The TimePass of India

My work there is done. I have the MDI degree. Quite frankly, I didnt think I would be able to. I would be lying if I say that I didnt think about running off from Delhi into the cosy, humid confines of Mumbai everytime MDI pushed me into a corner and boxed the daylights out of me. It is BY FAR the TOUGHEST MBA course in the country. We read these posts about IIM guys trying to justify how tough their life is, and end up laughing... If this course had gone for another 8 months, (along with some basic physical training) we would have been ready to take down the entire Al Quaeda Army or something.

I remember what all I had planned before I cam here. Some plans:

-Will watch one movie everyday.

-Will watch lots of sitcoms

-Will learn to play tennis

-Will go running around the campus every morning (I later changed it to evening, who ll get up in the morning yaar?)

-Will try to learn, rather than score marks

-Will get to know more about the culture of Delhi

-Will learn more about people in Delhi

-Will be a better friend

-Will be the coolest guy I know (I have always been that)

-Will try out new things

-Will try local cuisine

Now lets see if the plans materialized or not. Some effects:

-Watch one movie everyday??! I would consider myself lucky if I could see one in a week. The schedule is killing. Sleep doesnt come easy even to someone like me who values it a lot!

-Well, I did manage to watch a few seasons of a couple of sitcoms.

Fell in love with 'That 70s show' and 'Seinfeld'. Saw a bit of Scrubs too.

- Learn to play tennis? Just got enough time for a game. Nailed a German friend of mine in that game. Okay, thats a lie. I am awesome, but not Rajnikanth.

-Hmm.. I did run around the campus, but to submit reports, assignments etc.

-I did a better job of learning than what I did in engineering. Infact, I am kinda proud of myself :)

-Got to know the culture of Delhi... loved it..

-Got to know the people, loved them even more.

-I think this time I was better friend than what I normally have. I will leave this one for the friends at MDI.

-I AM the coolest guy I know, so no surprises there.

-Tried out a lot of new things... lots..

-fell in love with the local cusine - rajma chawal, kadhi chawal, paneer kulcha, tandoori parathe, steamed sweet potates, veg momos, wai-wai, chole bature etc etc

So, some of my plans have been realized, others not. The ones requiring time, have been difficult to realize.

What is the point of this post? Abbe? Har time story hi chahiye kya? Sometimes hamari bhi sun liya karo!

Anyway, time for my flight.

Take care. Have fun.

There were way too many spam comments coming.. Which means I am damn popular... Not that you didnt know about it already...

So now that I have blown my own trumpet and played a jingle on the banjo... I need to work on this Branding project..

Just want you guys to know that commenting on this blog will require you guys to fill a captcha from now on... I am so sure comments on this blog are gonna reduce.. esp Hiren's and Aroop's comments... Lazyasses, I tell u..

Enjoy...

Hello to all the dudes. And love to all the girls who have been visiting this page everyday for the past 1 month. Well all your wishes have come true. I am here.

After almost an age and a half, I slept for 10 straight hours. I woke up to a huge breakfast. Slept again. Took a bath, more than a record 25 minutes. Slept again. Woke up for a heavy lunch. And now I am here. Sitting outside my room facing the terrace, enjoying the warmth of the Sun and the chill of the evening air, and thanking God for inventing Wi-Fi.

The funny thing about this post is that I was supposed to write it last month, when my last exams got over. But I slept then, because I was sleep deprived. Once the weekend after the exams gets over, you never get time to do anything. Now this may seem to be a usual MBA cliche. But in this case, its not.

Heard MBA guys whine about scarcity of time and lack of sleep? Well, those guys have 14 lectures a week... We at International Management(IM) at MDI, have 26 lectures a week! More lectures also mean more assignments, more quizzes and more exams! And that is why we have exams every 4 weeks, but they get a good month and a half before every exam. Compared to my life, the normal life that MBA students live around the country live is Disneyland. And this crib is in line with my philosophy - What I do is more difficult than what you do! :P

So all those guys who are mad at me for not being able to comment on their blogposts, I rest my case.

But this isnt a crib post, this post is a feel good post... feel good for YOU that is! But seriously, MDI isnt all about hard work... umm.. it is actually.. But its majorly IM who has it so bad, but then they get to study and work abroad, proving Timberlake's age-old line of thought- "what goes around comes back around" :P

I have a stack of unread Economic times on my table that I plan to read. I have been collecting them since a week now. Last week, I didnt really get the time.

Today, after my bath, I cut my nails. It took me only 10 minutes. Believe me you, I had been planning when to cut them all week. After I was done, I wondered, why was I actually planning a thing this trivial?! Then I realised, its all about priorities.. Its always a tradeoff...

What do I do? Should I read that article I had been planning to or should I shave my 3 day old stubble? Should I sleep for another 20 minutes or research on that assignment. Should I read the newspaper or work on that ppt slide? Should I study over the weekend or join the folks over for a trip to Kasauli? Everything, you see, is a tradeoff..

But its not always bad. Sometimes I choose a trip to Kasauli(a hill station near Shimla) over studying. And its great fun... Come to think of it, even reading and studying and working on projects isnt too bad. Actually its kinda fun. You have to be creative and different from your peers. There isnt anything thats right or wrong, there are just different ways of doing it.

Now for example, this is something that I plan to work on - "The ratio in which the fairer sex checks itself out in the mirror, compared to the male, when presented with an opportunity"

You will be amazed by how nerdy I am gonna sound for the next para or so. I can already see the girls who used to hide behind trees to have a glimpse of me turning their laptops off. But dont. Listen to this.

The other day, in the 15 minute break that we get between serial lectures, I was having coffee, resting my already tired body, tired beacuse of attending 4 lectures on the trot, against the wall facing the door of the building. For the MDI guys who are reading this post, the building I am talking about is 'Lakshya', the building where all the International Management guys attend their lectures. This is a centrally AC building. It has reflective glass doors. The ones that allow the people inside the building to see the ones who are outside, but not vice-versa.

So I was standing opposite to the door. One door was open, the other was closed. As people entered the building I noted that they looked at the close door. Some just look, some touch their hair. But something was peculiar about this. The girls did this more. I was confused for like a minute. But then the coffee kicked in. I realised they are looking at their own reflection in the glass door.

I got half the class to stand with me and predicted who will look to the left(the girls) and who wont(the guys). Well, needless to say, it was a rage. I declared that only girls look at the mirror when presented an opportunity. Foreign girls go out of their way to look at their image. Some of them actually stop and pose and stuff! Well guys dont look at themsleves. But this notion was ruined by the French and the Italian guys who entered the building and not only looked at themselves but also fixed their hair. I am in the International relations committee of MDI and know these guys by their first names and nationalities. My next aim to find which part of what country they belong to. Btw, some Indian guys also looked at themselves as they entered. We now exercise caution against them. :P

Taking this research forward(yes, I am taking this very seriously) I conducted the same research in the break after the morning lecture. It turns out that lesser people looked at their reflection. So now I am very interested.

I want to conduct a full fledged research on this. Any corporate house interested in sponsoring this research(inclusive of the coffee bills) can contact me.

What good is this research gonna bring to the society you ask?

Well, due to the varied sample size - we can understand the impact of different cultural attributes on the behaviour of the masses of different regions of the world and the different ways in which this impact manifests itself.

I have learnt in my 4 months of MBA training that your answers to stupid questions must be more than 3 lines in length and equally stupid.

Anyway, I have solved the purpose of this post, which was to clean the webs hanging off its ceiling and treating you guys to some quality(?) blogging. Now that I saved the day, I should go off to my 3rd short nap of the day(I am making some kinda record here).

Thanks & Regards,(something I learnt here)

Arshat.

I remember that day. It was a Sunday or was it? When you have 25 lectures a week, you kinda lose track of time. I got a call in the morning. It must have been a Sunday, I think, coz I was fast asleep at 8 am. On weekdays, we leave our rooms by that time. I think it was Sulabh.

"Oye? Match hai! Ready ho ke aa ja."

"Huh? Match? aaj? Rohit hamessha Sunday ko hi matches kyun rakhta hai bey?"

You can understand my sense of frustation if you have slept for only 5 hours on average through the week and the only day that you get for yourself is taken up by a cricket match you are not even gonna win.

I exibit the kinda of pessimism coz we had already lost the first match. Infact, we had lost by a huge margin. We even gave away the bonus point. This team was team PGPM D.

Now let me give you a tour of my degree course at MDI. I am in the International Management course at MDI. The course is truly international coz I get to study at MDI for 1 year then for 1 year at Paris/Berlin campus. Its a dual degree course. I get one degree from MDI and the other from ESCP France/Germany. International management is by far the toughest course in the country.(This is my blog and I can say whatever I want) It has to be, coz we cover the same syllabus as other Bschools cover in 2 years in 1 year! The result - jam packed schedules, frequent exams, quizzes by the dozen, sleep deprivation and stuff. All programmes all over India have 14 lectures per week. We have 25! For me, IIM and Co are for sissies and little kids. Men come here.

The batch comprises of 30 students. 21 Indians and 9 Foreigners(No, they are not exchange students, they are actually a part of the batch)

Out of 21 Indians, we have 19 boys. So we effectively have like 19 members to make a team, in contrast to other teams who have around 60 guys.

So on this particular day, out of the 19 boys, 10 had left for their homes(cant blame them, they didnt know about the match). We had 9 guys on the campus, out of which a few werent too used to playing cricket. (Cumon, you dont get into MDI if you spend all your childhood playing cricket.. being a nerd pays, I tell you).

So we had 9 guys. But you obviously cant play with 9 players in cricket. You need 11. We searched and finally got hold of Philip, a German classmate who hadnt played cricket ever. But he jumped in and now we had a makeshift team of 10 guys against a team of 11 who beat PGPM D a few days ago.

To stay in the tournament we needed to win this match. Not only win it, we were supposed to win it comprehensively to earn the bonus point. We had to win with a bonus point with a team of 10 players out of which 3 were debutants!

As we entered the field, we started joking that we had great chance to win this. A nervous team always does that. I said to my team mate -

"What if we win today? With the bonus point...!"

"Yeah.. majja aayega na?"

"Main toh bacchon ko kahaniyaan sunaunga iss match ki"

"Kisske bacchon ko?"

"Apanne bachnon ko... unko toh sunni hi padengi na kahaniyaan"

"Oh.. I see.. majboori hai.."

"Saale... "

"We will win this match, then the next , then the semis"

"uske baad finals bhi"

"bas bhai, mazak mat kar"

"shuru kisne kiya?"

hehehheheehheheeh

But you know what? We won that match... with a bonus point! A small miracle of sorts!

We beat every team after that and kept advancing to the next rounds.

Today we had our finals!

We had our midterms till the afternoon. We give one exam ever month, its slowly turning into a hobby. In the evening, we had the match. I had slept for 3 and a half hours the night before. In fact, as I write this, in the last 48 hours, I have slept only for 3 and a half hours. I have no idea how I am I writing this.

A tired but upbeat team- tired beacuse of the numerous lectures we have to attend and the exams we have to give, upbeat coz we were slowly getting used to winning.

We were up against PGPM D. The team that we had lost our only match against. Their team was well rested. They had practiced all week long. We had given mid terms all week long.

We lost the toss and were put to bat. Rohit made sure things were on track right after a slow start. Everybody chipped in and we posted a humongous total of 143 in 15 overs. The total wasnt that humongous we realised later.

We were on to them in the starting over, only to be clobbered in the middle overs. They required 47 in the last 5 overs ith their best batsman on the crease. The last over required them to make 12. An easy task on this ground I would say. Thankfully the bowler and the fielders kept their cool to skew the run to ball ratio to 4 runs in the last ball.

As Ankur ran in to bowl the last bowl, I could sense that he knew we were gonna win this. A bowler has this intution - just before he leaps into his stride - it reveals all. The batsmen missed the ball.

I didnt count, but for like 3 seconds, we didnt celebrate. No yessss, no shouting, yelling etc. We just looked at each other to make sure that we had won. We had to make sure that the cherry on the cake was firmly in place. Small grins exploded into full blown celebrations. The team went beserk. Nobody knew what to do when you with the championships. I went on to grab a stump. I have seen cricketers do it on TV. Then you go hug your team-mates. It takes time to sink in - till someone says - "We are the champions!" And then it kicks in.. like a lightening jolt... Thats what we will be known as for the next one year - no one can take it away from us - WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS!

About the nervous-funny chat we had before that match, I asked that guy(you know who you are) if he remembered what we thought about winning the tournament a few weeks ago. He said he did. No one gave us a chance... not even us. But we all need our share of miracles to help us believe in ourselves. We got ours... and how!

About the sharing this story with my children, I sure intend to do that.

She was the perfect shy girl. The kind who hides behind her mother when guests come over... It was the first day of the first grade. I remember kids crying all around me. Some clung to their mothers, some threw tantrums. If I didnt know better, I would say they were going to whip us and make us work. But they didnt, actually compared to what I am doing now, those days were fun. Actually, compared to any days those days were fun.

She walked past me with her eyes fixed to the ground. Her bag was pink and so was her complexion. I love innocence. I guess all men do. I think we value it so much coz of our utter incapability to be innocent ourselves.

She went inside the classroom and took the first bench. I took the second. Right behind her. Then the teacher came and asked me to move to the last bench. I hate being tall. Apparently I was blocking the view of the blackboard for the guys sitting behind me. So I got up and took the last bench. And that was the end of that.

I strictly believe our choices dont change overtime. We like the same kind of people all our lives. If you dont agree, ask yourself who was your best friend in school and whos your best friend now(if both are the same guy, there are fewer people luckier than you), then try to analyse their qualities- you ll find that a lot of those qualities match.

I liked the same girl all my school life. People wonder when I tell them that I couldnt talk to her for almost all of primary school, except for the one time when we had an exam and I forgot a pencil. She was sitting three benches in front of me (the closest we had been till then). I got up from my seat and asked her for a pencil. She looked at me for around 4 seconds. Then quietly took out a pencil and gave it to me-

"This pencil writes very fast,"she said.

Then I didnt know why she said that. But years later she told me that she had seen my mother scold me for not being able to complete the paper on time.

Now dont translate this into love. She didnt love me then. Maybe she liked me. But not more than that. I think till girls dont reach puberty, the only people they can love is their parents. I, I loved her. Men can love at any age. Infact men can love anyone at any age, maybe they are more individualistic or stuff.

As we grew up, her liking for me increased. Or maybe it was just my imagination. But I found her glancing at me. She now tells me that she used to glance at me coz I used to keep staring at her! It would be impolite for her not to even glance. We men are idiots, we give it away.

As she grew, so did her curves. I would be lying if I said while looking at her my eyes or my mind didnt go astray. Puberty is such a gift. It suddenly gives losers like me, enough courage to say something that we have been wanting to say since like 7-8 years or something...

We were in the 8th grade I guess. I asked her to wait after school. Apparently I had some important stuff about Annual day that I had to discuss with her.

After school as I walked down the steps with her, I thought to myself - I can walk these steps all my life with her.

I held her hand, softly at first. She stopped but she didnt pull her hand away. Her eyes were fixed on the stairs. I thought of all the things I could say. You practise saying things in front of the mirror and stuff, but it just doesnt work. I thought of all the cool things I could say and then came up with this -

Really! I came up with that. I was so proud of myself. She looked at me, then held my hand firmly. I took that as a yes.

Years later she told me that that line was the lamest excuse to hold her hand. I pity all those guys whom I have suggested this line. No wonder all my male friends are single.

After our board exams, we made sure we gave the same entrance exams. Both of us wanted to get into engineering. She got better scores than me(like always) and chose Electronics in a top notch college. I managed to get in Computers in the third best college in the area. She cancelled her admission, much against the wishes of her parents to be with me. She gave up electronics and took up computers for me. Remember I told you a girl loves only after a certain age? I knew that she loved me then.

We gave the CAT last year. She again got a better score and made it in MDI HR in the first round. I was lucky to get in in the last round in the same class. But I got in. Thank God for that.

Today, sometimes, when we go to mess together for lunch, she walks beside me...her eyes fixed to the ground... I whisper something in her ear and she smiles.

Even today when I look at her, I sometimes still see the same innocent girl I had met on the first day of school. Here we are now- we attended the same school for 12 years, then went to the same engineering college in the same class and now are in the same class in MDI. God had a script written for us, didnt he? I love the fact that there is someone who knows me more than I know myself. I hope someday I get to know her, better than she knows me.

I find it amazing... shes the same girl who once offered me a fast pencil so that I could finish my paper on time and not get a scolding from my mother... and here she is walking next to me to the mess of our MBA college. We walk up the stairs to the first floor mess and I say -

And she bursts out laughing.