Day 472:8th Jan, 2011 - Oh helL, what the fog?!

Writing in reverse order, reporting the most recent stuff. 

Just came back to my room after a visit to the mess. The weather today has gone big time bonkers. Apparently, the rumor making the rounds is that the temperature today on campus is 0 degrees! I sincerely thought it was a little exaggerated till small crystals of ice actually fell on me while I was walking at night. And the visibility is so poor, one can't see beyond 15 metres at all! I can't even see my hostel entrance from the corridor (just a distance of 15-20 feet). And although one could argue that all you can and should do is crib about this whole thing, many of us now actually seem to enjoy this :D . Experience of a lifetime! :D

Sangharsh has begun! It is the high profile inter IIM (A,B,C,L) sports tournament and this year, is being hosted by our institute. Got to meet my friend from IIM A. They seem to have a nice time witnessing this weather :D

Also, finally got Pachpan to teach me a little bit of fin. Realized I still need to read up quite a bit :-(

PS: Credit to Mesh for the tagline today

Day 371: 23rd Sep, 2010

After quite a few days, I am back to my love affair with technology :-)

Spent more than 3 hours trying to install one software. Half of that time went in trying to somehow manage to read .iso files, without trying to plugin the ethernet cable (as I was meddling around with some setup). Didn't manage to find anything like that on my laptop, so finally had to relent and bow to the power of google. And that of course took care of things in a jiffy. A couple of clicks to download the setup, a couple more to install it, and finally a further couple of clicks to mount by creating virtual CDs :-D . But that of course, wasn't the end of it all. Figured out that the key I had to installing the master suite was expired :-( . Full effort waste.

So now I started off with a new setup itself. And the install status bar progressed and progressed, and then abruptly stopped. Oops - that setup was meant for a 64-bit OS.

But give up I don't. At least, not when it comes to installing software I want :-p . Downloaded the setup for yet another version of the software. And yes, third time lucky indeed! :-)

Of course, each time the set-up was running OR I had to uninstall the old version OR restart my system, I had free time. And what better to do with your time than to go disturb your friends :-P . And so I put in frequent visits to Pachpan's room, where he was working on some document with Chatur since afternoon. In one of those visits, I just made a casual reference/opinion w.r.t. the state of Vocational Education in India, and woah, it expanded into a full-blown debate for more than an hour! :D . And this is what I would say is the most awesome thing about an IIM :-)

Day 204: 24th Jan, 2010 - AWESOME!

IIM Lucknow is a great place. Great great place. I may be cribbing about tiny things now and then, but all that fades away when I look at things from even a little distance.

Lots of PGP23s are here, and it is so obvious that they all miss campus so much. It's around 5 now and I have just come from the location where we had the insti party. One crazyyyyyyyyyyyyy night. Actually after the Kailash Kher concert (which I personally found a little disappointing), I went off to my room to relax and was almost about to skip the insti party. Some stupid thing in me prodded me to go and I am really glad I did! Had awesomeeeeeeeeee fun!! Many PGP2s making their debuts and some PGP2s and alums just extending their record.

Sometimes, it's a pity all nights have to end...

PS: Some Channel V lady took recordings of a few of us. I may just come on national television, thanks to my unshaved unkempt looks :-p . But if at all I do make it through the editing table, I don't know the date and time when it's going to be aired :-S

Day 184: 4th Jan, 2010 - Term III starts !

And so the grind begins (again!) ...

I don't recollect the last time I woke up to a pleasant alarm tone. Typically, I would use the alarm feature of my motorola C-150, specifically a tone called the burning train or something. Trust me, it could wake up a corpse :D . A new year, a new term and more importantly a new cellphone ensured a more calm wake up today. But this works only in ideal scenarios where I am mentally aware of the need to sacrifice sleep and rush to the class. And doesn't work in situations where I actually need to depend on some external intervention. And that is why I now have the Tipu Sultan tone as my alarm tone. And yes, this one can make a corpse on Jupiter wake up :D.

We seem to be having a number of GLOBE courses this sem. However, had 3 lecs today and it does feel like the profs this time are nice. Vinod (b'day boy today!) got christened as 'Chatur' in HR's HR class :-p

Finished off the registration stuff in the afternoon. Collected the usual truckload of books from the program office. Those books only seem to be helping in exercising my biceps and triceps once in every 3 months.

Spent the rest of the day majorly watching LOST. That's a new series that I target to finish this sem. Collected the manfest sweatshirt during dinner. Pretty cool one, this as well. Anyways, continued with a little more LOST post dinner.

It's midnight. Pretty early for helL standards, but am dead sleepy. Not sure of what I am writing. Will read the post tomorrow. Good night guys!

Day 183: 3rd Jan, 2010

Yo readers! First of all, wish you all a very Happy New Year ! Had a super short but nice stay back home.. caught up with family & friends, got a new cell, saw some movies, ate ate ate .. in short - timepass with no strings attached.

A pic I captured on my flight back.

New Innings

And now, it's back to helL! Its freezing out here now. Came back and setup my room. Every term, my bed cover and blanket gets washed once and my bed looks clean and uncluttered (once). Downloaded some 50 odd mails into outlook (and deleted most of them without a first glance). Went to the mess to have a little dinner. Completed the other ritual of buying an Aquafina bottle; the bottle will be used for the next 3 months. Did some banter with Ghate, Sudeshna, Shipra (+ Mr. X) outside Nescafe and finally went back with the intention of sleeping early at 10.30.

And now.. it is 1 am again.. and I am yet to sleep. Just a few hours since I am here and already the helL-effect is showing. woah!

Day 157: 2nd Dec, 2009

What a useless start to the day. Even before I could put my bag down and take my seat, there came the announcement of yet another surpise quiz in MANAC :-S . I guess 80% of the class did not have any clue about 80% of the paper. Not that it matters much anyways.

Well, in this cruel world of academic reality, I must also mention that projects and submissions still exist. Just that I am yet to get into them. Had our FM submission today, and my good hearted group allowed me the task of taking printouts and submitting the report. (I later learnt some other groups had members who didn't do even this on time, so yea, that way I did score :-p). I did do a decent job of it, even searching for a new image for the front page, replacing it with the old pixellated SpiceJet logo and taking a new printout, all within the last 15min of submission \m/

Oh yea, and another of those awesome things happened, which wouldn't have happened but for the IIM brand. The Media Relations Committee on campus got a deal with which we could get copies of 'The Economist' at just Rs.20/- !! Which is 10% of the actual price! Good job MRC! :)

Day 155: 30th Nov, 2009

Seemed as if I was going to attend lectures after ages! Wait a minute. That was true :-p

Was way too bored. I don't even recollect what happened. My mind is still on INDEX. I just remember jotting down a few points that need to be avoided next year :)

Went to the PGP office to get some clarification on my DWO attendance. I have been marked absent TWICE even though I had attended all lectures! :-x .. On enquiry, they told me details cannot be shared! :-S

Day 151.5: 26-27 Nov, 2009 - Night out in the city !

So this is a special night you get to enjoy only if you are in INDEX Ops! :D As the last leg of publicity, we have a night out in the city where we just go around putting INDEX posters ALL over the city :D.

We had two vans, one headed by Riza and the other by myself to cover different spots in the city. As it turned out, the space in my van turned out to be a little insufficient to seat all the Ops support team members and the workers. So in that freezing cold, I took out my bike to ride in the city :D. Definitely armed myself well for the cold, multiple layers of clothing, including two pairs of gloves :P.

Went around sticking posters at a lot of places. We had to only cut down because we ran out of the glue. Were stopped by an inspector in between. Told him we were IIM students sticking poster for our fair. Worked like magic :D

Stayed out till around 4am sticking posters. From there, myself and Jayadutta went to this place where they put handouts inside newspapers. Waited there for sometime while the guys inserted/stuck our pamphlets on the newspapers. Pretty fast those people are, I must say!

And from the there back to my room. Time to hit my bed for a couple of hours. Lots of work left in the day. 1 day to go for INDEX! :D

Day 118: 24th Oct, 2009

Had free time in the afternoon today. So gave a pizza lunch party as my birthday treat. Sud went one step beyond Soumen's birthday treat; she didn't even get that aloo paratha this time, courtesy her great phone which remained perennially out of contact.

Talking of communication failure, a major breakdown has happened to the internet facility to hostels 1-8. Seems like some major fibre optic cable has broken down during some construction work. And it is times like these when we are reminded that IIMs are government institutions - it is going to take 4 days for the thing to get repaired :(

Day 96: 2nd Oct, 2009

Ah! What a great feeling to wake up and know that there are no classes and hence sleep again!

Varchasva - the inter collegiate sports and cultural meet - started off today. The atmosphere is brilliant. Huge contingents from XLRI, NITIE, IIM Indore and a few other colleges have come here. All guys are happy because the chick quotient presently is substantially higher. Great events happening all around the campus. The sports events have especially been superb - very close and brilliant badminton, TT and volleyball victories for IIM L boys team and comfortable victories in football and basketball. The female sports events have been as expected - lots of cheering/booing/sledging AND bird watching (yea hardly any game as such). Couldn't attend too many of the cultural events. However I attended a Kavi Sammelan in the evening where we had Kumar Vishwas, Surinder Sharma and one more person whose name I don't remember. Was awesome!

Also have Kaushik, an INDEX senior, on campus. Met him up. He was wearing the his INDEX Core t-shirt! Can't wait to get my hands on one :) . Then spent the afternoon doing some outsourced work for some friends in other committees on campus.

Thanks to Varchasva, we have some food stalls on campus. Ate hot cheese burst pizzas from dominos for dinner. With the dripping cheese and all! Was Wowwwww!!

Random post. No wonder - it was a random day as well. Went to the DJ nite - good music. I didn't dance much today. Have reserved energy to distribute over the next 2 days. Am going to expend all of it soon!

Day 54: 13th Aug, 2009

AFTER I had made the post yesterday, I met up with a couple of my friends to discuss about the video making thing. Had some random discussions till 4.30-5. From there went to the CC to take a printout of a some FIRO SPIRO stuff that we were supposed to submit the next day.. and finally slept at 6am! The result -> missed the Eco lecture at 10.15! :D

Actually it is partly also the mistake of the guy who 's there 2 doors away. I wake him up almost every other day, but whenever he is supposed to wake me up, I miss the lecture. He claims to have woken me up even today at 8.30 but I guess he is not persuasive and effective enough :-p.

One good thing that happened was I finally managed to move away from the state of inertia w.r.t. committee tasks. I went to the city exclusively for this. But as luck would have it, halfway through, there was a downpour!! Got drenched totally. The first thing I did after I went to the mall was buy new clothes and change! :D Then went about making a few enquiries. Got a couple of leads that I need to follow. But the experience was fun.. realised the brand value of an IIM :) . People stop and listen to you.