Final Transit

And thou shant be lonely ever again….

There are some things in life which are priceless. This piece of paper with that message scribbled on it by my best buds V & R is one of those things.

So this one day (29-June) we were returning from some place after doing some shit. And for some reason, despite not having taken any caffeine (in the liquid form), the testosterone levels in the group were running high. I don’t remember how, but as natural as it would sound for three 24/25 year old guys to talk about the ‘feeling of closeness‘ (you know what I mean ;)), we drifted to this topic.

After talking nonsense for a while and almost to the point of getting bored, suddenly at the next signal this car drew up next to ours and there was a pretty lady in it. When I mean pretty, I mean an ideal candidate for giving the feeling of closeness mentioned above. Needless to say, a car chase began. However, the fourth buddy, who was driving the car was too diligent a driver and conveniently ignored our provocations to chase that blonde bombshell (cliché).

Damn! we lost her.

So again, as natural as it would sound for three 24/25 year old guys, we started planning our next move. Also, as natural as it would sound for three MBA students neck deep into school load, we started talking about identifying the target, optimizing the process, increasing the efficiency, communicating concise message, blah blah blah…

Then something happened, I don’t quite recollect (or I’m simply lying because I’m too embarrassed to post it here). My friends fished out a piece of paper (which was actually an assignment graded a day before) and scribbled those words on the back of it. For those who are fussy about bandwidth and surf the internet with images switched off, here is the complete text:

Lonely Tonight?
Contact Puku At:
[my telephone number]
And its free !!!

Before I knew, another potential candidate to give that feeling of closeness appeared and this newly created banner, aka personal ad was waived at her.

Predictably, we lost that car too, and we were nearing the student residences. Shit!

I was being a bitch that day, and V & R were determined to victimize me. Again something happened and I don’t quite remember it, but my buddies threatened that they’d post this ‘ad’ on the bulletin board of our apartment. Since I’m extra smart, I challenged them to do it anyway.

They did it. They actually did it.

This advertisement was posted on the bulletin board of my apartment, without me knowing about it.

So, dear V & R, after say five years when we will be in different places doing different things, this will be one of the memories we’ll always cherish. (A melodramatic dialog pops out)

Vaarun adds:
Its just fun to grind your bud’s so called societal status into the ground, isnt it? And a challenge is a challenge is a challenge…

Rahul and myself, we put this poster up on the main entrance to Puku’s massive apartment building. We then pinned him to the ground, cause he was trying to get the poster off. In a matter of moments, a girl came toward the building with her guy, looked at the poster and burst into peels of laughter! She din’t know that the “Puku” from the notice board was the same guy that was pinned down, and looking completely red in the face! The fellow got rid of the poster that night, but I wish some folks we knew from school had seen it.

Rahul would have loved to add but currently he is busy with Porter’s 5 force model, which is instructing him to ignore trivial stuff like this.

Notes:
1. Puku is my popular name, but you wouldn’t know that unless you’ve read this post
2. I appeal to female chauvinists or self-declared moralists to hold their breath. This wasn’t as bad as it sounds.

Related posts

• Submission! (1)
• YorkU Fine Arts Festival (2)
• The joys of mental masturbation (3)
• The Blue Chatur (42)
• Planner at work (10)

Right next to by b-school is the Faculty of Fine Arts. From March 9 to April 1 2007, they are organizing a Fine Arts Festival.

The Faculty of Fine Arts at York University is spotlighting its resident talent in a three-week festival packed with more than 40 exciting and entertaining [tag]event[/tag]s. Running March 9 to April 1, the York Fine Arts Festival features [tag]exhibition[/tag]s, [tag]theatre[/tag] and [tag]dance[/tag] productions, [tag]film[/tag] screenings, multimedia [tag]shows[/tag], and a wide variety of classical, jazz and world [tag]music[/tag] [tag]concerts[/tag]. Events take place in state-of-the-art facilities at York University’s Keele campus.

I’m pretty excited about the whole affair. The event is packed with stuff like world music (Caribbean, Celtic, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, African etc), Dance, Orchestra, Theatre, Film and more. I have never seen most of them yet, so the whole thing looks promising.

Lets see how the arts engagements can be attended while succumbing to the already overloaded MBA schedule… aargh!

Related posts

• We will rock you (8)
• Uptown Monsoon Waves (0)
• The joys of mental masturbation (3)
• SwarGanga Music Festival 2005 (0)
• Submission! (1)

I don’t know if this makes any sense to those who are not studying the course I am studying. Haha, I dont care (its my websites). Yes I do care (almost all the visitors are not my classmates)… blah blah… (and the argument continues…)

Please ignore these instructions: Read the following text very slowly because the sentences are forbidding, jumbled, tricky and excessively long and it would help if you could break the words into individual syllabi (but how would that help?), but of course, don’t blame me if you cannot understand what I wrote, I already said that they are meaningless. (Recall all the stuff they told us about being nice to people who use English as second language). Here we go (I don’t really know what this phrase means, but I like it):

I spent over a day sucking up the immeasurable amount of data in the ‘Skills for Leadership and Governance’ portal (the devilish course I am going to talk about). I trust the professor expects us to input into our brains as much information as we can, so that, in the future when braced with an ‘Oh my god, what should I do now!’ kinda situation, the angelic re-framing techniques would appear and relieve our suffering. I have a degree in engineering (and so far that seems to work against everything here), and we engineers (wink) are used to a straightforward method of addressing things. So, in spite of having a hundred possible ways of absorbing data into the brain, this stuff simply declined to enter. Aargh! I hate disobedient children (wait a minute, what are children doing here? (maybe it’s a ‘metaphor’? (oh I am over using the brackets (stop! Stop!)))) (see, all brackets closed dutifully (yeah I am so systematic)). Ok back to what I was talking about (there are so many distractions in this world, really!).

So, I start thinking about the stuff I just read on the website. Don’t be surprised, I am allowed to think (its called freedom of thought, or something). I was trying to apply those techniques to my [tag]personal case[/tag], but they won’t fit. Of course they won’t fit directly into situations! We are MBA students and we cannot expect to be spoon fed (although that would have been nice). These techniques are supposed to be ‘applied’ to the problem and not ‘substituted’ (as if the problem was a math equation). So I analyze further, and further, and further…. Eureka! (Hey stop picturing me naked) I found some stuff I can relate to (Ok now start picturing me dance around the room). No sooner than I found this, I started feeling funny. Initially I thought that the clock has malfunctioned (cheap electronics goods - is it Chinese?) but it was really 3AM and I still had to cook dinner. Indeed, by breaking regular habits, we DO find solutions.

Now comes the most difficult part – putting it down on paper. And, in English. Oh God help me, (I suddenly remember the smiling ladies in ‘learn English is 30 days’ type advertisements in Indian papers. I should have gone there instead of coming to Canada. What’s with the MBA anyway?? (ok we are diverting from the topic)). So I spent the next few hours hammering at my keyboard (it’s a feather hammer, don’t worry). Soon, it was almost 5 AM and that reminded me of the things preached by ancient scholars and sages – “Wake up early and study”. Wow! I feel enlightened already (hey could you check if there’s a halo behind my head?). Such are the joys of mental masturbation.

PS: Mental Masturbation is a slang term for engaging in intellectually stimulating conservation with little or no apparent practical purpose. The phrase is often associated with academics who engage in discourse that many people find uninteresting or irrelevant.

Related posts

• YorkU Fine Arts Festival (2)
• Wearing socks and setting standards (35)
• Trip to the Holy Land (17)
• The milky way (9)
• The Blue Chatur (42)

4 years of engineering, 8 semesters of laborious struggle. The classes in each term culminate into a short but brutal period of extreme stress and sleepless nights – ‘submissions’. Only after this can the students get the crucial preparation leave (PL) for final semester examinations. The submission period, true to its literal meaning, is a nightmare for the students. However it seems to be much enjoyable for the professors (I should rather call them ‘lecturers’).

I happened to visit my college for a couple of times this month, right during the submission period. I went there as an ex-student, free from all barriers and restrictions. But the buzz sure gave me a nostalgic feel – students standing in queues waiting for precious signatures on their bulky files containing the term work, practical records and exam answer papers.

So while I went around meeting my lecturers in their laboratories and offices, I attracted agitated expressions from the kids (students) standing in long queues outside the offices. Any disruption in flow is disastrous, and I was sort of interrupting their course. I was forced to be as brief as possible in exchanging courtesies with the lecturers, and I promised to see them later.

Little did I know how useful these sessions of submissions would be to me after I graduate. There are lot of tactics and strategies you work out to get your files signed. If you commit mistakes in the file, there are ways to divert the lecturers’ attention. Sometimes you miss out an entire section, yet manage to scrape through. The groundwork and planning is required right from day one. By the time we reach seventh semester, many of us are ‘submission champions’ and we consider getting a signature on an incomplete file as a challenge.

Engineering is not a game for the weak hearted. Many may survive through it, but few come out smelling sweet.

Related posts

• Lonely Tonight? (19)
• YorkU Fine Arts Festival (2)
• The joys of mental masturbation (3)
• The Blue Chatur (42)
• Planner at work (10)