you through almost anything that business school life can throw at you. Doubtless, this would be one of the big things I'd miss during summers.

I packed my bags with a heavy heart, although the rush with which I had to pack them made things easier. The sun started setting in the western skies, and cast its usual orange glow onto the sea of coconut plantations which extended till the horizon. I would be leaving this room for good, and getting an 'upgrade' to one a floor higher, though the view would be a bit blocked by a leafy tree which stood right in front. It was a tree quite popular with a pair of tree-pies, and whether their noisy chirping turned out to be something I looked forward to or tolerated due to a lack of alternatives would remain to be seen. A mad dash with my half a ton of luggage towards the bus waiting to leave for Bangalore from our Harvard steps meant that I forgot to cast a last look at the amphitheatre, now prettily decked up in yellow lights. I descended the steps and looked back, and my first morning here came back to me, when I'd stood at the same spot and looked in awe at the majestic north tower standing tall over the wide, lazy steps next to the admin building and library. It all felt so long ago, and yet I remembered it as if it had happened just yesterday. What a year it had been!

Bludgeoned!

2009-04-01T20:05:00.000+05:30

Pre-exam week rushed by, as usual, with loads of assignments and submission work. Term end is like that, in the last few days when you'd like to catch up with what had been taught in class for the exams, you invariably have to put in all your time for submission work. Exam week was even crazier because of an incredibly heavy workload in terms of classes. There had been a lot of cancellation of classes over the duration of the term, and they all invariably ended up in the last few days for lack of any alternative. In between, I had to rush to Cochin and Chennai for the visa application for summers. The hectic schedule really got to me, and I ended up with a horrible cold and a fever right on the day before the exam.

There's only one way to describe the exam, and there's nothing more apt than the picture below। I was in this state during almost all papers, and I'll leave out a verbal description. As they say, a picture says a thousand words!

A bit of introspection...

2009-03-24T05:59:00.002+05:30

There are events in life which change you. Now that might seem as a bit of an understatement or stating of an obvious fact. But although these things keep happening, we rarely realize what exactly has changed in us due to them. This change is rather subtle, till one fine day it hits you.

Term breaks here are short, and time is scarce. Going back by train takes more or less 24 hours, which means that from the 10 days that we have as a break every 3 months, 2 go in traveling to and fro Pune. Which makes the case for traveling by air, maybe once every trip, decently strong. A lot of people do that, and my parents also keep asking me to do the same. However, I always refuse to, refuse to even travel by AC. It's not because I am a bit of a miser, which I admit to being. It's just that I tend to feel that I am not worth it. My time is not so precious that I fly in and out like a bloody prince.

Now, things weren't always like this. I remember one fine day in April 2007. The IIM results had been delayed (the first time around, when I had set targets for botching things up which few people could match :) ), and I grudgingly had to go and pay fees at IMT-G to reserve a seat. I was without a job and had nothing to do while waiting for the results. And I look back now, and find it difficult to believe what I did - I flew to and fro Delhi. I am pretty appalled by it now. I mean there I was, with absolutely nothing to do, and flying around for no good reason, when I could have perfectly easily taken the train and saved a good lot of money. I now wonder, had the IIM calls gone to my head? Had I become proud and vain and conceited, and thought too much of my time and comfort? Maybe I had. I shudder to think of myself like that, I'd hate to be like that. And yet I was.

Maybe the IIM shocker that year did me more good than I ascribe to it. Maybe it just prevented me from turning into one of those conceited, pompous buggers who think no end of themselves. Sometimes, it takes a good, hard shake-up to make things clear. Sure enough, I made it into the IIMs, but without, hopefully, turning into a prick. Somehow, that shock, and the events that followed over the next 12 months or so affected me so deeply, that it has changed me subtly in many ways - at least I believe so. When people ask me, as they often do, why I don't fly down, the answer is clear - because me and the time aren't worth it. It's not just about flying, of course, that is just something which is an obvious change. It's more with the way I tend to look at life and not take things, situations and people for granted. Which I was guilty of doing, for sure, earlier. Maybe I'll stop looking at the professors in IIMK who rejected me the first time around and going, why? Of course, it was never a angry, justify why kind of why, just a curious, scared, one.

Trains rock!

2009-03-24T05:56:00.000+05:30

There's something about standing at the door of a train bogie and watching the world go by which fascinates me to no end. I don't need stunning vistas or incredible landscapes to be passing by - just the mere act of watching the world go by somehow is enough.

I was traveling to Chennai, and after a long nap, I was at door, watching the evening sun turn the world a golden yellow, lighting up paddy fields and coconut trees. The air played with my air, and a sense of peace engulfed me. It felt good. Life was, as it often tends to be currently, a bit of a mess, but this was good. And then it occurred to me, how much I love train travel. And it made me wonder - why am I flying down to Pune at the end of the term. Flying, while fascinating in terms of the effects of the joyride - especially the g forces during take-off and landing - is a rather boring way to travel. Traveling is an activity to be enjoyed for me and air travel makes it to mechanical and mundane. I really believe in the adage that travel is all about the journey rather than the destination and air travel pretty much sucks out all the joy out of that.

I looked at the outside world, and I realized why I'd always chosen to take the train, and specifically, the non AC compartment. And I wished I could always do this. But I knew I couldn't. In a job, time was going to be too short - for both me and the company - to allow me the luxury of traveling by train. Then, there was going to be no alternative to those depressingly boring, cooped-up-like-cattle air journeys. These journeys were ones to be savoured, savoured for a time when life would be a series of mad dashes from one place to another, without the time or opportunity to stop back and smell the fresh mountain air whooshing past or the loud clatter of the train passing over a bridge, with the swirling waters of some beautiful, lazily meandering river underneath. Oh, how I would miss these simple pleasures of life...

I wanna sleep... :|

2009-03-24T05:55:00.001+05:30

Sleep is a funny thing. I never seem to have enough of it, especially in business school. Yet, when I have the time to get as much of it as I want, I don't use it to sleep. Or, rather, I can't fall asleep. Which is a bit ironic, funny and irritating, all at the same time. For I tend to fall asleep everywhere, and at all times. In class. In the library. While sitting somewhere. It just seems like an inescapable fact of life, falling asleep all the time. And then, when I have the time and the place to actually sleep, through some weird mechanism, my body refuses to listen. That is what happens to me nowadays in trains.

I had to go to Chennai for some urgent work. I'd been way short of sleep for around a week before that, caught up in submissions and project work, and I figured that the journey would be a perfect way to reduce the sleep debt before it went to ridiculous levels during the exams. And sure enough, I started drifting into a nice, fuzzy sort of slumber when I lay down on my berth and plugged in my iPod. And I did fall asleep. But then, sharp at 3.30, when not a soul was awake in the train, I woke up. And I was wide awake. And try what I did, nothing would make me even remotely sleepy. I tried music, but that didn't work. I thought of mucking around with the laptop, but that was a bit awkward since I couldn't sit up straight on my upper berth. So then I proceeded to do what I like doing the most during train journeys - get out of the cold as hell AC compartment and watch the world go by at the door. There's something about this which can make me do this for hours and hours, whether it's daylight or dark, morning or evening, some stunning forests passing by or an urban landscape with its filth and glitzy lights and people waiting impatiently at railway crossings. Which is all fine, but the important point here was that instead of reducing the debt, I was adding onto it. Oh boy...

Almost done...

2009-03-24T05:54:00.000+05:30

This term has been rather long. Which is strange, because it isn't really. It's just around 5 or 6 days more than the previous ones. Yet it felt as if this one would never get over. Which is a bit funny since the first half passed by with some or the other activity going on for every weekend. Suddenly, we had mid-terms, and that was followed by some of the most dreary weeks I have experienced here.

Well, anyway, that's over now. It's almost term end, with around a week to go, which should pass by rather quickly, on account of exams. The last 10 odd days have been fairly crazy for me, as I've been running around for the visa work.

It feels weird. On one hand, this term has been a tad boring, and I want it ti get over quickly. On the other hand, this is our last week here as juniors, or now, more correctly, as first year students. So I want to hang on to it just a little bit longer. As always in life, I am a bit confused, wanting a bit of everything and a bit of nothing. I often suspect that the fact that I can't do much about most of the things in life is actually a good thing due to the amount of time I spend in being confused. Anyway, so it's almost over and done with...

Farewell

2009-03-20T05:53:00.000+05:30

3 am. A few dozen souls strewn around along the walls. A tired DJ taking yet another request for the 'last' song. A sad looking bartender trying to tell half a dozen folks that the booze was indeed over. And a hundred and fifty odd, rather dazed and somewhat drunk fellows wondering how it could all get over so quickly. How 2 years, and for many of them, 2 of the best years of their lives, could pass by so quickly. How they would adapt to the world outside again, and live 'normal', routine lives. Another couple of hundred folks thinking that they'd be in the very same place, just a year down the line, and that how horrible that would be.

We often tend to live life by taking for granted the things around. And so it was, for almost a year. We ran around, studied a bit, partied a bit more, and rotted around a lot more, all with the supremely arrogant assumption, atleast a sub-conscious one, that we would be able to do this, live this incredible life of comfort and be surrounded by friends, and have it all for the rest of our lives. And then, suddenly, it strikes you, one fine day, that things will change, change forever, and we will miss these days like we have probably missed nothing else in life. That was what the farewell party did to us juniors. While the seniors went around hugging and saying good-byes, we went around wondering how it could be that we had only a year left, and only 9 months of that on God's own campus.

Parties here generally tend to be rather wild and vigorous. Parties are enjoyed out-and-out. The mood is exuberant and ecstatic. Yesterday, however, felt different. It was as if everybody wanted to enjoy this party, this one last party by not completely letting go. There was a sense of restraint and a feeling of nervous laughter in the air.

So that's it from the seniors. They have been an interesting bunch, and there's no doubt that life here would be much tougher and much less fun without them being around. I'd always thought that the junior-senior thing was a tad overhyped, but after landing up here, I'd say I was wrong. They've helped us get used to the system, find our ways through and at times around it. They've been there to guide us through the nonsense that business school life tends to degenerate into at times. They've been there during testing times, like during the summer internship selection process to give us a sense of perspective and keep reminding us to look at the bigger picture. And now, suddenly, they are gone, and we are left to ourselves here for a year. It's not that after a year here we can't really take care of things ourselves, but having somebody you can always approach for just about anything kinda rocks. And for that we'll miss them.

Purpled!

2009-03-16T05:50:00.000+05:30

I confess, I have never been too fond of holi. Yeah, it was great fun as a kid, but then somehow it turned out to be one of those things you tend to grow out of. So I rarely play it, and every year for the past 5-6 years, I've found some excuse or the other to avoid playing it. Not so this year.

There's this thing about campus. Unless you are a real recluse and a people-hater, there's little chance of escaping from celebrations here.If you don't turn up on your own, chances are that a nice little gang of boisterous fellas will turn up at your door, and haul you off to wherever the celebrations are happening. Which is what happened a few days ago on holi. There was I, sitting quietly in my room, hoping that they would somehow miss my absence, and thanking god for sparing me the trouble of 'uncolouring' myself post the festivities, and tending towards a nice little afternoon siesta, when there was a loud banging on my door. Oh dear. Within minutes, they'd barged in (I could have technically kept them out by refusing to open the door, of course, but the ruckus they would have created would not quite have been worth it) and after much bargaining, I managed to throw them out and change into something which I afford to lose.

This proved to be a rather sensible thing to do, for the moment I went outside again, they promptly pulled at my tee, and tore the whole thing apart. Great.

I was hauled to the center of celebrations, where the rest of the revellers fell upon me with glee (they were bored of recolouring the already coloured souls, and were looking around desperately for somebody new). I was thrown into a tank full of purple water, and dunked in a couple of times for good measure. Then, I was promptly purpled, from head to tow.

Surprisingly, I liked it. It was a tad too violent for my taste, but it was a load of fun. Campus activities are like that. They usually tend to be rather on the violent side, but still a whole lot of fun. Unfortunately, at that time, I had missed one crucial point - how tough it would be to get rid of the colour. First off myself, and then off my poor mac keyboard, which I had used without my fingers being completely decoloured.

So back I came to my room, and started the process. The next 3 hours went in a crazy bout of scrubbing and scrubbing and more scrubbing. All that managed to do was remove a wee bit of the colour. So then, more scrubbing. All sorts of ideas were being floated on the internal messenger to get rid of the colour, some of them normal, some a bit whackly, some outright bizzare, and a few, plain scary.

Finally, after 4 baths, trying body wash, hand wash, bar soap, shampoo, and moisturizer+cotton swabs, I finally managed to look like a shade of my previous self. Then, it was the turn of my mac. The poor thing had to ensure a scrubbing off a lifetime, during which, since I had forgotten to switch it off, I ended up renaming a whole lot of files. So my mac ended up being christened as 'mjadjad7777fffff' for a few days. Which rather intrigued me when I first noticed it, and puzzled me to no end. Thankfully, and hopefully, that was all.What I had missed, however, and which I realized to my chagrin when I got a few weird looks in the city mall the next day, was that I had completely forgotten to scrub my toenails, with the result that I must have been quite a sight with bright purple toenails. Now, Kozhikode isn't as happening a city as Pune or Mumbai, but I doubt it would be that accommodating. Sigh. Painted toenails. Bright purple. Aaaargh! As if getting a girl was not tough enough in the first place!

Bananas, Part 2

2009-03-14T05:28:00.002+05:30

So there're aspects to banana loving which I missed out on. Oh boy.

It's all nice to have the yellow fruit as an occasional snack to prevent you from tearing yet another packet of chips. But then that means you have to have the stuff in fair numbers in your room. Unfortunately, that brings with it its own set of problems. Which I realized a little too late into my banana obsession.

I used to wonder why the room smelt a bit funny when I entered it lately. Being the lazy pig that I am, I never pursued it too much till, one fine day, it became a tad unbearable. The combination of the tropical fruit, a nice, warm and humid climate, and extended periods of the room being completely closed meant that I would almost gag every time I entered the place. Trust me, a warm room full of the smell of warm bananas does not make for a pleasant experience. But then I had little choice, what with the resident feline making it a point to prove it to me that she owned the area comprising of my room, whenever she could gain access to it. Now, I have no problems with felines. They are rather nice creatures. But this one's slinky, and really scared of anything that moves, and scares the living daylights out of me given half a chance. So closed it has to be, the room.

The second problem is way more annoying. The campus is full of these largish red ants, who pretty much infest the place. I got the shock of my life when I first entered the room and found it a wee bit full of them. Now, red ants are scary. They have a nasty bite, and I'd give them a wide berth on most occasions. Thankfully, the Kozhikode variety was much more docile. They were the most unaggressive creatures around, and never bit. That was a relief, and improved relations between parties to a great extent, but I still didn't fancy them going all over the place. A bit of ant chalk did the trick for a while. Until I got the bananas.

Apparently, I am not the only one who loves bananas. So every time I get the stuff from downhill and keep it in my room, the whole place is pretty much swarming with ants in a while. Entering a hot, humid, and pungent smelling room full of ants on a regular basis is not something which I take to too kindly. Unfortunately, I don't have much choice here, so I have to live with these side-effects. Maybe I should just succumb to temptation and buy one of those stalks of bananas having a hundred odd of them and hang it in the balcony, outside the room. But then, I somehow foresee trouble from simian quarters in case I do that. The last thing, and this is laster than not wanting ants and a warm, smelly room, I want is to find a happy langur, having managed to figure out a way to open my balcony door, sitting pretty on my bean bag, eating my bananas!

When the days drag by...

2009-03-13T22:26:00.000+05:30

It's a rather dull time on campus here. All through this, we had something or the other going on. Most of first term passed by in a whizz, with assignments and classes and fake assignments from seniors and trying to cope up with the crazy schedule. By the time we had any time to breathe, it was second term, and with it summer placements. Second half of second term went in recuperating from summers, and enjoying the first real slightly relaxed time we had since landing up here. The first half of the third term passed by quickly in a spate of campus events and long weekends. And then, we landed up here, third term, second half.

Hmm. The hitch is, there is not much to do. Either the workload has decreased dramatically, or we have managed to adapt. Whichever it is, this is getting on many people's nerves. It's definitely on mine. It's kinda frustrating to be driven up the wall for around 7 and a half months by the workload, and then realize that you have nothing to do. it doesn't help that Term 3 is the longest of first year.

So here we are, waiting for term 3 to meander its way to an end. I am sure that relief, more than anything else, will be the paramount emotion on campus on 31st March.

The Land of errr.... bananas

2009-03-04T23:11:00.001+05:30

Maybe it's a silly thing to come to a new place with a lot of expectations. It doesn't help when the place has a name which makes you think that those expectations aren't fanciful. Like Kerala. Kerala means the land of coconuts. Now forgive me for assuming that the land of coconuts would have plenty of coconuts. Actually it did have a lot of coconuts. The only issue was that it had a tad too many. So many, in fact that they grew all over the place like vermin. So nobody bothers to shimmy up those long things called coconut trees and fetch the humongous things down. And since everybody has enough of them growing in their backyards, and their foreyards - and hey when did this one come up in the driveway - nobody in their right senses would buy them. So that left the third biggest city in Coconut-land effectively coconut-less.

Which is fine in the normal scheme of things. But then, as it were to happen, I love these things. And I came here with dreams of a coconut for breakfast, and one for lunch and one for... you get the drift. Which is what I tend to do when these things are available in plenty and are inexpensive. Which is what I did on a trip to rural Andhra, when I had enough of them to make the poor shopkeeper get cursed by his wife for not getting down more from the tree the previous evening.

So Kerala isn't, unfortunately, the land of coconuts. What it, however, is definitely, is the land of bananas. Yes, bananas. Tonnes and tonnes of the yellow stuff, hanging all over the place, in every nook and cranny. Any shop worth it's salt sells bananas. They sell them, ranging from yellow to red, tiny and medium to gargantuan, sugary sweet to starchy tasteless, beaten black and blue to smooth, untouched glossy yellow. There are shops which sell only bananas. One small hole in the wall, with a dozen odd stalks with a hundred odd bananas on each, and one heck of a contented shopkeeper swatting off flies and enjoying his afternoon siesta. For he knows, this is safe business. Nobody would be bananas enough not to eat bananas. His income, although nothing approaching astronomical would ensure a happy for himself and his progeny. Which is what most people in Kerala are more than happy with (damn, I wish I was as content as them).

Now, I hated the stuff before coming here. No particular reason, other than the taste. But then the lack of a overtly edible alternative in the form of good mess food drives you to places you never though you might reach. So now, I love the stuff. Yes, bananas. So much that I ate... how many of them today.... yes, 6. So now, I binge on bananas. Wow. How sad can life be! Atleast it's better than gulping down other random packed stuff, but bananas? 6 of them in a day? I mean, come on. Well, there's some solace from the fact that the damn things are dirt cheap and don't make a banana-sized hole in my pocket. I know, terrible joke. But then the yellow stuff ain't too well known for brainpower increasing nutrients.

They were right. MBA does change you. Completely :| Whether it's about a new found love for bananas or a significant decrease in the quality of my jokes. Sigh.

Love it or hate it?

2009-02-27T23:18:00.001+05:30

There's something about Kozhikode, the city. Something which us big city folks will never understand. Something which we won't really try to understand. There's something quite incredible at being able to keep your helmet pegged on the rear view mirror and saunter off without any worries that somebody will try to make a quick buck from it. Or your wet rain jacket draped over the seat, rather than lugging it around and making everything else soggy. And rest assured nobody will touch it. I've got so used to this that I've started forgetting my bike keys on the bike, something which although hasn't caused me any loss yet, is not a good habit to pick up when you occasionally go back to the big bad world.

Or the traffic for that matter. This is one of the most disciplined cities I've seen yet when it comes to traffic, if you exclude the schumi-driven local buses of course. People stop before the stop line, not over it, not 2 feet ahead and just before the zebra crossing or as Puneites proudly do, halfway over the zebra-crossing. If the right lane is for turning right and the left for going straight ahead, not a soul will be on the wrong side, and the straight moving traffic will continue smoothly without the usual snarling and swearing which is an omnipresent feature of Indian roads.

It's so brilliant to stay in a city where the land isn't under severe pressure. Take the beach road, for instance. In any town, this would be prime property, and every inch would be occupied. Not so in Kozhikode. The street is wide enough for an occasional car to pass, and the footpath on the beach side is one majestic tiled-up walkway with fountains (although I've never seen them working) and benches and grass carpets and quaint supposed-to-look antique lamps.

Take the people too. I've never seen a more contented looking bunch. There is this serenity and peace about them which is completely absent in any typical big city.

Yet, most people on campus aren't too thrilled with the place. They want nightlife, pubs and bars and fancy restaurants and a bit of vigour and vibrancy. Nothing wrong in that of course. There's no doubt that this place is slow. Even for me, a big-towner with the attitude of a small-towner. I loved this place initially. Then, slowly, it started getting to me a wee bit. Now, I am a bit confused. The lazy, easy-going side of me loves it. There's nothing quite like a quiet evening on the beach by myself, or a leisurely drive down the empty streets at midnight without running the risk of being driven over by a drunk idiot. But then, you also want a wee bit of fancy spots and some good fooding joints. Which Kozhikode sorely lacks. Which does make me feel like getting out of here as soon as possible. But then, there's this other side which will miss the good bits, which good ol' Pune reminds me within a few hours of landing up there! As usual, I am confused!

Some decent South Indian fare please...

2009-02-25T15:43:00.000+05:30

You go into a new land with some expectations, and a bit of trepidation. I came here with quite a bit of the former, and not much of the latter. I don't mean that about life, though you can easily apply that there too. I talk about experiences culinary. South Indian food has always been an attraction, and I prefer it over anything else given half a chance. And so I came in here expecting the next 2 years to be an absolute delight, in food terms. Unfortunately, I did not quite know that Kerala is a wee bit different from the rest of South India when it comes to food. I came here expecting crisp, steaming dosas and piping hot and spicy sambar, which would be washed down with some superb filter coffee. Unfortunately, what I did end up with were the limpest, whitest dosas, which've just about been half a metre away from a pan I've ever come across. And sambar which was well.... I don't quite know how to put it. And the coffee.... somebody remind them that it's south India for heaven's sake. I guess making filter coffee is too much work, doing all that boiling and filtering. So they all just make instant coffee. Which, if I wanted, I could very well make myself. So here I am, in the heart of South India, eating and drinking stuff which would make the worst of Pune's south Indian eateries cringe. Baah.

Tidying up sucks!

2009-02-24T15:41:00.001+05:30

It's funny how silly things can make you nostalgic. There I was, 'untidying' my room, trying to turn it from something which resembled a typical hostel room into something which resembled a slightly atypical hostel room. That mostly comprised of folding clothes and keeping things in places where they ought to be in in the first place. As usual, I stumbled across (relatively) long-forgotten scraps of paper, a bill here and a derivation there, a few hurriedly solved sums on the night before a paper. And suddenly this wave of depression struck me.. all of this felt so far away. And a year later, I'd be doing exactly the same thing, except that I'd be packing it for good. Heck, I wasn't even packing for leaving the place for summers, and I was getting nostalgic. Boy, there's going to be a problem next year!

Bliss!

2009-02-20T20:40:00.001+05:30

Post-exam weeks are brilliant. I might have said this before, but I'll reiterate it. They are simply brilliant. The mere thought of having absolutely nothing to do after polishing off lunch induces a state of bliss which is unparalleled. Maybe I'd watch a movie or two. Or have a long nap to make up for the hopeless waste of time the previous night. Or read the book which I borrowed from god knows whom god knows when. Or add a step to the pick-up-the-newspaper-every-morning-and-put-it-on-the-old-newspaper-pile routine by actually reading it. The possibilities are endless, and the mere thought of it, so relaxing!

That was how the week after the mid-sems went.

Yet again, exam week :|

2009-02-14T15:39:00.000+05:30

Exam week. Not a great way to start with it, with a Financial Management quiz on monday. And a couple of lectures. The next 4 days would be intense, with hundreds and hundreds of pages of reading material to make my way through, stay up all night and then stab at the answer sheet in my severely sleep-deprived, groggy state. That's the way it was. It started with the FM paper, another finance paper which left a major chunk of the junta scratching their heads. The remaining 6 papers were mostly un-analytical, which was good in a way because it made things less black or white in terms of scoring in them, but which meant that you had to read tonnes of material. Operations Management was an exception, with an out and out analytical paper.

As usual, I had to make things dramatic atleast once, with my usual exam paranoia. This is something which hits me during exams, for no fathomable reason. It starts with me thinking of doomsday scenarios, of me not being able to solve anything in the paper and flunking. This quickly develops into outright paranoia, and leaves me in a hapless state, at my wits end. However, I somehow manage to make use of whatever time is there, and go through the stuff properly. The end result, as always, is ironic... I end up doing the best in the particular subject. It happened in the first sem in accounting, and I ended up creaming the paper. It happened this time in Operations Management, when I drove myself crazy wondering what all stuff he'd taught in class. It took a rather annoyed and at-the-end-of-her-tether Namrata to point out that I'd been reading notes which had been made well over 2 years ago, and which were not at all relevant to our batch. So finally, after a dramatic night, I closed my laptop shut at 6 in the morning, and went out and solved everything.

Friday evening, and finally, we were done. This would be the last really stressful exam, atleast physically, for the end-sems were scheduled across a weekend again. Next year, thankfully, we'd be having much fewer subjects, so we'd be spared the agony of going sleepless for almost a week.

Chill? Huh?

2009-02-07T15:37:00.000+05:30

Third sem was supposed to be nice and chill. It's turning out to be anything but that. After 2 weeks of fairly low academic pressure, suddenly the knobs were turned t maximum. So we had one marathon week of 6-7 hours of lectures per day, followed by 2 in which we had a quiz almost every day. I know that the intention behind having regular quizzes is to make us lazy folks atleast glance through the books once before the exams, but having one every day for a fortnight kind of defeated the purpose. For after the first few, everybody became incredibly bored and tired of the whole thing, and stopped studying, except for the last 30-45 minutes they got after lunch and before the quiz.

But you can't have a quiz and not relax the day before, even if you dont study. Atleast I cant. It stays at the back of my head and keeps poking me when I am doing something which does not fall under studying. Which means almost everything, and which makes things mighty irritating. So, effectively, you dont study, you drive yourself up the wall and you turn up for the quiz every afternoon when you'd rather having a nice nap, cursing and swearing at the powers to be. I doubt that's what they had in mind. But then a 'meeting of minds' between the admin and students is rare in our academic system. Knowing how incredibly enthusiastic people are in general, I have a feeling it's a good idea though, the way things are!

So there ended week 5 of the third sem, which left us with another one to tackle in this half of the sem. As always, time has flown by. Why wouldn't it, of course, when you rot around and have a whale of a time when the going's good, and then watch the days fly by when you are ear deep in work..

A hair-razing experience

2009-01-30T02:59:00.003+05:30

You land up in an alien land, and things happen which you end up remembering for a while. One such incident occurred a few months when I attempted the usually-simple task of getting a hair cut.

It was the day before our summer internship placements were starting, and I decided that going into interviews with a hair like a mop wasn't a bright idea when my CV didn't boast of any jaw-dropping achievements. Nor was my knowledge of business subjects enough for the interviewer to ignore the 2 obvious not-so-great things. And since the only thing I could improve on of these 3 was my looks, or more specifically, my hair, I decided to risk a hair cut in Kozhikode, nay, Kunnamangalam, the suburb which is currently home. With a bit of trepidation I drove down the 2 km road to the campus main gate, and found a barber shop. There were 3 chairs inside. 1 was occupied, and a content looking chap was leisurely and almost casually chopping off the locks of an equally indifferent customer.

'Kitna time?'
Some gobbledook which I presumed was mallu.
'Mallu nahi ata'
Gobbledook again.
'Hindi?'
Shakes his head with a sad look on it.
'Time. How much? Haircut'
'10'

10 minutes sounded like a fair estimation to me, so I sat down, trying to get myself enthralled by looking at the act of him chopping off hair. A few magazines were strewn around, but they all were mallu and had fancily-posed members of the weaker (whoever has coined that phrase has obviously been nowhere close to South India) sex on its covers. Instinct warned me to stay away from them and not flip through, and I wisely did so. The dusty black radio belted out mallu numbers interspersed with the chatter of an excited RJ, again in good ol' mallu. I cast a bored glance at the instruments of his trade strewn on the table in front of the large, wide mirror, and one at my watch. 15 minutes had passed.

'Time. How much? Haircut'
'10'
'10 hua. More?'
'10 only. I cut his hair. Go. Tea. Back in 45 mins. Then 10 mins.'

Houston, we have a problem.

45 minutes to have tea? When you have a customer waiting? My big-town upbringing was appalled at this work ethic, but it cleared looked like I was the needy person in the transaction, and he didn't care two hoots about whether I took my business elsewhere. So off I went, back to campus, returning three quarters of an hour later, hoping that another customer had not replaced the old one, and that I would not be forced to go through the cycle again. I was partly correct, no customer had replaced the old one, but the owner of the shop was nowhere to be seen. I guess I don't learn from my mistakes, for again I had forgotten to get along something which would enable me to pass time without wanting to make a haircut redundant (though it would take a fair bit of frustration for me to pull out all of my hair). The more I waited, the more agitated I got, so after waiting for 10 odd minutes, I decided to push off and buy some odds and ends which the campus shop refused to stock for some obscure reason.

After another quarter of an hour, I returned. I was in luck this time, for the shop was empty, the mandatory cuppa had been consumed, and the owner was actually present inside. Success was, finally, mine. Or so I thought, until he declared he'd finished and I saw my scalp in its entire pristine glory, through the short stubble of hair he'd kindly left behind. Exactly 10 minutes later.

Quizzes galore...

2009-01-30T02:56:00.000+05:30

If marathon-week was crazy, the next got on our nerves, with a quiz scheduled every day. It started with a surprise Human Resource Management quiz on Tuesday, much to chagrin of the bleary-eyed, just out of a long-weekend junta. Wednesday was the turn of Business Law, which wasn't quite the easiest-you've-ever-seen-paper which was promised. Thursday, and Indian Economy had us pondering over GDPs and deficits from the Nehruvian era till yesterday. And last, later today, will be a quiz on Operations Management. The weekend isn't going to be much better, with a Financial Management quiz lined up for Tuesday. Oh boy!

A pleasant experience...

2009-01-29T01:32:00.001+05:30

A nasty little bug decided that my right eye was a good place to commit suicide, the consequence of which was that I found myself trooping all over the place in a hospital in Kozhikode on an otherwise sunny morning. I came in expecting a long day ahead, with multiple queues and heavy use of sign language. What I went through, however, was a revelation. It was a spacious, impeccably clean place. Not posh, not jazzy, but well-designed and functional. All support staff understood english and spoke it well, the counters were easy to find and directed me to the next ones properly. There were separate counters for getting an appointment, for billing, cash payments, and for buying medicines. They'd take the prescription from you, ask you to sit and call out when they'd managed to fetch it. There was a nice little coffee machine, and the rates were not outrageous. Neither did the doctor charge exorbitant consultation charges, definitely nowhere close to what I expected considering how well maintained the place was. All in all, it was a good experience, and way, way better than what I've had in the best hospitals in Pune, which are, at best, a chaotic mess. There are some things Kozhikode which are really impressive, and which put 'better' developed cities like Pune and Mumbai to shame.

Bludgeoned!

2009-01-24T02:54:00.000+05:30

Week 3, and the fun stops. One of the craziest schedules in first year, terms of lectures, with 2 days of 6 lectures in a day, 9 to 9 with 1 free slot. It pretty much drove everybody up the wall. Even other days were bad, with 5 lectures each, and by thursday, everybody was begging for mercy, and landing up in class glassy-eyed and with a distinct 'eh, what?' look. It was a real toughie, and the long weekend after that was a much required relief.

Backwaters

2009-01-20T02:53:00.000+05:30

The seniors had been going ga-ga over it since day 1, and most people from first year were rather curious about how it would be, IIMK's annual cultural-cum-everything-else event, Backwaters.

It was a weekend which disappointed at first, then slowly gathered steam, and ended with a finale that took our breath away. Having a campus located more or less in the middle of nowhere can be slightly problematic when you want a rocking fest with tons of visitors dying to get in. It's tough to expect that we could successfully compete with schools in the big cities, but then this logic is difficult to digest even when you know it makes perfect sense.

Saturday night was culturals night, with some rather good performances from visiting teams. The big thing, however, was the backwaters party that night, which as usual, rocked. A party was due since long, the last one being the Summers one, 2 long months ago. Many clouds had passed under the auditorium since then, and a biggie was due. It started late, and ended later than ever. It would be the last 'mess' party for the seniors, for they would soon leave campus to enter the big bad (literally, now!) world.

Sunday evening started slowly with a classical instrumental performance which was excellent but kinda dull for people who didn't understand the stuff. The finale, however, was something which will stay in our memories for a long, long time. Gaurav Dagaonkar, IIMA alum and a full time music artist now, delivered a performance which had us dancing, shouting and jumping all over the place. It was nothing short of brilliant, especially since we finally had somebody who knew the culture and the attitudes so well and could identify with them. An outsider, as much as he tries, can rarely understand these things, and to have someone who did, and weave that understanding into some brilliant music, was incredible.

6 Random Things

2009-01-15T20:20:00.002+05:30

I knew about email chain letters and such tripe. But a blogging chain 'letter' was news to me, when good ol' chuck ordered me to do as told. Which was to write a blog on 6 things about me. Rather arbit, you'd argue. So did I. But then, what the heck... So here I go.

Lifting the 'rules' straight from Chuck's blog...

1. I shall write 6 random things, and 'tag' six people to continue this
2. They shall proceed to write six random things, and 'tag' six random people
3. They shall intimate me when done.

Hmmm.

1. I think running is one of the coolest activities in the world.

2. I think I am gonna need a crash course on anti-procrastination first thing after I am out of here, if I am to do anything worthwhile again in life.

3. The best part of the day is from 6 to 9 in the morning after a night without any sleep.

4. A good way to stop making people talk about how thin I am is to stop cutting my hair, so that they just run away without saying anything.

5. Not having large eyes is an incredible stroke of luck when attendance is compulsory in a MBA course.

6. Having a valley facing room a mere 15 kms away from the beach makes you stop valuing both these things.

Now, nominations..... what a time, when dear ol' blogspot has decided that it does not like my bloglist too much, and has therefore deleted the list of blogs I follow..

I now nominate...... ( scratches head ) the following :

- Arslan Aziz
- Rohan Jaikishen
- Ankit Agarwal
- Vaibhav Saxena
- Svetlana Mahajan
- Persis Taraporevala

Yippee, it's done :P

The holidays continue.... well, almost..

2009-01-14T20:19:00.001+05:30

The first 2 weeks of a term are such bliss. Classes are just starting, with no submissions and assignments. With just 4-5 hours of lectures every day, life's good. You can rot around and waste time without feeling guilty, and loaf around doing anything anywhere. Especially now that summers and all that is done with, and some fun events like Sangram ( the IIMB - IIMK sports meet ) done and IIMK's signature event, Backwaters coming up, it's celebrations all the way!! Enjoy it till it lasts, which isn't going to be too long, but what the heck! :)

2 subjects really catch my eye this term.. Environment Management and Business Law. Environment Management is something which I believe will grow in importance over other conventional courses, as the world struggles to deal with climate change and realizes that business as usual is not quite an option. It's good to see sustainable development and such concepts not being left to 'those greenies', and being made a compulsory course in institutions like the IIMs. Business Law looks interesting simply because law interests me, and whatever little I have read of it didn't bore me in the least. Aah, not a bad term, from the looks of it! Hopefully, that judgement will not change in the coming few weeks!!

2009!

2009-01-06T20:17:00.001+05:30

So along comes 2009. Why is that a mere change of a number makes everybody feel so optimistic about things to come? Just because 8 has changed to 9 should make everything fine, eh? I guess we all need something to clutch at, some reason to drive some optimism into our otherwise pessimistic minds. So that's how I am too, in these first few days of the new year. Optimistic. Happy that 2008 has ended. Hoping that numerology does work and delivers some joy!

Lots of things planned for 09, hoping to achieve at least a few of them... I've been more pragmatic this time around, and have kept slightly more achievable goals. So I'll make a list of the things I will NOT be attempting this year :P

1. I shall not try to do superly well in academics. Not because I don't want to or any such snooty excuses, but because I know I can't :D So I'll enjoy my life and won't.
2. I shall not wake up early every morning. Because that drives me up the wall and is not sustainable from a long-term point of view. I shall accept that I am built for being nocturnal and shall get on with life.
3. I shall not harbour fanciful ideas of dramatically changing my reading habits and start reading philosophy. Especially since I have not read even half a non-study book since landing up here. I shall stick to my (once upon a time) staple diet of Wodehouses, Archers and the odd random book I find interesting. I shall gracefully accept the fact that that is as far I can go. The ethics course text has taught me a valuable lesson!
4. I shall not buy more clothes simply because I am too bored to wash the ones I have :P I shall wash, and reuse and rediscover stuff that I never knew I had.
5. I shall not let my costly bean bag be a repository of a) clothes b) the helmet c) odds and ends from the last shopping trip d) the library book which was due in september e) a collection of issues of the Business Standard since inception.
6. I shall not call people fat when I look more like a scarecrow with a mop on top than a real scarecrow with a mop on top would look like.
7. I shall not leave the balcony door open when I leave the room so that I freak out when I touch something warm and furry inside my wardrobe, which happens to be the cat-who's-always-having-kittens's kitten.

Chilling out!

2009-01-03T20:11:00.002+05:30

There's something so incredible about having a week of nothing to do! A week of sleeping as much as you want, and no tension of work or studies or other such frivolous activities. A week of catching up with people and roaming around in your hometown discovering new additions to the urban landscape. Such are my term breaks, and I welcome them with an enthusiasm which is quite contrary to what my seniors had promised me, saying that I'd get bored in a few days and want to come back. As incredible as Kampus is, there's no way I am gonna be missing it!

So passed by the week in a flurry of activity, and as expected, I was packing my bags with a strong feeling of regret for not spending enough time home. 10 days had passed by in a blur, though, to be reasonable, they pass by just quickly on campus. So it wasn't unfair or anything, and the theory of relativity didn't quite apply :P

Back where I belong!

2008-12-28T16:24:00.003+05:30

I guess it was a fairly crazy thing to do. But then, I am known for doing crazy things. So there I was, sitting at home, 1 hour after reaching Pune, wondering what to do. Yes, an hour after reaching Pune after 3 months. Sad :P So then, I decided to do the only thing I can in such situations - go for a nice, long trek. My old company chaps had arranged a rock climbing and rappeling expedition to Alang and Madan, 2 forts to the north of Pune, near the city of Nashik.
Starting the climb : The eastern skies light up

Alang, Madan and Kulang were 3 of the toughest forts of the Sahyadris, with tiring, steep climbs and perilious rock faces to negotiate. I had fond memories of Kulang and Alang. I'd spent New Year's eve, 2004-05 on Kulang, after traveling all night, walking all morning for around 10 kms due to lack of transport to the base, and then doing the 6-7 hour steep base-to-top climb, all with the sun on my back. It was well worth it though, and the experience for the next few days was unforgettable. Oh, those memories...

Madan, however, had eluded me for a while. It has a bit of a rock patch which cannot be negotiated without technical equipment. I was close to doing it for 2 years with Trek'Di, my old company, but something or the other had come up at the last moment.

So there I was, sitting in the bus at 11 with a bunch of 30 odd similarly crazy outdoor freaks. I didn't sleep much in the night, discussing everything from the state of the automobile industry to CAT to life in the IIMs to engineering with Tarini, who had the misfortune of being beside me and then choosing to be with me for the rest of the trek! I think Trek'Di will ensure that I sit in a single seat the next time time round, lest I scare away more of their customers ;)

Morning came with us in Ambewadi, the village at the base of Alang fort. The 3 forts stood tall to the South, lit golden yellow by the rising sun. After a not-so-quick tea outside the village, we set off. I love steep climbs, the no nonsense part of it really appeals to me. Sure, it stretches you cardiovascularly, but it takes you up quickly, and I prefer that to slow ascents. By late morning, we'd reached the base of the rock face.

After a few hours of climbing and traversing scree-clad ledges with a couple of thousand feet drops alongside, we reached the top of Madan. There's something smug about the Madan summit. It sits pretty there, between Alang and Kulang, both with vast summits, which take atleast a couple of hours to get around, but which are shorter than Madan.
Left : The vastness of Alang Right : Moi, but a minuscule molecule in front of it.

After a quick dumping of my sack in the caves, I rushed to the top-most point of Madan. There are plenty of large rocks here to perch on and dangle your feet into the nothingness below. The setting sun casts a warm glow on our faces, as people leave their chores and climb to the summit for the sunset. It's a fantastic spot, although how beautiful it is will become apparent only the next morning. The sun sets, and the temperature dips rapidly, making me wish that I'd not forgotten my jacket in the cave below. Shivering, I head back to the caves.

Left : At the Madan Summit Right : View from the top

Its such an amazing feeling, having nothing to do at all at such a beautiful place. You are almost on the top of the world and there's nobody else to bother about. Nothing else matters. The sky has lit up with millions of stars, there is a soft breeze blowing. A jacket keeps me comfortable as I sit on the top of the cave, watching the goings-on below. The call for dinner comes, and we reluctantly head down. Back to the roof-top afterwards, the sky is too beautiful to stay away from. It's got colder though, and the warmth of the sleeping bag is too tempting to continue staying up here. Sleep overpowers me instantly, although the ground is hard and uneven and rocky and dusty.

An alarm rings at 5. Time to head to the summit for the sunrise, although its an hour away. The short climb immediately after waking up leaves me huffing and puffing, and the comfortable rocks at the top are a welcome site.

Right & Below : Sunrise at Madan top

We sit there, watching the surroundings in awe. It's not yet dawn, not even false dawn. It's night, complete and proper. We can't see anything, not Alang, not Kulang, not the caves below except for the suffused glow of the torches inside; the group leaders waking up to make tea and breakfast. Above us are millions of stars again, albeit different ones. A stiff wind is blowing. The silence is like a shock, the complete lack of noise other than that made by the wind is a treat to the senses. Sometimes, nothingness feels like it is so much! There is absolutely nothing and yet there's everything, nothing to see except for a sky full of stars, nothing to hear other than the steady wind playing with the grass, nothing to feel other than the coarse rocks beneath us, nothing to smell other than the faint fragrance of I-dunno-what which makes the mountains what they are. In our busy city lives, our senses are literally assaulted, and yet we don't feel, remember, cherish or value anything. It's when you get them in such carefully measured proportions that you realize how fantastic an experience each one of them can be. I loved it, the simple pleasure of watching a brilliant star-lit sky, without the sickly yellow glow of city-lights, the soothing fragrance of a night in the mountains, the feel of the breeze on my hands. Life can be so simple, and yet so incredible at times! Everything else seemed history, irrelevant. This was me, this was the present, this was life. Nothing before, nothing after. One moment at a time. To be felt, enjoyed and forgotten to the fullest. To be lived the way life deserves to be lived. Who knew, while doing the traverse on the way back, who knew for sure that I'd place my feet where they should be put. Who knew whether I wouldn't slip and lose my balance and just roll down. Why bother about things that might never happen... Why do I realize these things so easily when in the outdoors and so quickly forget them when I go back to my 'life'?

The faint outline of Alang started becoming visible to the east. Along with the first light of dawn, rose the moon, a mere thin crescent, a day away from nothingness. It was brilliant, the eastern skies turning from black to a dull brownish yellow to a bright orange, with the moon just above it. It was an enrapturing sight, and we watched it in awe. Conversation was surperfluous, and an insult to the celestial magic being weaved. I wish those moments froze in time...

The sun soon came up, and along with it, the rest of the members of the group. The Madan summit felt completely different in the morning, beautiful, but in a different way. After sitting there for a while and soaking in the sun, I descended down reluctantly.

Bags packed and all ready, we started the descent. The day's walk was not long, but time-consuming, as we had to first descend Madan and then ascend Alang, which also had a rock patch. After much loafing around at the base of the Alang rock face, waiting for the outdoor experts to fix things up, we reached the top.

It's a sunny, albeit cold morning!

A quick dumping of sacks in the caves, and we were off for the water tanks, which were a good 10-15 minute walk above the caves. A quick climb took us to the top of the caves, after which we went through the ruins of the forts, broken down walls of houses, the last remnants of a forgotten era.

Alang has 1 construction on top which still has a bit of it's old glory. It's a largish house, with its outside walls almost entirely intact. The walls are made of large basalt bricks, uneven and coarse, yet giving the feeling of solidness which nothing else would. It has a beautiful window on the South-western side, which, when seen from inside, frames the far corner of the fort nicely. After a bit of a photo session there, we headed to the hillock towards the south, with a flag at its summit. Beyond that, however, was another hillock, quite far away, and a few minutes on the uncomfortable flag-wala hillock convinced Tarini and me to go for the one further on. The distant hillock held promises of a smooth, grassy top, and looked like a nice place to watch the sun going down.

A bit of a walk, and we were there. The grass was tall, yet comfy, and the view, fantastic as usual. Tarini found a packet of a groundnuts somewhere in the hundred-odd things she was carrying around, and hey, we had salted groundnuts too!

It was a completely different atmosphere, yet, again ethereal. It's incredible how nature can be so simple and yet so beautiful, so easily. The skies were blue, the yellowing-but-still green grass was looking brilliant in the evening light. Tiny yellow flowers grew randomly in the grass. Madan looked tall yet lonely, far, far away. An eagle played with the drafts, diving, soaring, gliding, a little tweak of a feather here, a sudden flapping of wings there, sublime and majestic. Small yellow lights started lighting up the distant town of Igatpuri, where I'd spent a fortnight in the near past, although it now felt like a lifetime ago. I was staring, gawking, lost in the overpowering beauty of the place. Money, a good career, power, they all seem so frivolous, so useless, so lacking in the ability to give me a real high. What did it all mean, if it kept me away from all this? This was me, this is me, this is where I am happy, this is where I can be myself, toss my head back and smile from the heart and be glad and thankful to the maker for life and its simpler and yet so much more magnificent pleasures. Yet, I knew, tomorrow I had to go back, back into a world which, in all possibility, will take me far away from this. Yet, that did not bother me, for once, for a change, after a long, long time, I was living in the present, completely soaked in it. Life, I thought, could get stuffed.

Despite the fears of going back, I knew that I knew what it took for me to feel happy, to feel content. I hope that wherever I am, if the chips were really down, I could come back here, there and in so many of my favourite places in the Sahyadris, and feel good again. As much as I look forward to going to Germany this summer for my summer internship job, I think there's nothing which can hold a candle to some of the spots in the Sahyadris.

Fort Madan, seen from Alang

The sun dipped behind the range of mountains in front. We got up and started on the long walk back, past the first hillock, past the big ruin, past the water tanks, and on. Then, we had to look around a bit, I wasn't sure about where the first ruins exactly. If there's one thing which rarely lets me down, it's my sense of direction, and sure enough, I found them, and down we went, to the warmth, darkness and comfort of the caves. A superb day, with the sunrise at the Madan summit, and the sunset from the far corners of Alang.

An early dinner, and sleep beckoned again. Tomorrow it would all end, like I was going to wake up from a pleasant dream and go about facing life again.

5 am, and again we head out for a walk. Climbing to the summit was out of the question today, it was too much of a climb early in the morning, in the dark. So we headed down to another water tank near the spot we climbed up from. Dawn seemed to come quicker today, and soon we headed back to the cave, for breakfast and tea.

The last descents and walks of a trek really get to me. There is this growing sense of despondency and helplessness, as I come to terms with the fact that it is going to end soon. Most of these descents end with a hot, dusty, boring walk across miles of open country which also does not help matters. Anyway, as it is most of the times, there was little choice, and soon we reached Ambewadi again, where they'd managed to, remarkably, concretize most of the village roads in the 3 days we were gone. After a late lunch, we stuffed ourselves into the bus again, and headed back home.

Thank God it's over!

2008-12-23T17:21:00.001+05:30

They say Term 2 is what a MBA is all about, in India b-schools. I agree. Although this wasn't quite due to academics, as is normally the reason. Surprisingly, acads were much easier and manageable this time, despite summers and the mess associated with it.

But term 2 was bad and forgettable. There is no other way to describe it. Summers were a nightmare for the first few days. In the end, I got a good offer, but not before some severe heartburn and frustration. Then followed events on campus which left everybody stunned and shocked. Then came the mid-terms, and the stress associated with that. The next 2 months were a personal nightmare, something which I hope doesn't come back to me this term. All in all, 3 months of the course I would like to forget as much as possible about...

And the End-terms come visiting again...

2008-12-23T16:19:00.001+05:30

OR and OM on day 1. Not very stressful, for the simple reason that few people have a clue about what really goes on in OR. I seem to do better than average here, so no worries. No reason to worry about OM either, the mechanical engineering background (finally) comes to the rescue. So day 1 is manageable, I think.

Alas, the OR paper was a bit of a disaster. By disaster, I mean it went kinda bad while it went fairly well for others. It's not a disaster if everybody screws it up, due to the relative grading system :) OM was average. A so-so start to the exams.

Day 2 was important. I had a below average macro-economics score in the mid-sems, and had to make up to avoid a low grade. Like Micro-economics, I had little clue about the subject for a long time. When I finally got down to read it properly, and I think i did a fair job of it, I started liking it, just like micro. I don't know how relevant these textbook theories are in real life, but the fact the front page of the pink dailies actually make some sense to me is so much of a morale-booster. I could now faff beautifully about fiscal policy changes and rate cuts. More seriously, it's actually quite an eye-opener, macro-economics.

Business ethics followed in the afternoon, which went fine. It's tough to do too well or too badly in subjects like ethics and sociology, which is just fine with me!

As expected, everybody had left the post-weekend subjects for the weekend. Again, as expected, nobody studied after the paper on friday or much on saturday. Which meant that come Sunday, and everybody was running around in a state again. So much for using the break! This is one MBA habit which I have to break out of. The tendency to leave EVERYTHING to the last moment. I think we should be having rigorous anti-procrastination courses :| It's crazy, it's irritating, and it makes me mad at myself. And yet I don't change. Procrastination has become a big problem :|

Monday morning, and the Financial Management paper is so tough, that it's funny. Few people have a clue about anything in the paper. I have a sneaking suspicion whether we actually had all that stuff... I mean 200 odd not-so-bad brains can't not have a clue, can they? Organizational Behaviour follows in the afternoon. My sole chance of getting a A+ this semester. Or in the entire course, I have a feeling. Anyway, I botch things up quite well, ensuring there's no way I am getting a A+. An A if I am lucky, or a A- most possibly. Darn.

Last day, and only a single paper. Management Accounting. After studying for a few hours, Mandy, the senior who's a CA, responds to a SOS and makes things much simpler and manageable. The paper's a dream, unfortunately, everybody's creamed it. Well, no issues, as long as I am not the one screwing up!

And that's that! I am a M. Out of a MBA. My friend says we get a PGDM, not a MBA. Darn. 0.33 PGDM doesn't sound that cool :|

Sem 2 draws to a close...

2008-12-17T03:05:00.001+05:30

Aah, well, for a change, we didn't have anything like an exam week. Through some possible scheduling goof-up, the end-term exams for Term 2 were schedule across a weekend. By that I mean that we had 2 papers before the weekend and 2 after. With people studying less and less as the course progresses, and this sem's courses being more understanding based and analytical, the cumulative effect was that exams this time around were much less stressful. All in all, the second semester drew to a close in a much calmer way.

We still had lectures scheduled in the days before the papers, with some important OR stuff being taught 2 days before the exam. I guess the admin seriously believes in continuous and regular studies :| The problem with lectures in the exam week isn't the lectures themselves.. as in an hour or so is not that important, even when you have 2 papers about which you have little clue waiting for you the next day. The issue is that these lectures will invariably be in the morning. Which means I have to get up in the forenoon, or worse, in the morning. Which means I can't put in an all-nighter the previous night. So the straightforward effect of having lectures on days before the exams is that there is a direct negative effect on my grades. Which makes me hopping mad. This is something I love about the engineering system. 45 days of prep leave in which you have hibernate if you want, for god's sake. Atleast a business school should have a schedule which favours the night owls... which is more or less everybody here!

Roller Coaster

2008-12-13T14:52:00.002+05:30

Warning : Serious Material Alert!

A year ago, it would have been difficult to imagine this scene - nay, I would have betted a hell lot against the specific sequence of events happening which would make me land up here, in the balcony of my room in the IIM Kozhikode hostels, watching the rising sun paint yet another stunning morning. Another long night has passed by, unfortunately just literally. Otherwise, I continue to wait.

They say life changes dramatically at times, events happen at a pace which leave you gasping for breath. It has been that sort of a year. Maybe the start was a sign of things to come. I start the new year with a fight in the wee hours. A sort of fight which leaves me wondering where we have reached and where we are heading. Time, (un)fortunately, does not offer me the comfort of delving into these matters, and they are shrugged off and (semi-) forgotten in the bustle of everyday life. There is a job to do, exams to give, a career to plan, back-up options to explore. I have a lot on my plate, I assume some things will fall into place due to the inherent strength of the foundations they have been built upon. Assumptions are silly things, lulling you into a false sense of confidence and comfort.

I vividly remember, 8th January, the day of the CAT results, when I spent a nervous day flying into and out of Delhi, and presenting our business proposal to a huge set of foreign delegates. Every other moment I checked my on-silent-mode phone for any call, any message about the results. I eventually found out about my LIK calls only the next morning.

The rest of the month passed in a blur, preparing for the calls, putting in long hours at work. 31st of January, and I watched the sun set on the outlines of Pune city on the horizon, shining through the haze and smog, on my way back from a business trip. There was something menacing about it, as if warning me of the dark night that would follow the twilight which, itself had followed the soft, golden light of the evening. I tried to shrug it off, telling myself not to be irrational, setting suns don't tell you anything. A bad phone call, another semi-fight, and I looked outside the window in frustration. Darkness was, indeed, falling rapidly. But that it would fall this rapidly, I had no clue.

There are incidents which you remember all your life, good ones, bad ones, but when you try recollecting what exactly happened, you go blank. February 1st was one such day. A normal day at office, followed by an evening which leaves me clutching for support to this day. There are moments in life when you reach a state where you are completely, totally, helpless, comprehensively defeated, with nowhere to go and nothing to hang on to. There are, thankfully, rare, most of the time. MOST of the time. I was having an entire set of them, bunched together in a nice period of 20 odd months. So much that I have begun to dread not the reason for those moments, but the moments in themselves. You learn to grapple with most of the stuff that comes your way, but it's those first moments, when it hits you is what is dreadful.

They say, what you get in life, what you do, whatever comes your way is all destiny. Some things are meant to be, some aren't. I was never a strong believer in this philosophy. The next 3 months, the fellow up there concentrated solely on proving me wrong about this. A series of events which put together would put a bollywood story to shame. It was as if there was a direct challenge from God - you can do WHATEVER you want, exactly THIS will happen. Exactly THAT happened. It was unbelievable. It was like he was sending me a message - just go with the flow - when it's meant to be, it will. Why couldn't I accept it and apply it to other things in life? I almost did. 3 blissful months when all that I saw was the the future. But these things have a weird way of getting back to you.

A month of here-or-there, and I land up in IIM Kozhikode. New place, new phase of life, new people, a new routine, a new purpose, a new destiny, all seemed enough to push the demons in my head way, way into the blurred past. As expected, I was overwhelmed, I was ecstatic, I was sleeping 3 hours a night and yet I was as happy as I can ever remember myself being. Life rocked. It was a fantastic place, with fantastic people, something which lakhs of people yearn to be doing.

Unfortunately, you adapt. You get used to things. You learn to manage them, as tough as they can get. You evolve. You fight for your space, your piece of time to think freely about what you want to. And then it all starts coming back. And you realize that it hardly matters. Your location, what you are doing, the people around you hardly matter, when the devil is inside your head. And slowly but surely, it takes you back into the labyrinth, through turns and twists which you pass and instantly understand that you will not remember on the way back.

I don't know where I am today. The IIM calls, the breakup, the interviews in that zombied, auto-pilot mode, the remarkable strokes of luck during them, the converting of almost all calls, the month where I drove myself up the wall trying to choose between the head and the heart, the 2-3 months when the high made me forget reality, the struggle to cope academically, and the eventual relapse. A soft wind blows, laden with the freshness of a hill-station morning, bringing me back into the present, into reality. The sun has risen higher into the sky, shining brightly into my east-facing room. Another delusion of light, another false but well-lit path to trick me to follow. Campus is waking up, the first joggers of the day are out. I turn around and walk back into my room. It smells stale, of yesterday, stuffy and humid, lacking the crispness of the air outside. It smells of things known, things and events in the recent past. I want to stay outside, in the fresh air, but something, something which I cannot fight pulls me back inside. I close the balcony door, pull the curtains. Why do I insist on keeping the sunlight out? I switch on the fan, it starts churning the same old stale air, and slide under the covers.

Will the coming times give me the strength and the courage to fling the door open and take in a deep breath of fresh air, not turn back, not turn back till the door is open long enough, till the elements do their job? Till every blob of air hiding in the crevices of my room is dragged out and replaced with fresh, oxygen-filled, crisp mountain air?

Life's a brick game...

2008-12-10T03:51:00.000+05:30

The fourth or the fifth week of the second half of a semester is the one in which you started realizing that there are, err, a few project deadlines which are round the corner, and which would require a bit of serious work. Mails then start going around, pleading with group members to turn up at unholy hours. Huddles of worried and bored looking chaps can be seen everywhere, hunched over their laptops, busy chatting with somebody on their gtalk list while appearing to work hard.

This semester was a nightmare in terms of project deliverables. Almost every subject had some submission or the other, and they just kept coming at us one after the other, like a never ending stream of coloured bricks in computer games. A MBA, however, teaches you one thing - if it has to be done, it will, in all possibility, get done.

Old affiliations call!

2008-12-07T09:48:00.001+05:30

Our sections had been shuffled for this second semester, which had caused a fair bit of heartburn amongst us, especially since we'd started to have a real neat time in class. I guess the professors didn't approve too much of the camaraderie we had. Anyway, so we all decided to meet up for old times sake, and went out for a 'B-Section' Party. Thankfully, the restaurant manager was smart enough to let us loose only inside a separate hall. Short of having a food fight and beaning each other, we pretty much created a fair bit of ruckus and mess. Whatever food came our way was attacked with a gusto. I keep seeing the scared-as-shit waiter syndrome a fair bit here. I wonder whether it's just here or also prevalent in other business school afflicted towns. An apprehensive looking chap will arrive with whatever you have arrived. He'll look around and ask a few people as to where that particular piece of edible matter was supposed to land. After getting more than a dozen authoritative replies of right here, right here, he quickly plonks it on the nearest horizontal surface available, withdraws his now-in-dangerous-territory limbs with the agility of a cornered snake and runs for his life. What follows is a scene which concerned mothers should shield their children from, as a couple of dozen otherwise perfectly sane folks jump onto the plate like a mass of crocodiles fighting over a recently pulled down beast, in the wilds of Africa. The crocodiles atleast leave the bones behind.

Satiated and tired after fighting for our food and getting it, we streamed out, boisterous as ever. I am sure we drive restaurant owners and managers here up the wall. They can't throw us out because it's just plain bad business refusing entry to a total of 400 odd customers, most of whom would have no qualms spending more than almost any of your regular customers. At the same time, with the way we behave, they wouldn't have too many regular customers. I think the manager of the Taj here would soon happily ban us from the premises, with the new found, unarguable reason of 'security hazard'.

Well, we do listen to them a bit when they request us to quieten down a wee bit, and haven't got any of them really cheesed off at us, so we don't seem to be doing too badly.

Needless to say, we had a great time. Strange to have a reunion when we were all of a sem and half into a MBA, but, well, as long as it makes sense, why not...

In the middle..

2008-12-04T21:47:00.000+05:30

Life at a b-school soon settles down into a fairly established routine, depending on how close (or far) you are from the exams. As the semesters progress, even that stops affecting you. It can start getting a bit too routine at times, though I guess it won't even come close to the drudgery that life is in the corporate world.

The last week was like that. Classes, hauling myself out of bed at 9.05 or 9.10, making a reasonable attempt to not look like something they hauled out of the rainwater harvesting pond, a mad dash up the stairs to the main area, squinting in the bright light outside, huffing and puffing my way to class and finally plonking myself on my seat. I would have loved to add 'and going back to sleep', but the smart schedule setters had considered that possibility, and scheduled lectures first up in which sleeping had the potential of causing a sharp dip in your grade. So there I was, looking like a zombie, trying to make sense of salesmen running helter-skelter between delivery points or wondering how much it cost today to start a project in the next millennium but for which you would take a loan in the next century for an interest rate of 7.4573589 percent calculated semi-hourly, and which had a risk probability of 0.45379 if I became the prince of egypt and 0.5634 if the arctic ice depletion suddenly reversed and an ice age took over the world. My instinctive answer of none, nil, null, shoonya didn't amuse the professor, who didn't appreciate the use of the gaping loophole he'd left while framing the question. Like Calvin, I will make complete use of loopholes.

:O

2008-11-30T09:50:00.000+05:30

For hours, we were glued to the TV, watching the events unfolding open-mouthedly. It was all quite unbelievable. The reactions which followed it were typically aggressive, jingoistic. But is that how we should always react?

I think we need to look at this issue from a slightly different perspective. Terrorism is difficult to stop, however hard anyone tries, if the perpetrators are determined to do it. The only real way to stop terrorism is to ensure that the original causes are handled in a way that they don't exist, or at least, minimized. It is practically impossible to increase security to a level where it is impossible to smuggle unwanted stuff into our territory. Most countries tend to attempt to manage the symptoms. This might seem like an idealistic solution, but it looks like the only sensible and reliable long-term solution to me. We say we need tougher laws - but do you really think people who have been brainwashed so much into doing this would actually care about how tough the laws are? The current attackers are almost a suicide squad. And do we really want a state where security invades into every aspect of our life? Anti-terrorism laws can be misused - there are several examples of this across the world. Can utilitarianism justify anything and everything? And more importantly, is there any evidence that tougher laws reduce crime rates? Remember Freakonomics?

Woooaaaaaah!

2008-11-26T12:57:00.003+05:30

It's as if the fella up there is thinking that I am being a bit of a chump by not being up to see the painting he's just painted. It's another typical morning for me otherwise, but for some strange reason, I will sit bolt upright in bed at 6.30ish, only to see the most stunning displays in the eastern skies. It's happened before, and it happened again. I'd slept at 3, and intended to sleep till 8.30, but for some weird reason I got up feeling as fresh as I ever could. I quickly picked up my camera and shot a few snaps. Why it never occurs to me to go around and get some better views than what my hostel offers is beyond me. Anyway, I did take some fairly decent shots and promptly went back to sleep. A couple of days later, I remembered them and saw them on the laptop, and was rather stunned to see them. This was by far the best sunrise I'd seen after coming here. I really need to keep a watch on sunrises here.

The Dust Bunnies come calling :|

2008-11-21T22:55:00.003+05:30

It's one of the biggest frustrations when using a digital SLR. That's a single lens reflex, or 'professional' camera for the uninitiated. In short, it means a camera whose lenses can be changed. As liberating and incredible as this is, it introduces a problem which can assume terrible proportions. When you are primarily an outdoors photographer, and change lenses in the field, you invariably get a fair bit of muck on the camera sensor or CCD. Over 4 years, which is how old my camera is, it can get fairly dirty, which is what I realized when I took some photographs at low apertures. In months, the problem has become so bad that I need hours of cloning work in imaging software to make my photographs usable. And as much as you might suggest use of do-it-yourself cleaning methods, I really look forward to the day camera manufacturers look at this problem really seriously.

Despite all dire warnings from the manufacturers, I decided that I was going to give sensor cleaning a shot. So there I was, with an improvised swab, the camera body with it's lens off, the mirror lifted with a bulb exposure. I got a sneaking feeling that the sensor was placed in a deep recess and generally made as inaccessible as possible in order to prevent bravehearts (idiots?) like me from tinkering around with it. After all, how can they get their 16 hundred odd bucks for a 5 minute job? :mad: Anyway, I finally managed to reach the damn thing and swiped it a couple of times. Problem. The dust particles (or whatever else it was, it seemed like some alien growth to me, a central big fat blob with tentacles spreading out in all directions) clung to the sensor with the tenacity of tar on a shoe sole, and mocked my gingerly attempts to dislodge them off their perches. Now, I don't have enough in me to make a concerted attempt by putting a bit of pressure to remove the stuff (I do not quite fancy taking photos with a neat little dent where the 1/3rds line would come), so I decided to leave it to Nikon and their extortionists to do the job.

Maybe film isn't a bad idea after all. If only I could afford it. And if I had a Nikon film body :P

Caught in a trough

2008-11-20T12:52:00.001+05:30

I've got some strange comments on my blogs, comments which I don't understand. I didn't know IIMians also felt low, says one. Why? Aren't we humans? Just because we got into a good business school hardly makes life perfect for anybody. Everybody comes here with their own baggages, own set of worries and might-have-beens. You tend to get so carried away in this hectic life that you often don't how things are still pretty much the same for you. Sure, you might have dramatically improved your chances of getting a great job, and getting enough money to live comfortably, but you still have more or less the same set of problems you started out with. Yes, I am grateful for what I have got, for getting into a place so many deserve to (and so many who do so more than me) and yet don't. Especially since I have experienced first-hand what it feels like to be in a state of penury :| But money and a high flying profile has never been a big thing for me. I've always wanted life's subtler pleasures, the slightly off-beat ones. I have so many things that many people don't, yet at times there is this all-pervading gloom which envelopes me like one of those clouds which take over the campus during the night. I end up feeling terribly guilty at feeling this way when I am in such an incredible place, surrounded by such incredible people, something coveted by so many and achieved by so less. Why am I not happy then? What is that holds me back from enjoying these days - which would probably be the best in life - to the fullest? Why do I feel like life has already been lived, and that there is nothing to look forward to? Questions, questions and more questions to pull me down, and not an answer in sight. What am I looking for, that elusive thing which will set me free and give me peace? It's not a fancy concept, that much I know, I've reached that state of utter bliss before, for a period of time so long that I'd wondered whether I deserved it. When will I again, if I do, and how? Just more questions, again.

3.someone

2008-11-19T13:17:00.003+05:30

Ok, really cliched title, I know. But it feels so good to be in the same point range as the batch topper. Initially, I'd missed this huge advantage of a 4.33 point system which IIM Kozhikode follows, as opposed to a 10 point system. So what if the topper has 3.94 and I have something on the lower end of the 3 range. But same point range :P

So, finally, the grades are out, and I receive a big pleasant surprise. Although my end-sem performance had taken away the pink-slip fears a fair bit, the usual paranoid me was always a tad scared. So I opened the result link with a bit of apprehension, only to see a list of pleasant scores. No path-breaking performances anywhere, but nothing to hide either!

Good Evening, Komrades!

2008-11-18T22:47:00.001+05:30

I'd always wanted to become a RJ. It seemed rather like a fun thing to do. Which is why I'd been rather gung-ho about RJing for K-Dio, the campus radio. Unfortunately, things hadn't taken off in the first sem, and I'd forgotten everything about it. Till now, when Nikhil aka Khadoos decided to take matters in his own hands. And so started our everyday adventure. So most evenings we now have a couple of people trying their best to bore the hell out of everybody else on campus. It's incredible fun, though thinking up stuff to say on the spot when you are live on air can get tough. You have to really think on your feet. Thankfully, the junta here is rather accommodating, and forgives us for the bloopers we tend to commit. Hopefully, we'll get better with time. We should, because it would be quite a feat to get any worse!

Nostalgia..

2008-11-17T00:50:00.002+05:30

The 3rd Sunday of November always had been a very important day for me for the last few years. It was the day when I made my ritualistic annual attempt to crack the Common Admission Test, or CAT. It felt different this year. CAT had been like a festival for me, something that I looked forward to. I was getting nostalgic. I was missing it, the slight tension, the feeling of anticipation, the dreams of getting into the IIMs, of fulfilling something which I'd set out to do one arbit day in April 2005. There's something about this exam, which makes it much more than a mere aptitude test. Maybe it's because the stakes are so high, maybe because of what it can do to you and your career, and failure so easy and a mere false step away. CAT, more than anything else, made me realize how much water had flown under the bridge. A year ago, life was so different. Back then, I used to wonder where I'd be a year later, which city, which b-school, or whether I'd be still doing some job, trying to fight again, giving it yet another shot. A regular 9 to 6.30 job, evenings with my girlfriend, weekends spent giving mocks and wandering around in the city or on the Tekdi, planning for sunrises yet to arrive, for years still unseen, for events never to occur. An uneventful but peaceful life. It's ironic, When everything is calm and peaceful, you want action and excitement, when there's action and excitement, you want a peaceful life. When there's safety, you want excitement and thrill and freedom, when you have all those, you crave for the former. Why do we plan so much into the future? Why do we think about events 2, 3, 4 years down the line, when everything can change so quickly and dramatically within days? Life today was not something I'd imagined a year ago. Some of my dreams have turned into reality, so have some of my nightmares. Do things always come in packages? Life today is not bad at all, by any stretch of imagination, but is it what I want?

A few peaceful weeks..

2008-11-15T00:39:00.002+05:30

The week immediately after the mid-sems is usually a good one. There is little work, and the feeling of having the rest of the day to yourself after a nice lunch is incredible. You can have a nice little (or not-so-little, in my case) nap in the afternoon. Maybe a stroll in the evening, or a bowl at the cricket nets. Or rot around in the NC, sampling the day's special fare. Or grab a book and coop up with it. Evenings, of course, are a bit busier with some work to be done for upcoming submissions or projects. Nobody schedules any group meetings before 10 in the night. It's the best time to work in groups. The faculty and admin staff are long gone, leaving the place to us. Campus is in a relaxed mood then, you can sit anywhere and create a ruckus without worrying about anything. That's the one thing I love about this place - the freedom and lack of restrictions in most things non-academic.

So the week drifted by lazily. I slept and slept and slept, covering up for all the sleep debt from the (pre-) exam weeks. It was a good idea to do that till it was possible, end sem week can get rather hectic with multiple project submissions and a lot of studies to catch up on. StudCon and the Backwaters Committee decided to spice things up a bit by organizing an inter-hostel competition on Saturday. They'd thought up a nice, violent game for us. A team from a hostel had to build a pyramid of cans, while everybody else blasted them with water-balloons. Games like this which allows people an outlet to vent their built-up frustrations are perfect, and much loved. Which meant that the first few teams got an absolute hiding. As with most things on campus, it was fought with an intensity which could scare outsiders. Heated arguments over rules and their not-so-spirited abidance continued throughout. All in all, it was a fun evening.

Off goes the Prince :(

2008-11-11T02:45:00.002+05:30

And so, it's over. Ganguly's gone. I've been an avid cricket watcher ever since I could say Sachin Tendulkar, and Ganguly's been around ever since I've really started to understand the game. I still remember his century at Lords. It's funny. I am a huge Tendulkar fan, and yet, when I think about cricket all these years, the moments which come to mind quickly and which I remember vividly are all Ganguly moments. The Lords century, those flowing cover-drives which left a packed off-side field running for cover, the shirt moment, again at Lords, the infamous wait Steve Waugh had to endure, that Pepsi ad which the world laughed at and finally, the comeback. It's hard to believe he's gone, gone at the peak of his form, gone after a comeback which even the craziest of his fans would not have genuinely believed as possible.

I've always had a soft corner for fighters, for people who want to and make a comeback against all odds. The odds were stacked heavily against him. The advertisement took the cake, for most people. For some strange reason, I'd always loved it. I don't think it would have been easy for him to do it. And he's never really been short of money, I doubt he'd put himself through so much trouble for a silly ad. He did it, because he meant it. What a way to announce to the world that he was gonna come back. And what a way to follow that up!

So one of the big four is gone. By far the most charismatic of them. It's only a matter of time before the other 3 bow out. One is in the middle of a horrendous patch, and is likely to be given a heave-ho for the upcoming England series. The other 2 continue in the same vein as old, but age can go only one way. Tendulkar insists that he will play for a few years more; the temptation of one last shot at the the ultimate prize - the World Cup is what, one suspects, keeps him going. With the temperament and skill that he has, it's quite likely that he will keep playing till then without giving the selectors any chance of thinking of keeping him out.

Ganguly has started the end of an era in Indian cricket. Without the big 4, without Tendulkar, Indian cricket will be but a bunch of talented youngsters. It's difficult to get by without something which you've grown up with. Cricket without Ganguly and Tendulkar will be but a pale shadow of it during the days when these 2 men set entire stadiums afire with their dazzling displays and personalities. There couldn't be a bigger contrast between them in many aspects, and yet they couldn't be more similar in the way they were synonymous with cricket for a long, long time.

There's this strange feeling that Tendulkar gives me. Call me crazy, but whatever trough life is in, if Tendlya's on song, everything else seems but a faraway worry. When the sun's out, the field's spread, Tendlya's batting like the good ol' days, it feels that everything else will take care of itself. It's a strange, overwhelming feeling of comfort, watching him in sublime touch. Yuvraj might dazzle with his stunningly graceful strokeplay, Dhoni might hoik things out of the stadium, but nothing, nothing comes close to a classic, minimal-follow-through Tendulkar straight drive.

When Tendulkar edges yet another one to slips or onto the stumps, I merely switch off the television for the day. When he hangs up his boots, however, the idiot box will stay off for a while. :|

And here they come! :|

2008-11-07T12:36:00.002+05:30

As expected, the 4-5 days without classes passed by rather quickly, without any substantial reduction in the amount to be done for the exams, and we landed up into Monday, the day before the exams. For some obscure reason, the admin had decided that it would be a good idea to have classes on this day. And some of the professors had taken this further, and had decided to keep some nice submissions and presentations for this day. Which meant that a substantial bit of Sunday went into getting the stuff ready for the next day rather than contributing towards the last-ditch effort for the exams. I guess we are expected to study consistently all through the term rather than make a mad dash for it at the end, but I doubt that the concept has really caught on with too many people other than the toppers.

Despite a significantly lower amount of studying, the pressure was quite less this time round. People were keyed up for the exams, but the sense of desperation and tension had vanished. I guess all those pings on the internal messenger by the seniors, asking for the syllabus on the night before the exams started making some sense, though I doubt I'll ever have the guts to keep it till so late :|

The exam schedule was also such that I could get a bit more sleep than the nightmare the previous time. 2 of the toughest subjects - OR and OM, both from the operations domain were on day 1, which meant we could study then comfortably for 2 days. The first day went pretty well, with a reasonably easy OR paper, quite unlike what we'd expected due to the reputation of the prof for setting papers which left everybody wondering what hit them. The OM paper left everybody pleasantly surprise. It was a fundoo paper, a feel-good kinda thing. Even people who'd not bothered to read through the text could have done reasonably well, and there was a perceptible got-out-of-jail kinda feeling after looking at it.

Day 2 was for Macro-economics and Business Ethics. There's something about economics which makes me feel like an absolute idiot. The very sign of a supply demand curve makes me go, Hmm, interesting, what the HECK is that? Micro I had tamed after a death match last semester. I had started getting a feeling that I would have to do something on those lines this time around, too. Business ethics was very interesting, but wasn't really meant for pre-exam reading. The economics paper went sorta ok, only time will tell how it really went. Business ethics was decent, although there were some blank looks when a case had to analyzed by using the ISCT model. Right. What was that again?

Day 3. Management Accounts, of MANAC, or MANiAC, as somebody's gtalk status message read. Despite some anxious moments the night before, it went rather well. I don't know what block I have against accounts. I was absolutely panicking on the day before the paper in the first semester, and then I went and absolutely creamed the thing. It's funny that it scares me so much, especially when I don't do too badly in it :|

Organizational Behaviour in the afternoon. I'd studied well for this, and had a pretty good run. There's something OB and HR which really interests me. Unlike the masses who dread the prospect of studying for OB, I actually look forward to it. For one, it's rather simple to comprehend, atleast the stuff we study. Which is a great start, as that's the stumbling block which ruins most other subjects for me. It doesn't make you feel like a nincompoop, which is a brilliant start for me!

Day 3 evening was quite relaxed, with only FM, Financial Management, to be studied the next day. FM was not bad, it involved a few difficult-grasp-quickly kinda concepts, but as whole, it was rather interesting. There were some furious debates raging well into the morning as to how to interpret certain interest calculations-related stuff, but with the syllabus being not too vast, things were always in control.

The paper went ok. It was a binary sort of paper. You get the logic right, you'll get a good score, if not, you'd have to put in a fair number of hours for the end-sems.

All in all, the exams were much better for me this time around. Whether that translates into a better score remains to be seen, but atleast I didn't drive myself up the wall through lack of sleep due to it. The weekend beckoned, one of the few ones which were absolutely free and tension-less.

A peaceful week

2008-11-02T00:39:00.002+05:30

A combination of Diwali and the summers week meant that we had 5 lecture-free days from Wednesday to Sunday. With the mid-sems next week, this was a blessing straight from the heavens. Somehow, however, this sem, the intensity was slightly less. One week before the mid-sems last term meant almost every soul slogging it out all night. This term, however, the mood on campus was much more jovial and chilled out. I guess it was like the seniors were telling us... first sem you'll all run around like headless chickens. Second sem onwards you'll all realize where you all fit in and leave the running around to the few souls who will fight it out for the top few places :D

It's much easier to study when there are no lectures. You can study late into the night without worrying about dozing off next day and getting on the wrong side of a professor. That's a constant worry with having late nights. You never know when you'll get into the sort of stupor usually the result of a bad night out with fermented liquids, when your eyes will slowly start closing, and when the professor who so far sounded like he was singing a lullaby suddenly noting your roll number down for getting even later :|

So there went the week... sleeping every night at 4 or 5, waking up just in time for lunch, lazing around in the afternoon, and lamenting how another day had passed by without any substantial deductions from the studies-to-be-done account. All in all, a rather non-happening week, other than the celebrations on 31st evening.

And we're done!

2008-11-01T01:44:00.002+05:30

This is going to be a bad year.
All b-schools are going to go into rolling.
Placements are going to be hard to come by.
Top companies are going to stay off.

And on and on it went. Doomsday scenarios were thought of by everybody. With the fall of LB and Merrill Lynch, the cat was literally amongst the pigeons. Buck up, said the seniors. Tough times are coming.

And so they started. Reports started coming in on how other places were doing badly. There was utter secrecy and mystery surrounding the entire process. The air was thick with crazy rumours of substantial portions of the batch being unplaced in many b-schools. 100 year. 60 there. Little came in the media, everybody was waiting for somebody else to get going.

Placecoms calls for a meet on the last day of the summers process. This will be the last batch meet we will be calling, was the opening line. As you'll know, IIM Kozhikode is the first top tier business school to be done with its summers' placement process, they continued. 100% placements, by the scheduled date. And so they went on. While we all knew that we were close to finishing it off, we didn't know that we'd scored the winning run earlier in the day. With a batch of 260+ it's hard to keep track of who's got placed and who's still left. It was incredible! We'd pulled it off!

Diwali!

2008-10-31T00:58:00.002+05:30

All pics courtesy Pratik

Diwali was initially a bit of a damp thing with lectures scheduled on the first 2 days. But trust people here to make the best of everything. Laxmipujan night, and the entire campus was filled with diyas. Every hostel floor, every balcony, every door and every walkway was adorned with these tiny lamps, giving the place a magical, ethereal feel. It was incredible to see the whole place lit up like that, and everyone walking around in traditional attire. Exams and the stress of the on-going summer placements was forgotten in the festive atmosphere.

The stunning F Hostel Decorations

Now, on Laxmipujan, you do a puja of Laxmi, the goddess of wealth. But Laxmi was nowhere to be found ( literally, what with the money crisis going on :D ). Bad jokes apart, there was no portrait of Laxmi to be found anywhere on campus. So someone smartly got one of Saraswati, and kept it there in the mess for the Puja. Maybe it was apt that as an educational institution, we should worship Saraswati and not Laxmi. But then we are a business school for heaven's sake. So maybe it aint really apt. Anyway, nobody really noticed, which was quite expected!

The G-Hostel Decorations

It's these moments that make you feel that you will really miss this place a year and a half later. The camaradarie, the high spirits when you are a b-school in the midst of placements in the middle of an economic recession is something which outsiders would find hard to understand. The scenario might be gloomy, but there is this acceptance inside that what has to happen will happen and that there is no point spoiling the few good months you have here thinking about the future. I think this is a very MBA thing. You might have the toughest exam coming up, the biggest assignment due, you'll rarely find anybody fretting about it too much till it's really due. You know that it's gonna some doing, that you're gonna go through hell doing it, but till it hits you, you learn how to enjoy life and forget about your worries. I think it's a very valuable thing to learn, the ability to live in the present and let the future go take a hike, especially when you cant do much about it ( which is the case most of the time ). Life is going to be, undeniably, full of problems, especially the nasty types, and the less you let them get to you till you really are in the middle of them, the better. Now there are quite a few souls who might line up outside my room to give me a hiding for saying this and then worrying about the smallest things in the world all the time, but then I never claimed to be a successful follower of this philosophy. But I will learn, hopefully, some day. I am sure Pratik would be shaking his head when he reads this, though.

All decked up!

It's a Bug's Life!

2008-10-27T14:32:00.005+05:30

If there's one thin I've not been able to do since landing up here is pursue one of my passions - butterfly and insect photography. So I decided that it was time to make amends, and get back into the groove. With a campus like this, it was a criminal waste for a fella like me not to be there and shooting those bugs.

It was a hot afternoon, and the (possibly) last spell of rain - and what a spell it had been - had just got over the previous day. Pratik and I set off in pursuit of the 2 big blue butterflies which have always taunted us when we set off to the library for lesser pursuits.

With the area in front of the library being unusually unoccupied, we went to the Circle of Contemplation - this fantastically wild structure, covered with this creeper with bright blue-white flowers which attract a variety of insects. There are also some garden plants planted nearby, which attract the ones we were specifically interested in - Swallowtails!

It was mayhem out there. After a week or so of almost zero sunlight, here was a bright, sunny day, and everybody was out to make the most of it. The circle was absolutely choc-a-block with dozens of varieties of butterflies, a thousand-odd bumblebees which kept scaring me by getting too close when I was busy shooting a butterfly and a million other insects. A Southern Birdwing soared in the sky above, like a royal not bothering to descend amongst mere mortals. It's stunning golden yellow glistened in the bright sunlight, and was in stunning contrast to the jet black of its forewings. As I was following a particularly interesting bug in the circle, I heard a muffled thud beside me. I turned around, only to find a rather stunned looking snake lying there! Whoa! I tried to approach it to get a shot, but as always, it slinked away before I could even manage to get an id shot. But then even to see a snake in the wild is a treat in itself :)

We went berserk shooting, when the biggies arrived. Oh, what stunners these creatures are! It was extremely difficult to shoot them, however, due to their rapid wing movements and constant flitting from flower to flower. Finally, after an hour or so, I gave up. I'd run out of memory! But it was a good experience, an absolute de-stresser. I think I'll be spending a fair amount of time here, once the mid-sems are tackled and done with!

Water-fall

2008-10-24T03:13:00.001+05:30

I don't think he meant the rain. I genuinely think he meant we'll go to see the waterfall. So there I was, a sucker for such things. Thursday. Classes were just over, and I was settling down in my room after a nice lunch, and had picked up a textbook to quicken the process of being overwhelmed by sleep. I love the way a text - any text - makes me sleepy. There's no better way to do it, trust me.

Pratik pings. Wayanad, he says. Yes, nice place, I go. We are going. Define we. You, me, Kaveesh and a senior. Ya, right. And so we go on. And as always, despite the fact that it's been raining like the dickens since 2-3 days, despite the fact that my sleep deficit has reached threatening levels, despite the fact that mid-sems are a fortnight away, I say yes. So off we go at 4.30 to Thusharagiri falls, someway before Wayanad. It's an incredible drive as always, made better by the threatening black clouds overhead and the chill in the air. After going all over the place enough to draw a combined physical and political map of Kerala, we finally reach the place as darkness starts to fall. The falls aren't all that impressive. I'd forgotten the simple rule that had saved me a lot of heart-burn so far. Any place which is easily accessible to tourists aint half as good as the stuff I've seen after trekking all over the place back in Maharashtra. Pookote lake and Soochipara falls had made me forget those wise learnings, at a cost I was paying now. After a 5 minute glance at the falls and an unenthusiastic attempt at a photo which was quickly abandoned after Pratik realized that he needed to replace his batteries, we started on our way back.

That was when the fun started. Rain. Not your usual pitter-patter splotches, but heavy-duty hiding. It just started and went on and on and on. We drove on, desperately watching out for approaching floodlights, and road borders to keep us on track. The rain hit our faces hard, huge, sharp drops piercing into the skin. After a while, we got used to it, and from then on, it was a blast! I've always loved driving in the rain, especially the really torrential types, and this was incredible. We reached campus at around eight in the evening, thoroughly walloped, yet grinning like kids in a candy store. This had been AWESOME!

Sundays suck :(

2008-10-21T03:03:00.002+05:30

I've come to the startling revelation that Sundays suck. No, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with them. Other than the fact that they always, yes always precede a humongous assignment, which I will, in all probability, start too late and will therefore stay up all night to finish off. I guess the professors are just being nice by keeping submission deadlines on Mondays. They'll get time to do it because of the absence of classes, they must be thinking. Unfortunately, the lack of classes simply translates into reducing 4-5 hours from the sleep deficit account ( deficit sounds way cooler and appropriate for a b-schooler than mere debt :P ), with the result that the whole campus goes around wishing each other 'Morning!' at 2 in the afternoon. Then there is lunch to be had, and you can't really get to work immediately after lunch on a lazy sunday afternoon, can ya. I mean, some sense of ethics a person should have. So there goes the afternoon in rotting around somewhere, maybe the NC, watching the seniors stream out of their sunday afternoon classes and snigger :D Oh, well, I know they have the option of NOT going, because they don't have compulsory attendance :| Take away that sadistic pleasure too!

Evening comes, and with it the sinking feeling that unless I get cracking on it now, it will never end. So then off I go to the library, where I will then spend the next 12 odd hours getting increasingly frustrated, which usually culminates in a hair-pulling bout when I have to watch a stunning sunrise through the library windows. I now understand how those poor butterflies must be feeling when they are stuck behind glass windows :|

So, yet another sunday night cooped up in the library completing an assignment. Yet another monday driving myself up the wall trying not to fall asleep in class. Yawn!

Bouncing Back!

2008-10-18T02:48:00.001+05:30

End-term papers to be distributed on so and so date, said the mail. Errr, ooooor, ummmm, went I. Crap. So there ends the party :P It's funny. Maybe it's not. All my life, I've always been eager to get exam grades. While I've always known that I wouldn't be getting mere-bete-ne-mera-naam-roshan-kiya kinda grades, I also (usually) knew that I wouldn't be doing badly. So there was always an air of expectancy about getting exam scores.

Cut to circa 2008. Now I don't quite know how to react to this. My performance till now had been the types which could be described by a list of synonyms which more or less meant bad, and you could still not quite describe it properly. Started off so badly with the quizzes in term 1 that there was no looking back, by the time mid-sems arrived, I'd turned the art of screwing up exams into an art form. In the beginning, it was due to the simple fact that the gap between the instructor's expectations about how much we should know and the reality of how much I knew was, well, a tad too large. In the later half, viz the mid-sems, I'd made some small modifications. Now I actually knew a bit of stuff, but I still managed to screw the paper up, either through (a) panicking left, right and center in the paper and hyperventilating my way through the first half, only to kick myself in the latter for being an idiot when I knew most of the stuff or (b) being too zonked due to extreme sleep deprivation and repeatedly falling asleep in the paper.

To cut a long story short, I landed up in the second half of the first sem in a bit of a mess. My tail was well and truly on fire, and it needed something big to set things right. (Un)fortunately, I have little recollection of how my end-sems actually went. I was just too zonked through all of it. The one thing I well and truly remember about them is that I was in the very base of Maslow's hierarchy of needs :|

So then, I didn't know what quite to expect. I trudged warily to class, searching for escape routes to take me away quickly in case of a disaster. The windows... might be worth the fall from the first floor in case of an emergency. Crap. Forgot the fact that first floor here is akin to two and half elsewhere. That would hurt. Especially since they'd paved all the area under the windows. Sadists. On second thoughts, knowing how the imported grass hurts, this would be a better deal.

Accounts. 31. Out of? 40. Eh? Is this my paper? It is my paper! Eh? Yippee :P And so it started. All-in-all, quite a decent performance. Something which should pull me back to average grade. 4 papers done. 4 to go. Hmm. I think I can be happy with the thought that I might just escape opening the DCPS khata :)