The Story of 3 “I”

Reality check , philosophical realisations, insight into human psyche and a lot of de ja vu! Being in the middle of around 850 0dd people with varied cultural, linguistical and most importantly age groups not to mention economic backgrounds has definitely supplied a lot of fodder for this blog. I shall try to maintain a certain aloofness in this blog, thereby not giving opinions or deductions or be judgemental but simple facts. Any deviation from the above statement is caused by naivety of the writer and should be excused!

Walking at 3 am around the campus in full formal glory looking for mythical characters!!! Yes, our class rooms are named after characters from Indian myth. So you do come across people who ask you “Where is ‘Bhim’ or where is ‘Vidhur’”. No they did not here rumours of these mythical characters being spotted again but are simply looking for the classroom where they are supposed to appear at ungodly hours for Interviews to the various prestigious clubs and committees.

I found the Interview process very very “interesting”. I could go on with the use of adjectives like ‘intriguing’, ‘ fascinating’ and so on but trust me I would never ever be able put into words the whole basket of emotions I went through. The nature of the interview varied from being stress(I guess I had chickened out from the one that was supposed to be the most stressful) to creative to psychometric to  simple personality assessment.

Interviews that were meant to look straight through you, interviews that were meant to test your creative skills and interviews that were meant to find out how well you can perform tasks. The interviewers were our Seniors who had displayed the same qualities last year and earned a right of passage to various clubs and committees.  They did and said everything that needed to be done and said to find “if you had it in you”. They pushed you to your limits and in doing so they did push themselves to be a person I have come to know most of them are not.

On expected lines, I did not get selected in any of the clubs but what flummoxed me completely was that the very interviews I  thought I had bungled , I got selected and the ones I thought I had performed decently I got a sweet kick on my backside.

A little authors note at the end:

1. I have been writing this blog for some time now so the contents may seem a little out of date. Nevertheless since I had started typing it out I thought I would post it. Right now I am getting used to the new meaning of quizzes.

2. @Honeybee I think I know you and i would love to read what you write about.

1 st week at B school !!!!

What is the biggest difference between an engineering college and a business school?
For me the main difference is the creativity. People are much more smarter and experienced and they realize the benefits of functioning inside the law albeit on the extreme boundary.The unnecessary risk of taking on the administration is something people can well do without with. Instead the energies can be channelized into "constructive" and development activities.

It was weird being a student again. Being a student comes with a certain degree of roughness, a feeling of being something unpolished. Past 3 years of professional life had , to a certain degree smoothed me around the edges. The fact that the next two years of my life is gonna be very different from the last three finally sunk in the moment I landed on the campus with all the skin peeling heat of North India.

The first week in a B school is supposed to be the toughest. don't know about other places, but here the only thing that was tough for me was lack of sleep. 23 and a half hour days for a whole week is pretty tough, specially for all people who aren't in the elite fighting forces. The felling of fatigue was such that I almost fell asleep while I was standing and was blindfolded. The only good thing that the fatigue did was take our minds off the heat or the problems of not getting sleep at a new place. Trust you me, I slept like a baby in a lecture for a couple of hours. It was the best sleep I had in a couple of months.

The major lesson I had in the first week here at B school is humility. Some people command respect, some demand it. Its very hard to respect these as it isn't something that comes naturally but is a very very pretentious gesture. Nevertheless situations may need you to bow down and I see it as nothing else but another chapter in the book of knowledge.....

2nd Class Indian Rail :Part 2

My earlier post have given me a few very interesting reactions. People have asked me about the background and ethnicity of the people involved! When I told them that they belonged to a certain religious minority, the reactions were “Ahh Haa”. As if it was expected. Why this generalization? Anyways Steering clear of absolutely any controversy and debate for now here s part two of my travel.

What a change of fortune!
From Quarrelling couples to a gang of enlightened souls, hell bent on handing out spiritual neon lights to all poor darkened souls, in this case me. I suggest all our originality deprived bollywood script writers should travel in the GREAT Indian second class Train and behold we would be saved from the numerous re-re-remakes (Please add any number of ‘re’ s as it pleases you).

This post though isn’t about the burning moral dilemmas or emotional crisis that I generally find myself in and it’s definitely not a cathartic expunge of all things that I do not have no where else to vent. This is a little observation on one of the legacies left by our former railway minister Sri Lalu Prasad Yadav. Well I have utmost respect for this man who wins all hearts with his rustic charm. Who packs a great mind under that mop of unruly white hair and whose deeds in the Railway ministry has become lore even in the hallowed Harvard business school!

I just happened to have a first hand experience of one of the major Ideas he put into place during his tenure; the second-class compartment with 81 seats. For the uninitiated, the normal second-class compartment has 72 seats with 6 seats on one side, and 2 on the other side of the aisle. The idea is basically to add a third seat in between these two seats. A brilliant ingenuous plan that raises the rail revenue as well as the entertainment quotient in the compartment, if you have a stomach for multilingual abuses in the middle of the night.

The effect of extra 9 legal people can be very interesting! Also taking into account the number of daily travelers, who think sleeper class is their domain and the ticket holding passengers are nothing but parasites taking undue advantage of their magnanimity, the train compartment takes the form of a busy flee market which has a lot of jay walkers. The rail catering service also displays a perfect business sense. Only cold drinks and cold water at room temperature are sold during the sweltering afternoon. Dinner and lunch true to its rail tradition stays unbiased to the myriad flavors of India by being devoid of any. The tea and coffee shows off the amazing thrift of the maker who has mixed milk and tea or coffee with the precision of a alchemist to give the appearance of the concerned drink but absolutely no taste.

The side seats to me are the most interesting in a train journey. You get the best views both inside and outside the coach. You can stretch your legs and pretend to be a part of the many scenes from the bollywood movies. But an extra person already plonked on that seat, you are sure never to get your chance. There is fights with this seating arrangement, there s fight about where s all the luggage gonna go. There’s fight about almost everything. I would not have been surprised if somebody complained about excessive use of oxygen by the extra passenger. Until you have the experience to travel in the 81 seated coach count your blessings.

2nd Class Indian Railway

Have you ever traveled alone in a 2ND class Indian railway. Irrespective of the length of the journey, you are bound to feel bored if you are traveling alone. Since that's what I have been doing for a long long time I pass my time observing the milieu which makes the Indian society such fertile land for stories and and thought provoking Ideas.
But before I put forward my story you got to prepare yourself for a few questions which were very uncomfortable to me at least. I don't want the answers but just want to direct your thoughts in the same channel as mine, Give you a little headache if you want it.

Here are the facts first.

I was in a second class train, A very "convenient" seat no. 72, right next to the loo :)

Below me there was a family of around 10, none of them having confirmed tickets. But their zeal prompted them to board the train anyways, taking scant notice of the fact that it is illegal to travel without a proper reservation.
At around 10 in the evening , there was a commotion and I see that one of the male members of that family had a member of the opposite sex by her hair. A couple of seconds later HE delivered a stinging slap to the LADY and pushed her on the floor. 

That's it folks. These incidents that took all of 10 seconds to happen gave me food for thought for the rest of the journey and prompted me put this new post in the blog. Here are all the questions that I had asked myself. I don have the answers so if you have any please let me know.

Question 1:

My first reaction to the incident was, "I need to write about this barbaric public display of animal-ism"

But why didn't I do something about it....? Why was I a silent spectator thinking about making my own thought s public at a more convenient atmosphere of home rather than trying to let my mind out at those who were involved in the incident...? Shouldn't I have let the MAN who did the act know what exactly I thought about his MANLY  behaviour.

Question 2:

The family was 10 people strong. None of them raised their voice. Just a little Hush Hush conversations letting each other know what happened and then life was normal!!! It seemed a common occurrence as people seemed pretty used to this fact.  A reality check that domestic abuse is still at large in India. A little tremor in my own sweet world where family s comprised of well behaving individuals where PDA (Public display of animosity) or for that matter DA is NOT an option. If my co passengers or I had raised my voice, would it have changed one family get rid of their DA....?

To be Continued.......

Morning After

Technically I am wrong...!!!
A whole weekend has passed by after I have quit my job. But this is he first Monday. I was supposed to go to office normally but stayed at home. Hence the title.
The usual suspects, Emptiness, depression, restlessness were all conspicuous by there absence.
I did not feel anything.... It was as if I was having a long weekend.
I surely did not miss my walk to office neither did I miss my air conditioned workstation and definitely did not miss that undercurrent of fear " If you screw up, the client is gonna be pissed. He s gonna be upset with you which in turn may cause US to lose revenew and which may mean you are gonna loose your job."
I just stuck to my packing....
Its seriously surprising...!
One day you are welled up for the fear of loosing but once when you have lost it you just shrug and bear. Its for the best I guess.

Changes Phase 1:

Wierdly I feel sad !
Hell I was waiting for this, cribbing day and night about how unfair they have been to me, How unrecognised and untapped my petential has been and how I have been handed out a raw deal. But yet when I said my final good bye , I felt sad. Come on last friday people were asked to leave, I left on my own terms but still i feel this way.
How quickly we cocoon ourselves! How quickly we learn to take our surroundings for granted, fallacies and all! We crib about it, cry about it,we look for the bigger and more importantly better things in life. But when the time comes to move on we ask,"is it worth?"
This is emotional attachment, an indescribable feeling that slows you down at every step,makes you look over your shoulder appreciate the past and fear the future. My only hope is that it tempers me down enough so that I pause to smell the roses and dont always keep chasing the happiness in the past.