Blog: Update - 1

I put the title of the blog as “Blog: Update – 1” for three reasons. First reason being, it gives me a sense of satisfaction that I am acknowledging the fact I haven’t written a post for my blog for long; second, there is more than 1 update that I need to post here so more posts shall follow soon; and, the third reason is I am now very used to reading the “BP: Macondo Update…” reports regarding the recent oil spill in GoM published very frequently by the research desk I work for and so it is only natural I pick that up as the title of this post!

My days are spent reading about Oil and trying to figure how, in the broad scheme of things, it would help manage someone’s wealth; where as my evenings are spent trying to figure how to manage the Oil usage at home so my roommates and I keep good health!

I guess once you start working, the mind undergoes a certain conditioning, which is automatic and completely unintentional as well, but it sure happens. I realized this when I was sitting with a friend in Hard Rock Café the other evening. It was his last day in Hyderabad; his stint here as an intern had just ended. Digging into the hot melting dark chocolate on an unusually large piece of chocolate brownie, he was narrating his experiences at work. On the day of his final presentation, his boss asked him “how many hours in a day do you have?” and my friend blurted, “Eight, Sir!”. It did not occur to him, even for a moment that his boss could actually be referring to the total number of hours in a day! He thought of only the ideal number of working hours in a day and said 8 in all honesty.

The other I realized happened with my roommate. She works for a firm which leaves her with no life – both in terms of time and activity. In the first month of her job, she went to office on all Saturdays. She is supposed to have a five-day week but she never saw a relaxed Friday evening or a Saturday morning in that whole month. And then, one day she returned with the biggest grin on her face, announcing as happily as she could that the next day, a Saturday was going to be an off! But the whole of Saturday she kept repeating to us, “I feel this is Sunday!”, “I feel as if I need to go to office tomorrow!” or “I will feel weird when Sunday actually arrives tomorrow!”. Her mind is conditioned to have only one day off in a week – in just a month’s time!

And well, I did not escape the conditioning either!

Suddenly I find, the popular phrase “All is Well” has changed to “Oil’s Well” in my vocabulary. Humorous I know, but it is a certain inalienable truth of my life now!

Umm, This was Crazy – Part II

Read Part - I below before you read this.

Fortunately for the four of us, we did not have to try too hard for an auto outside the main gate at such an odd hour! He agreed for 300 rupees to take us to Mehdipatnam in the city.

Now as we 'embarked on the bumpy ride', I thought of my BITSian juniors living in Hitech City. Mad as I might sound, I called one of them asking if she would be willing to let us in into their apartment post midnight because we had no place else to go and that we wanted to "do something"! Mugdha ever so willingly agreed.

The auto ride wasn’t particularly something I would like to remember. It was terrifying to say the least. Why? Well, the road was completely deserted, with only the auto’s headlights flashing – only every now and then. Not a single vehicle crossed us, ahh, of course there were a few bulky noise-making trucks that did but we are not considering them here.

And, to scare us further, the auto-walla’s phone kept ringing (and he was receiving those calls while trying to drive with one hand) and he said, “main aa raha hoon, jaldi aa raha hoon.” Terrifying scenes from all the Bollywood movies flashing in front of my eyes, I turned completely white, apparently. Well, it was something to be scared of, after all!

Finally, after a long and rather speedy drive, we reached Mehdipatnam, and looked for another auto to take us to Hi tech City. Mugdha had sent us directions to her place in an sms. So, huddled into a smaller auto this time, the four of us experienced Hyderabad post midnight.

A blank above is to tell you that there isn’t much to write about Hyderabad’s post midnight life.

Upon reaching Mugdha’s luxurious flat and a round of introductions, my BITSian juniors cooked some delicious late-night dinner for all of us. The menu was exquisite – Pasta, Chicken sandwiches, and cold drinks along with some chips and chocolate-chip biscuits; we couldn’t have asked for more! As it happens always, when a few BITSians get together, and then if they belong to the same Department too, there’s no stopping them from going into long sessions of lachha, ignoring the rest of the world. Pretty rude for an outsider, I agree, so to not look rude, we narrated some BITS stories to the non-BITSians in the room and the lachha-session continued for more than an hour or so.

Have you ever played Taboo? It’s a card-words game, an extremely enjoyable one. And, that is what we did for the next three hours after two more juniors joined us. Two teams of four each, Controlz Vs Non-Controlz; and boy! did we have a gala time or what! Controlz made a clean sweep, although my friends in the other team provided both good competition and great fun – with Dipsen using all of the Taboo words one after the other for cards after cards!

Oh Dipsen, you are the cutest I know.

Post 5.30am, the diligent student and the sane human in us woke up to reality. We forced my juniors to retire; they had to get to offices and internships in about three hours time.

We gathered our tired minds to work, and strained our eyes to read the fine print from our laptops. Only to fail, for slowly, all the four wickets fell one by one on the big black cushiony sofas into a deep slumber of about an hour!

By 8am, we were on the way back to our campus in a seven-seater. We had taken our camera with us, but in all the excitement and madness, we forgot to click for most part of the time. But, none of the eight would forget the night, ever. For Dipsen – it was the satisfaction of having done something outrageous, breaking college rules to be precise. For the two guys who accompanied us – it was the delight of having given us company through such madness. For my juniors – it was reliving Pilani days, graveyard shifts in the Controlz Booth to be precise. And for me – it was the addition of another great story that I would relay to my grandchildren!

Umm, This was Crazy – Part I

This post should have been here a long time ago. But, given the rather erratic MBA schedule and the regular succumbing to the whims and fancies of my professors, this post got inevitably delayed. Of course, I also went home in a rush which added to the further delay. Anyway, read on now.

Disclaimer: All names are real. And no incident here is fictitious.

This is the story of one night. A rather simple and funny story of just 12 hours!

It all started with Dipsen walking into my hostel room at 9pm. I was acting a slave to my laptop at that time, trying hard to start reading the case pending for Brand lecture the next day, with two more assignments nagging at the back of my mind. Ok, alright! I won't brag about my academic schedule here but, what I mean to imply is I was busy with terrible work load. (In fact you know, to validate, just that evening I was chatting with Raghu and Anish, and they would willingly agree that I was dead meat then!). Anyway. So, Dipsen walked in with the biggest grin and even more intense sheepishness written all over her face. Then, she blurted, "let's do something!". Puzzled I stared at her for some time, obviously prompting her to explain! The next couple of things she said sounded just like her - determined yet confused. Mm hmm, Determined because she was sure she had to do something. And Confused because she did not know how to.


Half an hour later, some part of her craziness rubbed off on to me. The "let's do something" had changed to "let's run off from campus". By this time, Nivi was also in my room and she looked at both of us very disapprovingly. And so, we knew she wasn't going to "do anything"!

Like some random shots, we phoned and Googled a few places around our isolated campus. When I say isolated, I really mean Isolated! There is nothing around my college campus apart from vast stretches of green and only green. And, as expected our search was all in vain. But, Dipsen wasn't to budge at all. About one thing, she was very true, "It's a chance of a lifetime - to have this kind of crazy enthusiasm. We might not have the time and the place to do this again!"

So, like all management graduates, we tried to first set up a team of like-minded people - people on campus who were ready to take on a crazy night. Most of them did not agree. We finally called up Nishadh, almost expecting him to get convinced in a jiffy. But it was Tj who unexpectedly agreed almost instantly! Finally, Nishadh gave in too. And so, we found our team.


But what was it that we were "to do" exactly? Haah! We hadn't decided yet.

As we all got ready to leave (with no planned destination), it was past 10pm. Now, like in all college campuses in real life, there are some rules you are supposed to follow. Like not go out of main gate without permission post 11pm, like sign in the Out-Register while leaving campus. And there are certain general rules of Life that you are supposed to follow too. Like not travel on a deserted road with no street lights in an auto at the middle of the night. Anyone would call you insane if you did that.

But, those are exactly the things we did that night. The four of us quietly packed our laptop bags, convinced each other that we were doing this now or never, and casually walked out of the main gate.

For The Last Time...

This is a good news to declare to everyone. I am on the brink of writing the last three-hour final examination (popularly called as Comprees in some part of the country and Externals somewhere else!) of my life. We've all had our share of waiting for this D-Day, and aloha, here it is for me! So, although a bit nostalgic about it somewhere within, the excitement is overpowering and it is definitely a moment to savour!

Needless to mention, with exams ending, the day tomorrow also brings the end of the long academic journey I embarked on at the age of 3! It is overwhelming to think of it that way. I Learnt and Un-learnt many things. But, this post is not to tell you about the serious and sentimental stuff (that'll bring an unnecessary halt to my last night-out preparation!); so, I am going to do what I logged on to do.  

As a tribute to all those days and nights of exam-preparation, tension, lectures, professors-teachers alike, techhy classrooms, out-of-syllabus incomprehensible questions, really weird invigilators, and to all those wandering imaginative brilliant minds -- suited to the occasion, here are five of my most favourite from the world of Calvin and Hobbes:

No one does it better than him; I am sure you agree! Cheers!

The Blues and Hues

Disappointments are difficult to handle. You don’t know what you are disappointed with more – yourself or the situation you found yourself in. You don’t know whether it was you who did something wrong or if it was the situation that went against you. But clearly, you are dejected. And, that is why I presume disappointments are tough to handle. Because of the sheer ambiguity they carry with themselves. For a while, you are immersed in a feeling of loss – loss of something good, something you wanted but did not get; later perhaps in the lack of a feeling itself. The vicious circle that the mind then weaves gets you weary to even fight any longer.

I am talking about one such disappointment I experienced today. I will tell you why I call it an experience later. It has not been easy to overcome. Absolutely because of the confusion it clouded my mind with. I did not know who to blame, if at all I wanted to play the blame-game – myself or the series of events that led to the disappointing outcome; or both. And, I did not know of a way to find comfort in my chaos.

It wasn’t somehow a regular college day right from dawn; and yet I dared to march into the unknown armed with… nothing. Or maybe, with some hope against hope. And, as I sit here in the library reflecting on my day that just went by, one thing stands out. Life is not easy. There are days when you become a victim of Murphy’s Law and chance upon the sad realization that the road ahead might only get worse. And that’s exactly what happened today. Being hopeful is even tougher on days like these, but then that’s the best you can do. Perhaps the day was chalked out to be like this, says a friend philosophically. But I don’t know that. Yet, I mean.

Like in most Bollywood movies, where the good wins over the bad, the disheartened feeling also saw a heartening comfort in the end. Sipping on tea sitting outside the college mess, I had a ‘lecturing’ conversation with a friend. So when I say lecturing, you can imagine it to be completely one-sided. And it was not the lecture that was the actual take away. It was the fact that no matter how bad your day is, at the end of it you will always have friends to sit on your either side, who’ll try to make you believe that the script you have been writing for your life will win just when the time is right; that the blues within would soon be replaced with newer, brighter hues; and that there is no greater delight in having faith in yourself, patience with life and wielding your pen no matter what happens.

With the day at its end now, I realize I shall wake up again to dare and march into another unknown armed with… maybe, the experience of having done this before. And, that as they say, is Life!