Why am I here? No, this is not a philosophical question where you look to explain the fundamental questions of life & existence. This is a question which directly addresses the reason why am I here at ISB. So...why am I here? Seeing my mid term marks I question these very reasons. As mentioned earlier, all i aspired was to be above the mean.

Till last evening I could proudly say that I was meeting these very ambitious targets. So what happened next which shook the foundations of my belief. Well....the mid term Stats marks were released. And to put it succintly...I sucked. Big time. To be very honest, I had modest expectations from this paper. But I never expected this. If the marks distribution is a sort of a pyramid, then I'm probably the foundation, dug deep into the earth, which props up the entire structure. To top it, my marks in the Stats quiz is following some sort of a rapidly downward sloping curve. I see no hope.

The classes for Term I get over tomorrow. Prof Waterman & Prof Kumar were outstanding. I have talked before about the pedigree of the visiting faculty. If possible, they were even better than Prof Stine & Prof Bell who taught the first half of the 2 papers. I'll not talk about Eco here as I have quite strong sentiments, albeit in a different way, about the faculty. So that brings us to the End Terms. It's funny that by this time next week the exams would be over & I am wasting time writing a blog nobody gives a damn about. But then again....I have already reached a zen state.

On a different note, the GSB Core elections are through. Happily for me everybody I voted for, except for the President, has won. Only time will tell whether mine & others confidence in these guys will be repaid properly. I was initially disappointed at the Presidential elections. I was supporting a friend of mine and helped in writing his manifesto & preparing his speech. The winner, to be very honest, was a complete dark horse. But I & a few others have interacted with him on quite a sensitive matter over the past couple of days & he's turned out to be a great guy. Being an Army guy, he may not have an exposure to the Corporate world, but he's a great people's guy, a very good organizer & man-manager. And after the Army, I think he'll be upto any pressure situations this year will throw at him. ATB, Major Saab.

We celebrated the 1st birthday of Javed's daughter today. His studio was full of kids & I, as always, felt a lump in my throat. It's been almost 1.5 months since Bubu & Arya went back. In between my schedule of assignments/reports/classes/booze sessions all of a sudden I feel overwhelmed. I wish they were with me. It's becoming so difficult without them. The good thing is that they will come for 4 days the next week.

We bid farewell to Arunava tonight with a small party in the SV1 lawns. He's leaving for IIM Bangalore this weekend. Over the last few weeks I have really grown to love the kid. Being a juniour from school he insisted from Day 1 that he'll call me Dada. Because he sits next to me, he has tried to keep me awake every single day in class & only lately has he given up totally. A crazy sense of humour & extremely sharp intellects....the whole class will miss him.

Finally....I got a mail from my office today. My F&F has been processed (at last!). Some welcome additions to my bank balance.

Cheerio

So the first month is over. And what a month it has been. But I am getting these conflicting feelings. At times it feels like I walked in yesterday....at times it feels as if I have been here for ages.


There are a lot of things happening around us. The foremost has to be the mid terms. Now, I am sort of mentally okay with the exams thing. But there are 2 things I am definitely not being able to reconcile with:
1. No study leave before exams
2. No chilling out period after they get over

I mean, how can ISB do this to us? We have classes till thursday (for which we are expected to do our pre-reads), our exams are on Friday & Saturday & then on Monday we have a Stats quiz & a marketing assignment due on Tuesday. "Bachhe ka jaan loge kya?"

We have new profs from tomorrow. We had our last classes with RS, AB, DB & MV over the last 2 days. I have spoken at length about their quality & the finesse with which they have conducted the class. It speaks volumes for their ability that each of them got a standing ovation from the entire class. I do hope the profs to come are of the same standard. It's a pleasure & privilege to learn from the masters of the trade. I loved the small poem MV left us with. I don't remember the exact words but the basic meaning was - we'll meet again and we'll be happy to see each other & if we aren't happy then this parting probably makes more sense. Even RS gave a superb closing speech...in one year you all will forget me, forget the stats class, but you will have a great set of friends....learn together, enjoy together, grow together...AB also had a fantastic closing. Undoubtedly the last 1 hr was the best he taught during the entire course. DB deserves a very speciall mention here. He had, to my opinion, the driest subject...marketing. The enthusiasm he brought to the class, the involvement he managed to extract from us (CP or no CP) was simply awesome. Hats off to all of them. They are simply the best people I have ever learned from.


Section E wanted to have a dress code for the day. We actually woke up sometime late last night to get something going. Around 2 at night we had reached a consensus. The theme was Blazers + Shorts (preferably with a tie). As always, this decision was not unanimous. In the end, around 8 of us turned up like that...but, there were almost 40 other guys who wore blazers. So all in all, a good showing.

I leave you with a couple of pictures taken in the last couple of days. My next post will in all probabilities be after the mid terms. Till then.....ATB

It's been another hectic week. Actually only 2 weeks have gone by & we are already staring at the mid term exams due next weekend. The general response to a "How are you dude?" elicits either of the following responses:
a) "I am NOT good"
b) "Fati pari hai yaar"

- It's not been a smooth sailing. In between my last post & today we have been neck deep in Eco assigments & Marketing case studies. The Gillette case study gave me more agony than very few other things have ever given me in my life. Our team spent close to 200 man hours to come up with a solution & write a meaningful report. Somewhere in this, I feel we need to realise that at one point we just need to let go. More you analyse, the more you will find new things and more will be the debate that follows. So, the idea should be that once you reach a sort of consensus on something you just move ahead.

- Sadly, I have nothing rosy to report on Eco & Stats also. Prof B who teaches Eco says that there are 4 possible answers to a situation - Yes/No/Don't know/Don't care. I am rapidly moving to the "Don't care" scheme of things and don't really think that it's going to get much better in the short term. We started with the notion of doing all the pre-reads, progressed to just about managing post reads....and now, have given up altogether. Not that we are lazy/inefficient/stupid. I guess we all had some notions on how to crack this before the term started and all that has been blown off. So it's back to the drawing board for most of us so as to find the best way forward. I guess everybody has to find out his or her best fit to the circumstances.....and hopefully by the end of mid terms all of us will find out their own study patterns.

- My team for the accounting project met for the first time last night. This being a cross section team I met a couple of guys for the first time. There was a very high degree of enthusiasm. Carbon credits is a topic which interest a lot of people and our preliminary research has thrown up a huge amount of data. I do hope we come out with decent grades out of this. Most of my friends, who have been doing accounts for maybe the last 2 weeks, have got 95 or 100 out of 100 in the 1st accounts quiz. Probably the regular class was the easy way out. But I generally never look back on my decisions, however illogical or spur of the moment they may be, and think...what if? So now that I have taken the plunge....I am sure I'll reach the other bank.

- One of the most important things you need in a new place is to build up a support group quickly. A small circle where you can be you, where there are no pretensions, no artificial smiles. A group with whom you can just chill out and talk nonsense. This is what DD & I were talking about last night and he also was of the same opinion.

- Thursday nights as usual were full of parties. This & Friday are actually the weekends at ISB. I played some basketball last evening. All the sports activities I undertake reminds me that I am in woeful shape. Anyways, I played for about 30 minutes and then decided to play snooker. Now, this is a game which suits my physical & mental state of affairs. You take a shot & then keep walking around the table as if you understand everything that's going on. I have played pool in the past and trust me snooker is much more complicated. For one, the table is much much larger. The rules are also somewhat more stringent.

- The "Calcutta Chimneys" had planned for a dunking session at around 10 in the night. This is probably the only city specific group which has sprung up in the campus till date. Thank God it's unofficial. It just throws the diversity angle out of the window. Thanks to PA who suggested the idea to have a blast & leave the frustration of the assignments back in the pool. All the members turned up & AM & CM were also invited over. CM was actually extremely sporting and agreed to get dunked even though she was the only girl around...

- We also dunked Sidharth last night on his birthday....Happy Birthday, dude....have a great year.

- We have got a new mailing list exclusively for spams. After a lot of hue & cry over the spam levels in the first 2 weeks (totally unwarranted, in my opinion), somebody took the initiative to arrange the mailing list. And man....do we love spam. Every 5 minutes we seem to get a stupid mail from someone. Actually, I find these mails a nice diversion....specially when you are sitting at 12 at night & staring like a zombie at your laptop.

- We have a inter-section basketball tournament later in the evening. Also there is the regular weekly footie match today. Also, somebody has taken the initiative of getting a movie screened sometime later during the night.

So all in all, we are having a pretty good time here. If only there were no studies......

My blog count has crossed 1000. A high five to that & thanks to everybody out there who have contributed to that. It does pamper the ego.

Now this is what I call a totally Arbit blogpost.

Term 1 has started and time has duly moved on to our first weekend. I say weekend, but this my friend, is unlike any other weekend I have ever seen. Weekend to me, at least after my CA, meant curling up with a good book, going to a movie or just lazing around the house like a mindless oaf or if I really had some inspiration then indulging in a bit of cooking. And before I can hear the surreptitious sniggers...I am a good cook. But coming back to the point. I had no idea that 1 week could drain me out so much both mentally & physically.

I mean last week around this time I was quite confident of the whole scheme of things. There are only 2 classes per day. Surely that gives me enough time to go home & revise the day's stuff & also do the pre-read for the next day....I rationalised. Man, how wrong I was. I seem to stumble along from class to class & after that the day passes in a blur. By the time you start to recollect on how the day went you realise it's around 2 at night & you better hit the sack for next day's class. And so goes the cycle.

To my defence this week had the Champion's League Semis. And me being the die-hard football freak, no way was I going to miss these matches. I watched both the matches....& for once had both the results going my way. Yippeeeee to that!! What this also meant that I slept at 2.30 or 3 at night & next day had to somehow wake up & run to class. My state of agony can be further understood from the fact that it's been 5 days since I last had breakfast. In hindsight, my decision to opt for only lunch & dinner seems to be a smart one.

The classes, I must say are amazing. We have this whole bunch of amazing profs....among them 2 from Wharton & 1 from Duke. The pedagogy is absolutely brilliant & the way they orchestrate the class is just mind-blowing. After my interaction with some equally oppositely amazing profs in my B. Com days I had a very clear picture of Indian profs & the education system in my mind. And man....has it been blown apart. If this is the standard of faculty & the quality of teaching then this probably has been the smartest decision of my life. Though I am struggling with the subjects it is more to do with the fact that I am a moron rather than the Profs. I mean, I just get blanked out at times.

That said, I am having a gala time in the Accounting class. According to Prof M, who is taking the class....the CA's can do this stuff with their eyes closed. But I am taking....as the Prof said, the "Red Pill". Basically he's given all the CA's an option of doing a team report on any accounting issue of our choosing. It's probably much more difficult than the regular Accounts course & I may be running a risk of loosing my advantage in the only subject I know something about. But the way I look at it is not the short term grades (which anyways will be a disaster) but maybe a medium term picture. Our group has taken up the topic of "Carbon credits and accounting implications". I actually have been quite keen on this area for quite some time and had been thinking of doing an independent study on this sometime later during the year. So once the topic was proposed I just jumped at it. Prof M was also very encouraging. During our meeting today, he said that this is a topic about which he also doesn't know much & would be looking at us to enlighten him!!! So officially, I am now out of the accounting class. No attendance, no quiz & no exams.

Coming to 'CP'. Now I still do not understand why 'CP' carries marks. To top that, it's been 2 classes & I am yet to open my account. It's not that I have not tried. I have raised my hand a lot of times. But like some other enlightened people I cannot do it all the time simply because I don't have an opinion on everything. We have had Arbit 'CP' which to the uninitiated means 'CP' just for the heck of it. These are the people who gets everybody's goat. Section C had a novel solution. Their CP master has been mass dunked around 16 times couple of days back. We probably have to something on similar lines. A new term which has been doing the rounds lately is Despo 'CP'. This typically happens sometime later during the term. Essentially the guy realises that he has still not done any CP & now to get his marks he has to resort to CP at any cost. I believe in there lies my destiny.

Finally, we had a big dunking session last night. All the people born in April were dunked along with the prospective CP king of our class. And then it was time for mass dunking. Around 30 of us jumped into the pool at the same time. Man....that was fun. After that we had another PARTYYYYYYYYY. By this time I was blown. I had played tennis in the evening & when I turned up I was already dog tired. To top it, there was no beer. I mean, how can a party run out of beer? Even funnier was that even the glasses were finished. So you had this bottle of whisky sitting beside rum/vodka etc & there was nothing to drink them from. Somebody had a great idea & got those cups which are kept with the coffee vending machines. So I ordered a vodka. The guy said that they have only Fanta to go with it. So at 2 at night I ended up drinking a vodka with Fanta out of a stryfoam cup. How much more weird can life get?

While I was walking back at 3 in the night, I saw another gang staggering on the way to the party. Apparently they already had a binge in their rooms and were going to the party to get even more sloshed. I met one of them in the Atrium today around 6 in the evening & he said that he needs to have his breakfast!!!! Man, I am in love with this place

We also have assignments/reports/quizzes. I'll not dwell on them as studies tend to be inherently boring. Maybe in a rainy day when I've nothing else to write about I'll bore you with all that crap.