Yeh Dilli Hain Mere Yaar

1st Year in IIMC is over, placements are over for the 2nd Years as well. So most of my friends & acquaintances have gone home for much needed R&Rs. And the first thing they do when they get home (even before talking to their friends & relatives) is to change their gtalk status messages to tell everyone  else in their hometown that they are back (so that They can pack and run away!!).

But the strange thing is that now I realise, at least half the IIMCians I know are from Delhi!! What’s with that? Is there a special Delhi quota in IIMC that I don’t know about?? Worth investigating.

1 Year Later

At Last – after 1 year of gruelling hard work (Ok its 9 months if you have to nitpick – Divyesh did, but that’s no surprise!), I have done it, I have completed the First Year of Post Grduate Programme in IIM Calcutta!

It has been an awesome journey (though it pretty much sucked all the time) – filled with joys, jubilations, tribulations and dissapointments (mostly it was the last two). Getting in was huge ego booster, but that boost carried me over the first one and a half terms AND cost me a good summer job!! After that rude awakening, came the slow recovery (WITHOUT the benefit of a bailout) and now I am in a complete “na-gharka-na-ghatka” stage, still dunno if I took the right decision to go for an MBA, but more or less confident that I haven’t made a total mess of myself here (yet).

The next 3 weeks will be pretty chill (as if any of my three weeks aren’t!!) – just sitting at home, gaming and watching movies and tv serials all day – I have filled up my external HDD in anticipation . I DO plan to study for my internship  but that’s what it will remain, a plan. And a friend is coming from Delhi – he has timed it well, we have our old college fest and Reunion Night this week only. So I will hang with the old group some. But my girl is coding in US – so I am missing her like crazy and 3 weeks at home and the 2 months of internship, without hankering after her and nagging her all day will be like hell.

So there; that’s my plan for the whole of March!! What’s up with you??

IIMC & Narendra Modi

There is something going on between the IIM Calcutta student community & Narendra Modi. Confused? Lemme explain.

You see, we have something called a Discussion Board on our Homepage. Its supposed to be a forum for free discussion between the students, alumni and the faculty. Now, every 2 weeks or so, someone or the other will invariably post some news or opinion article about how good/bad (curiously though, the discussion generally starts with the bad) Narendra Modi is. And then , as invariably, all hell will break loose!!

The Modi bashers generally take the stance that how he has in general fucked up the Gujarat state and that all the talk about the progress of Gujarat is just a good marketing campaign – all smoke and no substance! For this purpose they try to dig up obscure articles from equally obscure journos on the net as proof (Example).

The Modi Fan Club in IIMC on the other hand are quick to turn on these articles and very methodically, they tear down each of the arguments mentioned in them, point by point (their enthusiasm is quite impressive actually). The point they try to make is – Narendra Modi is the best thing to happen to Gujarat since Mahatma Gandhi, what with his uncanny ability to attract investment to the state and general pleasant personality. And wouldn’t it be good if he was the Prime Minister of India! And if you disagree with the godliness of Lord Modi then you must be a Congress sympathiser (That’s a VERY BAD thing) and must have read nothing other than the crap served by liberal english newspapers!

While I have no idea whether Modi is a good administrator or not – I find it funny that none of the Modi bashers has ever taken issue with the fact in 2001 Modi presided over or more likely, orchestrated the greatest state sponsored pogrom of human beings since Rwanda. It’s as if that chapter of Indian history has completely passed out of the public psyche – maybe that’s why we are so unfazed by the random murders and terrorist attacks that keep on happening all over the country.

Anyways I don’t want to launch into another anti-Modi tirade right now – no one wants to hear me vent my spleen. But no matter how much that man has contributed to the progress of Gujarat, all of it pales in comparison to his crimes against humanity. If we hadn’t burnt the body of that poor man, Gandhiji would be turning in his grave right now – with the likes of the Ambanis & Birlas calling Modi the Pride of Gujarat!!!

PS: Sorry for the serious post – promise I will make up for it by making the next one exxxtra funny!

JBS No More….

Sorry Vamsi, no more videos for you

PS: Since I can’t stay unhappy for too long, here’s something funny I read.

JBS BaroC

JBS BaroC – possibly the only thing in IIMC that I actually like doing (What? You think I like making ppts till 3 in the morning?).

I just found out today that there is a JBS BaroC community on Orkut. That’s to be expected – Orkut has a community for every damn thing under the sun and then some. But the strange thing is that in the 7 odd months I have been a part of JBS, I have never even thought of looking for the JBS community in Orkut – I found out accidentally while browsing through a friend’s community list. (Note: This friend – he is also in JBS – has a fan community with 42 members: 40 guys & 2 girls!! Link)

Had a review-cum-feedback session for my performance in JBS last Thursday. Have to tell you the truth – when I was going for the review, I had butterflies in my stomach, kinda like what I was feeling just before proposing to my gf! The review was ….. (dunno good or bad) – the general consensus was that I need to give a lot more effort – true enough, 2 songs sung in a year is nothing to write home about. But in my defense, I was out of commission during our last performance during GGP (see link). But I was never much for giving excuses.

So the end result? Don’t know if I am in or out. If I am thrown out, that would really suck. And what with my general inferiority complex & approval issues, I just might go Virginia Tech and shoot up a buncha guys!!

PS: Here is a goody for all my devoted readers (Yeah, Right!) – This a video of my first performance for JBS, during Badla Party, 2008. Enjoy!

Repercussions of Satyam Fraud Being Felt in IIMC as well!!

Can you imagine – Satyam fraud has touched us here in IIM Calcutta as well??

Ok, not exactly.

What happened was that this Summer I am supposed to go to the auditing firm KPMG for my internship. And with Satyam all over the news, I actually thought it would be funny to tease an ex-PWC-ian friend (That’s my sidey BTW) about the auditing firms who were sitting with their thumbs up their asses while Raju played Haadoodo with the Balance Sheet (Maybe we should call it the Balance Shit! Okkk, Bad joke again).

But in my life, the Big Guy always likes to play Haadoodo with ME. So about a minute after I make the PWC crack, one of my friends tells me that he just saw KPMG on the news! Some other doofus also chooses that moment to tell me, that KPMG WAS the auditing firm for Satyam. That got me hyperventilating and for the next half hour I sat glued in front of CNBC TV18 trying to figure out whether I still had a summer job or not.

But, as I said, the Big Joker upstairs likes his little jokes and it turns out in fact PWC was Satyam’s auditors and now I am happy again.

But really what was PWC doing?I really can’t believe that a firm of that stature can be complicit in such a matter, but no one knew about Arthur Anderson as well, right?

PS: For a good rundown on the Satyam debacle, read this – http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2009/01/07/satyam%E2%80%99s-raju-lifts-the-lid-on-indian-corporate-fraud

Spore

New God game Spore - where you get to develop a species from its beginnings as a unicellular organism, through development as an intelligent and social creature, to interstellar exploration as a spacefaring culture.

Well I installed the game on Thursday night, started playing just before 10 pm and when I wrapped up and uninstalled the damn thing at 8 am next morning I had a galactic empire in my hands. And the game actually noted that I had passed all the stages of evolution in a single sitting and acknowledged the fact with some kind of weird title (forgot what)!

Thank god that my only class that day started at 2.15 and so I had some time to sleep!

PS: BTW, the game itself has little to do with actual evolution and looks more like a covert version of “Intelligent Design” and besides, though it’s engrossing at the first sitting, the game has little re-playability, if any at all.

French Class

I joined French classes this term, so now I have 5 classes every Monday (As if I don’t have enough on my plate already). Most of the other duffers in classes with me are there because they want to go on STEP (Student Exchange Program MORONS), but since I have neither the money nor the inclination to go mon ami with French girls for 3 months (Yeaah right, admit it – it’s just the money), WTF am I doing there?

Well I figured since my time in IIMC is already a waste, I might have some ROI to show for these two years and 7 lakh I am wasting.

Unfortunately, after 2 classes, my knowledge of French is limited to ca va (OK) and vous vous appelle comment (What’s your name) – so it seems this isn’t going to be much of an investment either.

Life Sucks, continued

Since we are on the topic of life sucking, let me just inform you that last Friday I broke my glasses (-7.5 dioptre power bitches!) and got a huge cut over my eye (OK, not so huge but it bled like hell). So currently I am at home (that’s a good thing – mom’s cooking YuM!), will miss a few classes (another good thing – my life doesn’t really suck does it?). But unfortunately because of this entire debacle I have to miss performing in GGP tonight and that really sucks!

Oh and I am also missing French class, but more on that later.

PS: For the uninitiated, GGP = Alumni Night and maybe next year I will tell you what GGP stands for, if I get to be there.

Life Sucks, In General!!

“Life Sucks, in General” – it was mid-November and this was my status message in GTalk. Surprisingly (cos no one ever cares to inquire about my well-being), quite a few people asked me whether I was OK or not. Maybe it was cos that the Placement Week was just over and they thought I was sad that I had screwed it up royally. Well, it wasn’t – I was pissed off cos  I was having a huge fight with my gf. But the strange thing is that, since then I have realised that this sentence seems to fit almost every aspect of my life. Not a single day has gone by that I haven’t said about something or the other – “Life Sucks, in General”! Is it just me whining more than usual, or maybe nowadays life DOES suck all the time?