This one is for my seniors here at IIMK, a tribute to them, My style…..

The entire BHostel Gang together after the last Hostel Party

A simple little pretty much inconspicuous guy who was my junior in college in St.Xavier’s Kolkata, and an eccentric guy whom I met during the GD/PI sessions in IMS Kolkata a couple of years back. The first one lives right opposite to me and the other one is one of the more famous guys here, a council member and both of them are my seniors.

The story of life has always been a collection of the stories of the people whom we meet and all the moments we share and all the things which we did or even more about all the things which we could have done, but never did.

Today as my seniors are leaving I can’t help myself but regret the fact that I was a failure in not knowing all of them more closely.
Perhaps we could have got more time to know these people who were right next to us, rather than knowing about authors with unpronounceable names who wrote shitty books.

But still whatever time and moments I got are all part of one sweet little memory file for me. Snapshots of times which froze in my memory to be cherished forever and perhaps to tell you guys someday through places like these.

Spam wars on IP, Pranay’s creative genius, JC’s smart one liners, Ravi & Abhilash’s size, Nilanjanda’s knowing smile and red eyes. Shounakda’s lambi gyaans, Sumcha’s random walk through the corridor with the earphone on, talking to his girlfriend, God so many times I thought he was talking to me while I walked past him, Mustu’s cool & sweet attitude, Sandy’s historical blunder. My own blunder at the first party at K with the Ms. Seniors :) All the girls who used to frequent my hostel and how I did a klpd once by greeting one of them? (will tell you guys in detail later). There are so many such moments which I will never forget. But there’s one guy whom I will miss the most and he is Meren. Somewhere down within I feel he is a lot like me. Carefree, bindaas, never cares about his grades or attendance, big time smoker, and to top it all he listens music in full volume. I will miss him when the next time I am out of cigarettes or when the next time I need to piss Firdaus off by playing music at full volume. But I will miss him the most when after getting up late I wont find anyone on my floor and have that feeling that I am the only one bunking classes.

Well not too far away in the future a day will come when I will also complete my 6 terms here and get a diploma and a farewell party and also a convocation ceremony and I don’t know how my emotions will run then? But today when I look at my seniors I just want to tell them that they were one hell ova batch of achievers, not because they got into an IIM and left with the best ever placements, but because of the persons they are, the kind of legacy they are leaving, the culture they built, the parties which they gave us, and most of all............

FOR SURVIVING TWO FULL YEARS IN THIS PLACE.

I just hope that someday, somewhere around this big bad corporate world we will meet up again face to face and that Day ....................…..Mil Baithenge 3 yaar.….Hum, Tum aur Bagpiper…:D

Valentine’s Day IIMK isshtyle

Just another day that’s what I expected it to be, nothing more. Got up late. Again. Thankfully one of the classes got cancelled. Not that it would have mattered much, but still !!

Afternoon was cool nothing much to do other than watch the slowly burning overgrown grass outside my balcony. Don’t know which moron’s idea it was.
That’s one more shortcoming of living in a state like Kerala, nobody wants to work. Who wants to carry the grass down & burn them?? You can do it here only. So what if the charcoal-ed grass flies all across the campus & poor fella’s like me can’t even open their balcony doors for days just to avoid the dust.

But something was missing all this while. I was missing my daily dose of tension. That’s something which you get here for free. Something to worry about, everyday. Checked my mail & there it was a mail from one of the assistant’s reminding me of yet another of my blunders. I am the only person left who is still not part of any group in the subject and the day for the group presentation is nearing. She had asked me to meet her but gosh by the time I checked my mail she was already gone for the day. One more blunder.
‘Jab Uparwala deta hai toh chappar phaar ke deta hai’
It kind of gels well with another of my fav lines: ‘Shit happens’ and today they seem to be working in concert.



6:45 in the evening & Sameer pings saying ‘pratik check ur mail’ ……it is kind of Deja tu experience (the feeling that I have seen you before © Happy) tomorrow we have a presentation so the case has to be solved & made into a PPT. And as usual he has broken the case into parts, to be solved & made into a ppt individually till we collate it JIT before the presentation.
Just another day was going on well, just as I had expected until someone pushed open my door and barged in.
‘ Sea Queen jaabi??’ Everyone’s celebrating it so why should we sit back. So what if we are away from our gf’s. Let's celebrate…!! Prosenjit said those words in exactly 3 seconds. I could see in his eyes it was the food of sea queen more than anything else which was alluring him. !!(I don’t blame him though coz I feel the same.)

Now that’s an offer which I have learnt not to decline in my past 8 months here. So we were out by 7:30. Though it was not our usual bong group, it was much smaller this time, only me, prosenjit & shiladitya (better known as soupda)

WHAaaawwW…!! Was the expression which had come out from my mouth the first time I entered the roof top of this sea-side restobar. And every time I enter this place I feel like saying it again. This place has a particular feel about it. An ambience, especially at night. It kind of soothes me and takes me away from all the crazy tensions of campus life.

Prosenjit’s cell kept ringing. It was the third time that he picked up the call & simply said ‘Same to you! I have a meeting going on now. So can’t talk. Will call after 12’

The place, as usual was quite filled up with our seniors and other batch mates. There are hardly any nice places to go in Kozhikode. We ordered our drinks and starters and lighted our cigs.
The topic of discussion shifted from the menu card to other things. CGPA, foreign exchange programme, electives, assignments, culture ….all came one by one and both soupda & prosenjit were deeply involved in it. I was silent, somehow the sound of the waves hitting the beach seemed more appealing to me. I would never care in a 100 lifetimes what CGPA I am getting as long as I keep on moving from one year to another, smoothly. Or for that matter going to Europe for a student exchange programme and increasing my bank loan by another couple of lacs.
There was a cool breeze blowing in from the sea and the combination of alcohol and the sweet air was having a calming effect on my nerves. After some rounds of drinks and a steak I got up on the parapet and jumped. I was falling down. I kept falling for some 10 seconds but I didn’t hit the ground. I was rising up again. And then soon I was flying. First I made a couple of circles over the restaurant & then proceeded towards the beach & then over the sea. I would have nearly reached the Arabian coast if only Prosenjit could have waited a while. But he was too eager to smoke and nearly shook me up …..Just for a cigarette! How mean can people get??


By around 11’O clock we decided to leave. For those of you who don’t live here. The roads here are really classy. I mean they are in much better condition than in most of the upper half of India. But they are really narrow & winding. You will hardly find a straight stretch of road which runs for more than a kilometer. There’s hardly any traffic at night except for the trucks. A bike ride now would have made the day for me. But all we had at our disposal was an auto.
I sat at one end of the backseat. Soupda kept complaining about his size not fitting in the middle. Don’t know whether he was complaining about his size or the auto’s size or us sandwiching him? Whatever it was I was not interested. I laid my head on the side wall & kept looking at the road ahead. I just wanted to go & crash on my bed. It was the kind of feel I used to have as a kid while coming back late at night from a party or some family get-together.
Somehow I feel the older or matured we get the more primal our tendencies become.
I am always a person of compulsions and very instinctive. But at that moment I don’t know where all my head & my thoughts kept banging & in which direction. I was having an uncanny feeling of bliss & solitude.

I remember saying once to someone on a related topic that these two years are the most vulnerable years, emotionally for most guys here. Little did I know then that I would so foolishly expose my own to her ?

How much more ironic can life get?


The auto ride lasted for some 35 minutes.
I came back to my room and started working on the unfinished case. It was around 2’O clock when I sent the PPT over to Rakesh to collate it.
At 3’ O clock Ankur multicasted that there is a test the next morning at 9 am.

Just another day had gone by perfectly fine!

In trance....

It’s so weird! isn’t it?......that things which we want to forget or wish to forget actually never gets deleted from our mind. So many times I have believed that I have been able to forget them and was comfortably ignorant. But I was wrong. All it took was a lonely night and 10 minutes of rain to bring back all those memories fresh in my mind as if it happened just yesterday.

It is 4:30 am in the morning & I am still wide awake. Still trying to fine tune my newly constructed weblog. I am quite tired with 4 days of night-outs with my studies and one day of fever. But somehow I don’t feel like going to bed. I am out of cigarettes, 6 hours back I still had an entire pack of it on my table but now it is empty (and there’s no chance of borrowing it either from Arka or Kiran as they are both fast asleep)…..also lying on my table are two empty cans of Diet Coke. Even my water bottle is empty which means I have to go out and refill it again. All these newly discovered constraints suddenly made me feel sleepy and I lay back on my chair and closed my eyes.

I have to call up mom. Its been two days since I last called and she must be worrying as my cell is inaccessible.
I need to book my tickets also for the next term break and Oh! Yes before I forget I have to complete my FM II assignment also, before 18:58 hrs tomorrow (deadline set by my neighbor Firdaus, who should get a six sigma certification for his lifestyle, everything about him seems like clockwork)


And then suddenly her face flashes in front of me, as an unwanted pop-up advertisement.
I wish it goes away but it doesn’t. She looks at me and starts smiling. I try to control myself thinking its nothing but musings of a semi-tranced mind. But the trance seems to get stronger on me. I go back to the day when I first met her. And everything appears to be so clearly saved in my mind. Each day, each moment, every incident, every joke that we shared, every fight that we had, her smile, her laughter, her getting angry on me, her favorite dialogues and how I used to make fun of them……starts raining through me…….All at Once !!
That one moment I felt like having re-lived the entire story once again.


I can hear the sound of rain lashing on my balcony. Its already dawn and the first rays of sunlight have started to lighten up this beautiful Kampus.

There are times when you have a feeling, a feeling of content even without a reason. Like the beautiful sunrise from the corridor of B-Top, or like rain lashing the picture perfect hills across the horizon, the beautiful small houses and the narrow winding roads across them.
Well Discovery Channel says that rain water is nothing but naturally recycled water. But today it brought with it something more than just that.

The rain didn’t last long, hardly for 10 minutes. But for those moments it did, it completely drenched me.

Photo: Nitesh Solanki

The Theory of CHAOS

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There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

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The flapping of a single butterfly's wing today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done. So, in a month's time, a tornado that would have devastated the Indonesian coast doesn't happen. Or maybe one that wasn't going to happen, does. (Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos, pg. 141)

Simplified it conveys basically two ideas. First, not all things which appear random are random, they have an underlying order……and if understood properly they can help us solve most of our problems.
Second is the sensitivity of the dependence of the outcome on initial conditions. Just a small change in the initial conditions can drastically change the long-term behavior of a system.

If all this is true then probably there is a pattern in the randomness of my life also.
Things which I never understood and left it just as a chance where after all not just isolated occurrences. They had a pattern, an order.
Probably I can retrace all the things which I had done in the past few months here and find an underlying pattern in them and find my answers like why I bunk so many classes? Why have I not been able to live up to my expectations, academically? Why I wasted so many nights & hours with someone?

What if I go back in the past and change the initial conditions? Will I be able to make the final outcomes as I want them to be? If present is a function of the past then I should succeed. What if I could go 3 years back and undo all my mistakes which I did as a young teenaged college go-er? Or what if I could go back some months back and stop myself from committing that foolish mistake of trying to do something which was utterly utopian and irrational ? Would I be able to get back my previous life then or the months which I wasted doing it? Or may be I could just change the conditions to get just what I wanted from the entire affair !!

I wish I could do it. And keep doing it as long as I don’t get what I want.

GMD

One more term is standing on its head upside down at 90 degrees. Mid terms are starting from Monday. And I have no clue about the subjects.

In the mean time I have just realized that I have screwed up one more paper by not attending the classes of the visiting prof who came all the way from Sweden. And I don’t have a suitable excuse yet. Perhaps it was the environment of Kerala and more closer home of Kunnihill which makes me more romantic and lazy. Who wants to study Indian economics and commodity futures?? when you could just fix your eyes upon the beautiful landscape and let your thoughts wander searching for …………………….!!