October 1999 on campus

Hi guys,

It's been ages since i wrote last, so prepare yourselves for a really long letter.

September 3rd, we finished our exams, hols started. I was planning to catch the 11:15PM train to Bombay. While climbing down the platform steps, i tripped on the last one and have twisted my ankle. (yes again
!!!)

September 13th, i flew to cal. There were 5 juniors who were on the flight with me. We were waiting from 3:30pm in Howrah station for the 5:30 train. Quite a bit of junta joined us. we were around 15 in all. There was one empty train on the opposite platform in which the fans were running, so we started taking it in turns to sit inside that train. When i was taking my turn with 2 jrs in there, & almost dropping off to sleep, this empty train (except for the 3 of us who were inside) started moving. I had no option but to jump.

I seem to be just asking for trouble once i have come here to XL.

Then there was this jr guy, who was coming in from Bangalore by the Koromandel with 15 others. They all got down at Karaghpur, they bought tickets for the Kurla express. This guy V had done rg on the others and booked his ticket for the geetanjali before leaving jammpot. SO he said he would wait for the geetanjali.

Promptly at around 2:00 the geetanjali arrived. He checked the train and all that & sat in the train. He took out his book & was reading peacefully until the train came to a final halt. He got down & was suprised to see that so many changes had taken place in Jampot station, only after 15 minutes did he realise that he ws in Cal. He had caught the Geetanjali up instead of the Geetanjali down !

C had gone to Delhi for his hols. The whole junta from Delhi was travelling back on the 13th, when they reached Mugalsarai. Suddenly C decided that he wanted to see his mom, so he got off the train to catch the next train to B. He then came to college 2 days late. We told him to get a medical cert and come. He showed this to the new dean acads. Dean told him to go out & think it over for 15 mins as to whether he wanted him to accept the med cert. C stood his ground, but dean is not convinced.

Fr. George is leaving at the beginning of next month. He is going to XIMB. Fr. Augustine is going to be coming in his place. He was hostel dean when zac's brother was out here. I believe he comes at night to make a round of the MH.

The new LH is kind of ready, but not enough to move in. We seniors, who are currently being housed in the mdp have decided not to move , since this is a really hectic term for us. & generally we r just too comfortable to move.

Popc had been to Calicut for almost 3 months on some teaching assignment, he has just come back yesterday.

This time papa mathias has only guys in his Pub Speaking class & the 3 ir guys who r in this class are finding it a little strange to not have any girls in class (note: or batch was 66% women)

Premu is offering MCD to both batches in this term itself. So not only us, he too will be overworked. Small consolation that.

Our Strat Man prof is quite pathetic. Just lets everyone talk & the kind of arbid CP that comes out is incredible.

S in the 2nd class told prof that "i had no idea what strato was all about & hoped to find out in your class, instead after an hour i find that i am more confused than before"

In todays class, all we did was discuss the case on Honda. C today told her "Mam this is your 3rd class but my first. I think your strato is all wrong. A discussion should not go on for more than 45 minutes, becos then u start getting only crap out of the discussion. Honda was formed over 50 years ago and i am sure that at that time they would not have spoken as much crap as is being spoken in the class now" Her only reaction to that was "Next time read both the readings and the case before u come to class"

She caught A sleeping in class & told him "Please leave if u r not interested" A took to his heels & ran before she could change her mind.

Prof X is totally arbid in XXX. W has been asking him the same doubt since last class, till finally X joined his hands, bowed his head and said "maaf karna mere bhai" X keeps maaroing gandhe pjs in the class.

This new guy sengupta who we have for BFM is really good. He sees to it that everyone in class understands every word that he says. The latest joke on campus is the name of his dog. It is - Arindam.

This was sent to me by Mad Shuks at the beginning of this term and it is so reminiscent of XL that i just had to send it to u guys

To bring you back to the XL variety of reality, here are some new definitions which will help you grappling with it once again / making sense out of it:

Blamestorming:
Sitting around in a group discussing why a deadline was missed or a project could not be submitted in time - and who was responsible (often held at the end of the term)

Seagull Manager:
A species of student who flies in, makes a lot of noise, shits over everything and then leaves. (copyrighted by Richard Bach in Jonathan Livingstone Seagull)

Salmon term:
The experience of spending an entire term swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.

Dilberted:
To be exploited and oppressed by the faculty. Derived from the experiences of Dilbert , the geek-in-hell comic strip character. e.g., "I've been dilberted again. The *@*!! (censored) revised the grade criteria /resceduled the class for the 7th time this term."

404:
Someone who's clueless (often found in the afternoon classes). From the World Wide Web error message "404 Not Found," meaning that the requested document could not be located. e.g., "Don't bother asking him . . . he's 404, man."

Persecutive Maintenance
The fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device
(e.g.,computers) to get it to work again.

Generica;
Features of the XLRI landscape that are exactly the same no matter where one is, such as mess, class, cc, lib, helter-skelter, etc. Used as in "We were so lost in generica that I forgot the quiz today."

Adminisphere:
The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the student population. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.

Anyone wanting to write to Madshuks can do so at Madhukar@xlri.ac.in

I guess I have gone on long enough. Before ending let me just tell u the important dates Summer Placements start this weekend, XL-iimc is October 17th & 18th

September 1999 on campus

This is part of my nostalgia bit from my senior year on campus from way back in 1999.

Ps: First installment. leaving some of the names in place, to remind batchmates to send wishes where relevant.

~~~message

Right now we have just got in. There are a huge number of Junior girls. So there was no place for them in the hostel. The room which was supposed to be a single seater for me, is now being shared by 4 junior girls. I got such a shock to enter my room & see 4 beds in there.

My room had been the store room for summers and so I was shocked to find that all our stuff was thrown out of the room. Still havent located some of our stuff. Some of our cards and other personal belongings which were outside have been junked or torn to make into place cards by the jr women. Hmmm they havent endeared themselves to us. Lets c what happens over the coming weeks.

Anyway, this hapenned to about 15 of us, who were living in the faculty flats in the first year and had elected to stay on in there. First they had put us in small cramped rooms in the LH. Putting 3 or 4 in a room meant to house 2 at the most. Few of us protested until we were given rooms in the MDP hostel. The AC connection has been removed but the rooms are comfortable.

Great News :
As some of you might have already heard Ministhy S. delivered a baby girl on 31 August at 10.00 a.m. She and the baby are fine.

Great News 2:
RS got married on the 28th of this month in Madras, the guy is with Ernst & young in Muscat. She had sent an invite to XL.

There is this girl in the junior batch P ( had u guys heard about C fainting in Jomus room when he was taking Viva and kind of browbeating her last term ???) Well this P took it one step further. She fainted while doing her presentation. (The reason attributed was that she had put in 2 consequtive nite outs)

G fell down on the dance floor (abt a month back) and his leg is still in cast.

Football captain Ankush decided to have a jr-sr match on Aug 15th. The 'Independence Cup' was highly publicised, but didn't happen becos we had our lab law mid term on the same day.

The cc was in extremely bad shape inspite of upgrading to Windows NT, the hardware was in miserable shape, so Socrates threw down the towel. They refused to work in the cc any more and called a GBM in which they said that they would be like the other associations and concentrate on organising syposiums & lectures. So this match I was talking abt. Got rescheduled & was now called the 'Socrates Cup'. It got postponed again.

Then after all this hungama was created. Not without reason. We were losing our files. Word files would get converted into these tiny boxes and hazaar other problems. SO we were pushing for postponement of submissions (NO we r not a frax batch, the printer is till not working) finally we got a blanket ban postponing all submissions until the 21st of September. So the football match finally happened as the "Submission Postponement Cup'

Those interested in the result : it was a draw.

Interesting events : B has broken his nose.
He is much better now.

Right now, exams are on. We finish tomorrow. The way the new dean has set the timetable is that the last paper is a compulsory paper for both IR - II and BMD - II. So no one can go home before the other. We start again on the 14th of Septmeber.