Thought Overflow

Excellence & Integrity, it says proudly on the XLRI emblem.

I will be the first to admit that just living here for the last few months has changed me tremendously. It’s made me much more courageous, more self-confident, more instilled with the belief that I can do most things I set my mind to, and it’s taught me to not be satisfied with mediocrity, because nobody else here is. Everyone is going to take that extra step to ensure that they get the best they deserve, be it in terms of marks or projects. We are all here because we deserve to be here, it’s as simple as that, and we will what take we deserve, by right or by fight.

But stop grinning now, because this post isn’t a glorification of XLRI. It’s a post about calling a spade when you see it. It’s about an anger that to me is justified. Excellence? Sure. But integrity, where have they left you?

So our electives for the next term have been floated, and some professors have set limits to the number of students they wish to take for their courses, and while that’s another debate entirely, I am unwilling to get into it now. But the question arises…how to select which students get to attend a course they applied for? One method is to give students with a higher CQPI (XLRI equivalent of CGPA) their first preferences. And why not? I believe that generally, your grades reflect how much effort and sincerity you’ve put into your studies. There are exceptions, of course, like my room-mate, whose grades do no justice to his level of input and diligence.

The other option is to hold an ‘entrance test’. There is irony here of the highest order. Think about it. You work hard and give a multitude of ‘entrance exams’ to get into a good engineering college. Then you work hard to give a number of ‘entrance exams’ to get into a good B-school. And now that you’re in, you give an entrance exam to get into a good elective!

Anyway, we had one today, for a course that has attracted far too many students, apparently. I will not debate the validity of the idea of conducting an entrance exam for an elective, but I will discuss how it’s conducted. There would have been about 80 people in the hall, if not more, and when the test started, answers were being hissed across the room, roving eyes were trying to sneak a peek into other papers. All this for an elective? Integrity indeed!

All this makes me wonder…maybe this is how the corporate world wants us to be. Maybe to crack the crooked lock, we need a crooked key. Idealism is lost, because the righteous have been far outnumbered by the sly. We are a miniscule voice, screaming at the top of our lungs, but our throats have been stuffed full of cotton by dubious means, and this is my lament.

Disclaimer: This post is not intended to pass judgement on XLRI or its students in any way. For every black sheep here, there are a couple of white ones that exemplify the values mentioned above. This post merely my opinion and my expression. It’s my right to be inflamed at what I perceive is wrong, and if it offends you, then you probably deserve it.

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So I recently bought a second-hand motorcycle from a senior at a wonderfully knocked-down price. It’s perfect because though I’ve learnt how to ride, I don’t have much practice. An old bike is really perfect since if I fall off or something, a few scratches and dents would probably give the bike more personality than they would take away from it.

Anyhow, I was sitting behind Varun the other day when we went into town, and I realized something. I get slightly nervous when I sit behind someone on the bike, because I’m always thinking things like “I would keep the bike a little more to the right”, or “That was dangerous!”, or “Why doesn’t he just accelerate and overtake this guy quickly?”. Before I knew how to drive, however, it was much simpler, because I just put my life in the hands of the driver and enjoyed the ride. This realization led me to some of the “golden rules” of bike-riding. Here we go:

For the pillion-rider

1. Trust the rider. He (or she) is in complete control of the bike, just the way you would be were you riding.
2. If you do not trust the rider, then don’t get on the bike.
3. If you do trust the rider, then realize that you are going to put your life in his hands, and there’s nothing you can do to control the bike now. So relax, sit still and don’t do anything to distract the rider.

For the rider

1. Your passenger has trusted you with his life. You are now responsible not only for your own life, but also the life of the person sitting behind you. Drive carefully.
2. People can sometimes get scared or nervous sitting on the back-seat. Deal with it, or try driving a little more conservatively to put them at ease.
3. Your pillion-rider will more than occasionally want to indulge in some “back-seat driving”. This is natural. Learn not to get irritated and take it in your stride.

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It’s getting hotter day by day. One of these days, I’m going to have to start taking a shower with cold water again. If that alone is not strong enough proof of the fact that summer is just around the bend, consider this. What word do you most strongly associate with “summer afternoons”?

Lazy.

Everybody has had to have read or heard of the phrase “a lazy summer afternoon”. And it’s true, isn’t it? We tend to be lazy during the summer, not only because we have our summer vacation, but also probably because the heat makes us lethargic. It’s just too hot to do anything. The other problem is that you have to switch on the fan to make yourself comfortable, but we end up inadvertently making ourselves too comfortable, and the moment we pick up books to read, and lie under the fan, we tend more often than not to fall asleep.

(This post is probably an excuse for why I’m not studying Organisational Behaviour despite the fact that I have a quiz tomorrow!)

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Back when I was still doing engineering, I had plenty of time to devote to the design and upkeep of this site. It was one of the things I enjoyed a lot, designing and customizing themes to suit me to the dot. After starting MBA, obviously I haven’t had the time to do any of that.

However, I must say that I’m beginning to get bored with the current layout of the site. I’ve also been thinking that I should put my writing on my own site rather than leave it all on Storiesmania. I’ve been thinking of ways of implementing this, and I think I’ve got a good enough idea now (I just spent the last OB-3 class thinking about it!).

Therefore, I can announce, with pleasure and pride, that over the summer, if all goes well, I will be redesigning the site, automating major portions of it and facilitating the ability to post my writing, and allowing readers to post comments, and possibly even to rate the writing out of 5 stars.

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On random play (as usual), my media player put on Pearl Jam’s “Garden“. Before I describe what it made me feel, let me describe how the day has progressed so far. I woke up late today, because after about a week of an extremely tight schedule, we finally have a couple of light days, today and tomorrow. Today, we have only 2 classes, both after lunch, so I woke up late and have been relaxing since I woke up. It’s a beautiful day when you don’t have to do anything but chill out. So, it’s a bonus when your media player randomly throws a melodic masterpiece like “Garden” at you.

While I will not attempt to try and decipher its lyrics for you, “Garden” is a song with absolutely amazing guitar riffs and Eddie Vedder’s voice is more than perfect for that song. When it starts playing, and your heart is already happy, it feels like this song makes you want to be in love.

And that’s exactly how I felt.

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PS: On a thoroughly unrelated note, I have decided to change my blog’s tag-line from “Dedicated to the Invisible Audience” to “Music | Life | Love | …and the lack thereof”. Cheers.

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After a long, long time, I woke up early a couple of days back to study for that afternoon’s Production Management mid-term exam. It was a glorious grey sky morning, cool and peaceful. It might be a huge coincidence, but every time I have a test or exam for which I’m not 100% prepared, the sky is generally overcast. However, contrary to popular (and clichéd) literature, a grey sky is far from gloomy for me. I love it. I revel in it.

So anyway, back to the morning. I switched on the laptop to read from the slides that are given in the CD accompanying the text book. My earphones were on the table, and instinctively, I connected them and hit the play button on my media player. It’s generally on random, and within a couple of songs, it played a classic number by Santana. Instantly, I took it off shuffle, and started playing Santana’s 1973 album III. I had drawn the curtain of my window earlier, and it feels awesome to have the morning light come in and light up my work-space.

More than anything, the grey sky reminded me of those cherished moments spent in the hour-long bus ride to college (engineering) every morning, drowned by the sound of music, pondering over what I’m going to do on that day’s test. Nostalgia, again.

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If there’s one universal truth that all bloggers will accept, it’s this: we’re all comment whores. All bloggers love receiving feedback on their posts, and these come mostly in the form of comments. If you offered a passionate blogger a choice between getting a steady stream of comments on all his blog posts on one hand, and eternal life on the other, he’d probably choose the comments (besides, who wants to live forever anyway?).

What most bloggers seem not to do too well is to reply to the few comments that they do get. I’m going to try to make some points here about the right etiquette for replying to comments on your blog posts or stories.

1. Always reply to every comment (or commenter)…individually. You have to realise that getting comments is not your right. It’s nothing short of an honour that someone has taken time out to read your post, and then taken some more time out to type a comment on it. Unless you thank them for their comment or post a reply to their reply, they will be discouraged from writing comments for you in the future.
2. Always reply to every comment (or commenter)…individually. It was important enough to repeat as point 2.
3. If you do not want your comments thread to go haywire, try to keep spam and off-topic replies to a minimum. Of course, you cannot prevent others from posting off-topic stuff in the comments, but you can actively avoid doing it yourself. That might help.

As a writer, I love getting detailed feedback on my writing, from how the characters of my story were perceived to how the pace of the story was fine (or not fine). I try to do the same thing for others. I have, in the past when time permitted it, spent hours writing a detailed critique for others on Storiesmania. The response I usually got was what made it all worthwhile, and made it worth doing the same thing again. But I’ve also seen that sometimes when I write a good length review, when someone posts nothing but a “thanks!” in return, I never bother spending time writing them a proper comment again.

Maybe I’m just being a little demanding, but put yourself in a commenter’s position. Unless you can make the commenter feel that his comment is valued, you will not be getting any valuable comments.

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Back when I was in 9th class (or was it 10th?), Hyderabad witnessed furious rains that flooded a small open drain (the best English translation of nala I could come up with) in Begumpet, which caused school to be shut down for about a week or so. This happened very close to exam time, and we ended up getting an unexpected vacation right before the exams. The anti-climax arrived in the form of the results; I ended up doing pretty badly in those exams (and so did most of the class, if I remember right). At that point, I remember a teacher remarking that had it not been for the break before the exams, all the students would have probably done better.

I thought it strange at the time to think that a refreshing break would have resulted in a drop in performance, but it seems to make sense now. There’s a certain inertia to performance. For the past week, classes in XLRI had been suspended for a major event, and we’re back to the normal routine from Tuesday. I have mid-terms scheduled on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday (WTF, literally). I tried reading for one today, and I found it close to impossible to get my mind on my studies. All I wanted to do was chill out. Because that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing for the last couple of days. It’s not so easy to break a habit.

Anyway, this is just something I noticed that I thought I’d blog about. Have you ever felt anything similar? Let me know by leaving comments!

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I’m extremely tired. I’ve had less sleep than I would have liked in the last couple of days (who doesn’t like sleeping), but more importantly, I’ve been doing a lot of running around in the last couple of days and I can feel aches in places I didn’t even know I had muscles (clichéd line, I know). Right now, though, I have some time off, and it’s a lazy, quiet afternoon. I need to finish off writing 5 sentences on a piece of paper for an assignment, and after that I ought to be free.

On this quiet, “lazy” afternoon, I’d love nothing more than to lie in bed and listen to music. It’s been a while since I’ve had the time to do that. My mind is full of mirth at the thought of partying with some of my favourite bands. The Queens of the Stone Age would be there, and so would Pearl Jam. I can anticipate Eddie Vedder’s voice jumping around, just like he used to do on stage. There’d be Metallica playing some of their more mellow songs like Low Man’s Lyric and Unforgiven II. And I can’t forget to invite Swervedriver with their shimmering guitar riffs.

Good afternoon and good night.

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Life and I more than occasionally share a hate-hate relationship. I’ve often said that life is a female dog. Really, though, it’s a roller-coaster ride with a crazed loon on drugs at the controls. Every once in a while, life surprises you by sending you a hell of a day, and I mean that in the good way. Today has been just one of those days.

I woke up at 11:45 AM, despite having resolved last night to wake up at 9 or so. I spent majority of the day playing Football Manager 2010. Lunch in the mess was distinctly average, but the real fun began in the evening. Today was COWBAXI Day (Cowbelt Association of XLRI, a group of students from the cow-belt region of India — states like Bihar, Jharkhand, UP, MP, etc.). They organised some traditional snacks like litti, and masala chai. It was delicious! They then organised a few cultural programmes that consisted of a couple of fun games and a couple of dance performances by the students.

And then, there was dinner.

There’s a reason I’ve put that line in its own paragraph. The dinner, I think, was the highlight of the night. It was incredibly delicious. Despite having gorged on two ghee-laden littis, I managed to eat a fairly heavy dinner. The number of dishes was not very high (in comparison to some of the other committees’ dinners), but each and every item tasted heavenly, and I guess a simple menu was clearly the way to go. It also helped that COWBAXI has the highest number of members among all regional committees, since their service was also spectacular. After dinner, we were treated to a small skit, a satire on the Mahabharata and on some of our professors here at XLRI. The amount of creativity, humour and wit that went into it were obvious and I thoroughly enjoyed the performance.

And then, to end the day, I came back to my room to read (and watch the last few minutes) of Manchester United’s 3-1 victory over Arsenal.

What a day!

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