Third front intervention – Why the IIMC-XL sports tourneys are jingoistic

DISCLAIMER:

Whatever is being written is light hearted by the most serious of any blogging rules. By no means is it to be taken seriously , unless of course, one unfortunately suffers from the most retarded versions of a disease called the ass-brain-same-position-uptightness-syndrome

THE FOUNDATION:

While thinking between how RPFs work in the banking sector and how the Ude Garami can be varied with respect to the combat position ,I was struck with an idea that was totally uncorrelated with either.

This evolution of thought , where you are seriously thinking of concluding a pondering process between two mutually exclusive thoughts, and yet conclude on something else totally devoid of any connection to either; I have no puta of an idea what such an idea should rightfully  be called. For now, I will casually call it  the third front intervening-nugget :p

THE THIRD FRONT INTERVENING NUGGET:

Ever wondered why the IIM Calcutta and XLRI annual sports tournaments are so aggressive and jingoistic ? Stupid question. I am sure you all have your answers. So do I. The stuff that doles out like ‘tournament’s competitive nature, warm blooded warring-spirit, machivellian sportiness, et al’ ! Usually, I think so too. Yet, for the dilletantish sake, I have an another (additive but not exclusive) theory…

You see this good friend of mine , always made a thought provoking…err..thought that at some point in life, perhaps for a second or perhaps for longer, everyone thinks like a communist. The egalatarian idealism perhaps appeals to a young mind who yearns to see some equality in their frame of observance.Pute ete ? Anyway, totally granted …lets park that thought for a while !

Now you see in IIM Calcutta the gender ratio has always been sad , not so for good ol’ XLRI. So, when a sports contingent from Joka (IIM Calcutta campus) goes to XLRI for a sports festival, the boys are naturally expected to be in their good boyish, prince charmingish behavior . Who knows if the Gods will it and the XL brothers are not so bothered, the Jokaites might even score 😛 This is where the communistic-correlation kicks in …

Not everyone would score. By the laws of gender dynamics and the Uncertainity principle, not necessarily! If a few do and others don’t , the remaining might feel bad, sad and not at all glad. So to make the comrades be equal, an ancient IIMC-XL culture had been invented to prevent the ladies’ stud of Joka from succeeding.

THE SOLUTION:

That of jingoistic , Indo-Pak level sports rivalry where IIMC  and XLRI are the collective personifications of two rivals, and no niceties in between please. Hence, the comrade who wanted to score, should not, because he is part of a contingent that is only following tradition, open sports-rivalry and perhaps, closet marxistic distribution of unscoring! Get it ? 😉

Yours truly,

the dark, the fast and the only,

-Ghost Runner

**The Metro Kolkatan Epic** Episode 5: Of varieties , quant and good byes

In a cab from Joka to airport , it takes approximately 2 to 3 hours depending on traffic.

Lets see what happens when you take the metro … (From where i started to the airport , i needed to take the whole stretch of the metro line 🙂 )

Details: Starting at 11 am in the morning. The timings between the arrows show travel durations from one station to the next. The times accompanying the stations indicate the duration of the stops :-

Tollygunge —– 2min 18 seconds— -> Rabindra sarobar (12 sec) —1 min 51 seconds — -> JD.Park ( 17 sec) — 1 min 13seconds –> Rabindra Sadan (23 seconds) —-> Maidan(18 seconds) —1 min 20 seconds—-> Park street (15 seconds) — 1 min 20 seconds– ->Esplanade(13 seconds) –1 min 42 seconds–> chandni chowk (10 seconds) —1 min 28 seconds—>central (14 seconds) —-1 min 23 seconds–>m g road (12 seconds)– 1 min 25 seconds–> girish park (22 seconds)–1 min 35 seconds–> shobha bazaar(18 seconds) –1 min 20 seconds—> shyaam bazaar (10 seconds) –1 min 25 seconds —> belgachia (15 seconds) — 1 min 33 seconds–> dum dum

Hmm ..more of a detailed accumulation to roughly get an idea of the travel time in a metro. Considering this is Kolkata, a relatively backward city compared to other big cities , the city’s metro is surprisingly fast and effiecient. A bus from Dum Dum to the airport will take around 4 minutes.

So the whole thing takes a little less than haf an hour 🙂

And thus, having travelled the length of the great kolkatan metro completely for the first time , on the last day in Kolkata ..I bid adieu to this place …

** the end of series**

Anticlimax: the night of solitary nostalgia

They have all left, the 2009 batch (pie batch)  Jokalanders. I look at the watch and its 10:30 Am now … me the last person on campus.

Last night I jogged the proverbial last run on the roads of the campus. The Prof. taking an evening  walk with his wife , the FP students chatting at the Amul shop, probably even the snake trying to catch the fat mouse et al., knew that this is the ghost runner’s last freakishly useless run on the grounds of IIM-C. Haha ..is anyone listening ? 😛

Well ! I have a flight at 4:30 PM so I would be leaving soon.

Call it cognitive gothicism or even subtle masochism that I find a vague pleasure in seeing them all leave one after the other, in being the last man on campus.I don’t do senti,  never been my forte’ …but my loyalties towards Jokaland trigger a small sense of pride that I stayed in Joka a little longer than the rest  (as if that matters !)

On the flip side , Jokaland (IIM-C) has given me back what Gachibowli Insti of tech (IIIT-H) destroyed , at least most of it 😛  Now all bullshit said and done…  I am happy to go back home …  sio nara 🙂

The **Metro Kolkatan epic** Episode 4: Kolkatan smokes

Kolkata is easily among the places where people smoke the most.

Anyway I took the metro all the way to Park Street last night. Co-Incidentally this area is the place where you shall find everything from the 2o–beedi packet for Rs.4/-  to the most expensive cigar for Rs.4000 per piece.

Suddenly I realized I never really smoked before. The devil in me tempted me to do it. I got out of the station (smoking in the subway kills you ..more by the security guard’s lathi than by lung damage)

Hmm ..so I   bought a  single piece of Wills Classic Milds (unarguably the most commonly smoked fag among the folks in Jokaland) I lighted it,  smoked a puff, coughed, got a feeling like someone fired a Diwali rocket into my wind pipe. I threw it away concluding that smoking is not my type !

But the irony … is a clear cut case of herd mentality. As I was lighting that cigarette, many pedestrians joined me in the street corner and lit their own cigarattes.  Thus,  in spite of me being able to get rid of the smoking-curiosity in me , I ended up playing the devil by inducing so many people to smoke that moment 😦

Am I, the soul less chap, actually feeling guilt ? Naah ..more like objectively depicting an irony.

x-x

ps:  Episode 5 shall be the last in the series. It is a bit numerical 😛 and depicts the ghost runner’s  last Kolkatan ride to the airport

Interlude 4th April: Convocation Day

The in-your-face FOREWORD:

I would leave the redundancies of the  details,the convocation speeches, the events,  the placement figures, the list of Business research publications, the mood of the convocation et al.,  to the press, the media and those who have the unearthly patience to set it all down in the midst of a heavy duty nostalgia …

And now , the single most dense thought in my head at the moment….

Our folks (parents, uncles, aunts etc.,) ,  come to leave us at school on the first day of our kindergarten . We are crying (explicitly) because we are being thrown into education …

cut to the present ..

Our folks again come back to witness our convocation and take us out (symbolically) of this education . We are crying again (inside) because we have become so used to this student’s life which we have grown to love ….

Pals, Jokalanders and fighters ….

God bless you all 🙂 and even if He doesn’t, it doesn’t matter … for you are more REAL than He is, and that is what (I guess) He wants you to think  🙂

I salute thee !

Metro-Kolkatan epic: Pilot episode

For many days I wanted to travel in the metro the one in Kolkata. But never did it in 2 years. Thanks to the consistently persistent nagging of my fellow-con-man Mr.Mike Talman aka Chirag Desai 😛 , I mustered the audacity to defy my motion-sickness and travel by the metro …

And then there had been no looking back and the adventures began ,,,, So it begins the “metro” – kolkatan epic 🙂 , a saga of bufoonery, randomness and Bongland

[the (mis)adventures take off from next post…]

Between the Gugni

I sat there outside the campus eating the egg bread gugni , an excellent dish for break fast.

I looked at it wondering how come it is so far better than the stuff we get inside the campus at double the price. And the thoughts flowed backwards …

The previous night was a grave yard shift without a wink of sleep. I remember myself running around the campus at Joka at 3 AM while most of the stud farmers (my wingies … majorly the only group left in the campus right now) were busy playing Poker over smokes.Lets go further back …

At my room, a bit drunk and seeing  War lords (chinese movie starring Jet Li)  And somehow , came to understand that all chinese periodicals depicting war, are directly related to one or more of the thirteen chapters of Sun Tzu’s Art of War ( I guess any mgmt. student  would love this book 🙂 ) Rewind karo …

I was at Magnolia in Park street drinking Old Monk (not much of a drinker. But couldn’t resist the sentiment. Behind the potentially last outing with the last few guys who stayed behind ). You go further back …

Scene shifts to Some place else …  widely regarded as the most popular bar in Kolkata. A group of two boys and three girls I guess is never a bad-ratio crowd in a bar. And that too in India 😛 . They were locals …non IIMians talking about their college festival starting on 13th. They seem to be living in a myth that IIMians are arrogant snobs always trying to show off their brand power.  And all it took to shatter their misnomers, was to be nice and friendly with them.   Lets move to an earlier part of the evening …

I was at tollygunj booking my local train ticket to park street.It was 7 stations away. The Kolkata metro is an awesomely well managed local train system. I would dare say, as good as the local train service in Singapore,  sans the Air conditioning  of course.  Kolkata metro should have been  allowed to develop beyond the limited number of areas it covers. Anyway, going further back ….

Coming to think of it, Kolkata does celebrate Holi well. Near the tollygunj station, preparations for a huge bon-fire were being made. Lots of bhang was being brought in. Across from shaker bazaar to Behala to TOllygunj I could see see such preparations in multitudes. I was vaguely, in a subtle way, happy to witness all these … Rewind by a couple of hours!

I sat there  in my room squabbling over the fact that the recession is a bad thing. But it also showed the IIMs that they are not Gods. That they too need to work hard. So in the end, it is a good thing that the economic crisis has occurred at this time for it is a lesson that life’s got no short cuts 🙂 Lets shift even further into the past …

I was talking to one of uncle’s friends , the head of Sandvik (Calcutta office). Though a big man, he is still in awe of an IIMian. So I guess the respect to the brand stays. As long as  expectations are not raised to God-level again  … lol. Rewind to the chronological start of this post …

I was eating the gugni with the boiled egg. Somehow i felt that, that evening,  I am in for  a clarifying introspective experience 🙂

~ HappyHoliToThoseWhoCelebrate

et tu, music

In the days of the IIITian dream head, I used to listen to nothing but metal. For everything …. and every occasion.

Then I went into loggerheads with  this French girl,    my STEP buddy who seems to hate metal and worship sissy pop music!

And the clash in the true professional management style led to a collaboration, a compromise , a middle-state convergence.   (do I hear the people shout Glooobe !!  😉 )

I still dont listen to shit like Britney and kiddo teenage  music like that of Backstreet boys.But … a little more flexibility has creeped into my musical part of life  🙂

So these are I guess the kinds of music I would recommend listening to on different occasions.

Running :  heavy on the lyrics – something you sing along with energy and gutso .. (alternate rock ,gothic metal, nu metal and trust me ..senti songs 😛 , ——to name a few, hhh, evanescence, maiden, eminem, etc.,)

Weights in the gym: heavy on the beats ..which causes enough disturbance in your head to forget the heaviness of the weights. My favourite here being an orchestra called INVASION which is also the entrnace music for Bill Goldberg. (apart from heavy metal, hard rap …also South Indian item numbers 😛 ,  Punjabi etc, should do 😉 )

Dance or aerobics –  techno, indi pop remixes (they work !!)

daaru (drinks) sessions –  trance, house or latesht filmi music

(if you are sad with daaru … nothing matches better than Dev D    😀 )

Candle Lit dinner dates : French orchestra any day.

Fast Food dinner dates: Indian filmy music, the foot-tapping ones

Sleep inducing – any lyric less music … instrumental versions of soft songs, orchestras et al.

Love making: I seriously won’t comment on this …. lol

~et tu, music

The experience

It was quiet out there

With me filling  application forms

Those cliche’ formalities and norms

The night was calm and bare

I fell asleep … too tired to care

—

Dreaming of  market-crisis … I throw up

Crazy Theories …  To say its all over

Would  I even afford a lawn mower  ? 😛

Was still writing an SOP, life’s sum-up

Wanted pets … but can I afford a pup ?

—–

Then I shifted dreamland to short term

Like a person hesitant of the future

Thoughts one not commended to nurture

Wondered like a crisis-struck IIMian pachyderm

If placements would see the brand still firm

—-

“Conspiracy theories you have” … one said

“Out there . learning curve has  value now”

But still, the uneasiness persists … Mr.know-how!

Am still  worried about butter and bread

And if I can afford imported marmalede spread  😉

—–

Then I wake up to see the dawn

In a jog, I feel the morning gale

Like an innocent grace of a fawn

In sun, my face was no more pale

Cheered up inspite of the dreamy tale

—–

Solution for this fear, I don’t have

But no point in being overly fearful

No solution for now that’s all suave

But the  morning jog  made me cheerful

Today’s break fast was so marmalede-full 😛

—-

Again , now, it is quiet out there

With me filling  application forms

Those cliche’ formalities and norms

The morning is again calm and bare

I compose poetry … too charged to care

Of Taj-Eiffel Combo and brutal honesty

It happened that this queer little incident occurred at BBQ in Park street, undoubtedly one of the most famous and value-for-your-money restaurants in Kolkata.

So anyway, the runner was on this last outing with the foreign exchange students, several of them being French. And in the midst of words, he happened to think of something that was funny to his head.So he said,

“The Eiffel tower actually looks like a dick (penis)“ and of course the runner , true to his unabashed brutal honesty about arbit things, did it while showing his middle finger in the air to visually represent the male genitals 😛

The following three seconds were the longest three seconds of his life. They had weird expressions. the French. The kind of faces you make while making a mental double check. A double check at the words heard before you finally lunge at someone to kick his ass !

And so, damage control time and the runner luckily did it …again with his annoying and painstakingly brutal honesty …

“And well the main dome of  the Taj Mahal actually completes the picture … it looks like b***s”

At this the whole crowd burst out laughing. Not because the runner blasted his own nation’s monument, but becasue of his way of dealing with his brutal honesty with brutal honesty. By showing no patriotic favoritism while describing obscene allusions of national monuments. 😉

~ NOM (no offence meant)

~ Both are unbelievably beautiful pieces of architecture

~ Sorry Mr.S.Jahan, sorry Mr.Eiffel 🙂