Day 268: 29th Mar, 2010

Want to know how to incur the wrath of 130 of your batch mates? A perfect setting - an open book (book, notes, printouts, etc etc) MIS exam - basically something which you can survive without much prior input. But then Mr.I-am-so-smart sends a mail to the prof which says 

"Sir,

As it is an open book exam, why don't you allow laptops? Otherwise students take a lot of printouts and paper gets wasted."

He goes on to give this amazing statistic

"Even assuming each of us takes 100 prints (why would you!), it will be 13000 prints. blah blah"

Now no problem with the intention of the mail. Except that games are not to be played at such critical junctures. 

Pat comes the reply from the prof

"Mr.suddenly-conscious-of-the-environment (or is it Mr.you-just-finished-your-print-balance?),

No, LAPTOPs are NOT allowed."

so far, ok, but, it didn't stop there..

"But just to make things simpler, let's NOT have anything apart from the book i.e. NO printouts."

And this came at 10 in the night when the world was just heading towards the Computer Center to take prints! Needless to say, all plans go haywire. 2 sections full of angry people. The guy would have been lynched.

Fortunately, our CR's negotiation skills came to the rescue! And the prof agreed to the original clauses. Normalcy, you are most welcome!

PS: Just a note about the SCM paper - ctrl C, ctrl V :D

Day 267: 28th Mar, 2010

A day of celebration for around half the batch today. We had our FM2 paper today - which, for those anti-fin junta, would happen to be the last paper they would ever write in Fin.

Now, FM is one of those subjects where you have to read up something before the exam. But I woke up at 10.40 in the morning. And that too thanks to my wingie who walked by! And I didn't even realise exams were going on when I woke up, just wanted to continue sleeping :-| .. And usually the paper takes up all your time (and leaves you wanting for more). But, "the great ME" finished the paper a good 35min before time. But also, in no way is it supposed to indicate anything about the performance :-p 

In a way done with my exams. The remaining line up is:

SCM - open book

MIS - open book

HRM - even an open book won't help :-p

So I went and played some badminton today. (Haha.. excuses!). Didn't enjoy it too much, partly because the energy was missing and partly because I lost :-p

Prepared better for the open book exam this time. Went to the CC and took all printouts one day before! super improvement ! :D

Day 258: 19th Mar, 2010

Oh, I don't know how I forgot to write this yesterday! Some more raid on seniors - this time the target being Pravin. I took a tennis racket and a TT bat from him (for now .. more to follow in a week). Kisaan took away BOTH his badminton rackets and pachpan also took away his tennis racket. Man, this is fun :D

I continued my exploitation of the high attendance resource piled up by sleeping through the FM class (in the room i.e. :-p) . Went for the HRM class in which this funny thing happened - the prof made a statement which, thanks to the wonders of the Queen's language, can be interpreted in an altogether different meaning - "... the same applies to sexual harassment. You must have experienced that in your Behaviour In Organisations class". After that, sat down all by myself and did the SCM Nike assignment. That felt nice :)

I seem to have lots of time right now. Just saw The Dark Knight again. Read quite a bit of Calvin and Hobbes. And a little bit of Harry Potter. And all this conveniently sitting on my bed, thanks to the extra long LAN cord given by Sanghvi! :D . It's 5.30am now and the charge on my laptop is almost out. Guess I'll treat it as a sign and sign off for the day (or night.. or the next day.. arghh!). Chalo guys, cya tomorrow and have a nice weekend!

PS: the last 2 words reminded me that we have tons and tons of extra lectures of ADA lined up in the next 2-4 days..!! shucks!

Day 251: 12th Mar, 2010

I don't know why.. but for some strange reason I woke up thinking today was a Sunday. (It's only Friday, not even Saturday!) Maybe it was because lectures started only at 10. Which I eventually bunked exercising my luxurious attendance backup.

We had a section photoshoot today. We did have one a few months back - but that was the official one. And not all of us were in it together. This time, we planned and coordinated to have everyone together :D . Some great pics & videos have come out, which I'll cherish for years to come.

Met Mr. Psycho in the mess. He now seems to have graduated to psycho^2 levels. Attended PGP day - a function to commemorate a lot of students for the various events as also to award trophies to the various departments at IIM L. Shruti gave a nice speech on behalf of INDEX. Then took a 'peanut butter sandwich' treat from Shanky @ Just Tea and we three had a nice looooong chat in the backdrop of the convocation dinner and the fountain :)

Day 250: 11th Mar, 2010

Predictor variables:

1. Theoretical subject 

2. Buffer attendance

Dependent variable: 

1. Sleeping in the class

2. Attendance in the class

Add to this the following,

1. subject: SCM

2. time: Immediately post lunch!

3. Term is almost ending

4. ADA quiz lined up in the evening

No wonder - SCM lectures immediately post lunch are not attended by students, but by corpses :-p

The ADA quiz had a first of its kind feature. Absolutely not required feature. What? Negative marking in the objective section!! :O

Last couple of days of PGP24. I saw a senior friend of mine taking arbit campus pics. Suddenly, capturing and updating IIML related pics are the craze. Facebook under siege!

Day 249: 10th Mar, 2010 - 'Pen'sive

Just yesterday I was happy that we were group 8 in ADA and it was only the turn of the 1st group to present. But as luck would have it, in an absolutely random manner, Sir simply called out one arbit group number and that turned out to be ours! :-S The funniest part was the prof even contemplated asking us to present stuff in the 4.00 pm lecture.. luckily the lecture was at 2.30pm leaving us with very little time, but a very big excuse.

Consequently got to present it tomorrow. Along with MM research assignment. And MIS. And SCM :-| . Not to mention the ADA quiz to be held in the evening. Practically the whole of section B was at the library today. Our group divided the tasks pretty neatly I would say. It's around 3.45 now and I just about came back from the lib some 30min back. Will sleep now - 8.45am lecture tomorrow. And I have work lined up to do in class. Like tweak the MIS assignment. And modify the hitherto-kept secret design :D

PS: Came up with a poem. Check it out at http://casualchronicles.blogspot.com/2010/03/pensive.html

Day 234: 23rd Feb, 2010

Trust Rohit Yadav to always speak his mind out as straight as he can. Today our post-mid adjunct faculty prof for SCM started the course with a very small revision of the terms used pre-mid. He asked if any of us had any doubts. Prompt came Rohit Yadav's God level question: "Sir, I don't remember any of these terms" :D

Finally a pretty decent plan for the extended weekend's trip has now been put into place, mainly thanks to Mr. Rajat Ghate. Am really looking to the trip for sure! The only thing I'll seriously miss is the failure of my plan to see KCK on the day of release :(

Tomorrow we have classes the whole day. Right from morning to evening 6 .. thanks to all the guest lectures. .. !! Shucks! :(

Day 222: 11th Feb, 2010

Having 2 exams / day is nice. At the end of the day, you are pretty happy to see the exams rushing by quickly. (Of course, if you subjects like FM and HRM on one day, you may not even survive to see the end of the day.)

Another first here - I took a supplement in the SCM paper :D (sshh... won't speak about the blank pages I left).

Mad rush at the photocopy fellow. Why couldn't the other idiots be more responsible and have their notes ready beforehand?! :-p . Consequently, I didn't have the case booklet for the first three questions. Fortunately, ma'am got a few extra copies and I could attempt them later on. The thing did cost me around 10min of idle time, which was quite a bit considering the paper was already lengthy.

Day 208: 28th Jan, 2010

So finally the quizzes have started pouring. Had the SCM and CFM quiz today. Nothing much to prepare in CFM - 90% of the class walked in without reading a word. And then, I utilised the 20 min gap between the tests to study for the SCM quiz :D

Played TT after a looooong time. Went back to my room and did some timepass. Suddenly around 7, I got a call from Pindyck asking me to come down for CS! Counter-strike!

Some info about me. Back in school, I was a BIG addict of all video games. But somehow, the computer games bug never bit me, mainly because I didn't like playing without joysticks. And inspite of me warning all this to Pindyck, was incorporated in his team.

We started playing as terrorists. To identify ourselves (especially novices like me who wouldn't be able to distinguish with the clothing), we named ourselves as terrorist_XYZ. All was fine as I tried to shoot and kill the counter terrorists. Really enjoyed all the killing, though usually I happened to be the victim. The funnier part was when we switched roles to become counter terrorists. It never occurred to me that our names won't change. I saw somebody named terrorist_rancho in front of me, became trigger happy and killed my teammate :D

Day 194: 14th Jan, 2010

Another of this witty prof statements today. Our SCM prof caught one of the students sleeping and told him - "Please go wash your face and come. If you will be sleepy, you will induce sleeping in your neighbours as well. Only studies will not get induced amongst you all" :D

During the previous sem, Shreyas used to kill time and nurture his grey matter by coming up with anagrams for names of people. For samplers, sec B people reading this, try figuring out who are 'HIS JAM RAN RASH', 'I IN TAJ A DAY', 'BRAINS' :-p . Anyways, he was regretting that he had run out of names and consequently had nothing to do. So I came to his rescue and gave him the task of coming up with AB dialogues. Somewhere along, we also started listing AB movies. Definitely took all the lecture time quickly. Lecture ended with a grand altercation between Sudesh and Kans over attendance :D

Had pizza for lunch - Sarin's treat for his engagement! Topic revolved a bit around a similar theme ;-)

Saw Invictus in the evening. It's a movie based on the time when Nelson Mandela was just elected as the president. A nice watch, I recommend. The title of the movie, however, is also the title of a poem by W.E. Henley. The poem is one of the finest I have read. Do check it out at http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/invictus/

Day 187: 7th Jan, 2010 - One and half hrs = 5400 seconds!

I have a strong inclination to believe that Einstein thought of the Theory of Relativity while hearing a lecture as a student. I had that experience today. Not that I had not attended 1.5 hr lectures before.. but 2 of them back to back was(is!) a little too much! Time just doesn't pass!.. not even by the second.

Our first lecture was MIS. The class spent the first 10 min trying to convince the prof to hold 'practical exams' for ITC rather than theory papers. Another funny incident in class:

Sir: So.. how many of you want to specialise in Systems?

Sir: How come so few people want to specialise in Systems? Why did you all decide not to continue in IT?

Soumen : ever since we had ITC

:D:D

Was followed by the SCM class. This was followed by QAM 3 class, where our maths prof was more enthusiastic about teaching excel than the ITC prof! Good, it helped me definitely.

After many days, went to the city with Ashish in the afternoon with some INDEX work. Came back at around 6-6.30 - was already chilly. Had an INDEX meeting at 9.00 which got postponed. Took a walk around the campus with Saurabh. Came to know about this unique threat Poojavin uses to blackmail Saurabh :D . Finished off with the meeting and came back to my room and its been a LOST cause since then. It's 3 am now; a change from the last couple of days when I had been sleeping pretty early :-p . Guess I'll put myself to sleep now, or will it be another episode of LOST? Will tell tomorrow :-p