It has been long enough and I do it with increasing frequency, so I’ll quit it with the excuses and get on with it.
IIM Calcutta Term One is over, but not over for me. Yours truly has done too much due diligence on one subject you see. Also somehow the end of a term here does not feel like one. For two reasons.
1. I am in my home town. No more spending the day at the Chennai Airport, or fighting with strangers Tams on Trichy-Chennai night-trains, or fighting with autowallahs in a language unknown to both. Yes, no more putting up with all that so that I can taste Mum’s food.
2. The holiday is a miserly over the Sat-Sun weekend, so there you go. Shortest term break ever.
Strange things have been happening throughout this year(as we approach 2012, just kidding). Its raining way too much in Calcutta this year, and yesterday we had an earthquake mini-tremor in Calcutta. Never before as far as my memory goes has Calcutta danced to Nature’s tunes.
IIMC is frenetic with its pace and its the old adage of either you keep up or get left behind keeps coming true. Once upon a time in Trichy, I used to keep checking my Gmail for relevant emails and now I absolutely abhor opening my IIMC mail for fear of new notifications. Ironic but not so sad. Once upon a time in Kharagpur, I used to fight for IPs to download serials and now IPs are so underutilized that I literally don’t have any waiting time between episodes. Once upon a time in Ahmedabad, I used to marvel at the internet speed, but the one at IIMC has literally put the LAN speeds to shame. Sometimes I’m better off downloading an episode rather than waiting in queue for one in DC.
The parties in IIMC are in stark contrast to the lazed out sessions we had in Trichy, stoned out, staring at the night sky, beaming at the constellations wondering where we’d be after graduate, worries like placements and grades and attending 8.30s which seem so effing trivial now. We had endless garrulous metaphors instead of beer-drunk party brazenness , Pink Floyd and Iron Maiden blaring from a cheap cell phone speaker over cheezy multi woofer remixes (like the beats you’d hear from a Persian’s guys car) and oh, the roof, why in the name of everything that is holy, don’t we have a roof ? The jetty by all means is not high enough, rooms are claustrophobic and corridors are full of curious onlookers. Oh, roofs would definitely be the end-karma for every level of inebriation in any institute. Not fucking rooms converted into mini boom boxes.
But with all due respect to the South and the West, and I’ve spent substantial amounts of time in both of these hallowed portals, IIMC is absolutely the most beautiful campus ever. And in the rains, even the overflowing lakes looks so beautiful, I take it upon as a personal pleasure to wade to class. The new academic buildings has a nice touch of modern architecture to it (I know a thing or two owing to my Civil liaisons) and are thankfully not left thread bare for the world to see and devoid of any punched holes in between. (With all due respect to Louis Kahn)
I find it amusing how Engineers here(like me) term anything which cannot be quantified in numerics as globe and as a result hate them with a deep anchoring bias. We happen to be subject to a lot of subjects which are heavy on paragraphs after paragraphs of textual data and seemingly abstract concepts and it has literally created a huge furore with the majority engineers that we have amongst us. Somehow I think, in future, we’ll all sit back and thank IIMC for teaching us how to globe the shit out of presentations.
