Delhi Duty free flooded with offers

Image via WikipediaIts a wonderful time to be landing at IGI Airport, Delhi. Not only will you have fond memories(hopefully) of your trip, when you come back a surprise will be waiting for you at the IGI Airport in Delhi, well, at leat it was for me when I landed there a week back. The power of bargain works best in India and no where will you see the emphasis on discounts and offers as you will see in desi land. Staying true to the game, Delhi duty free was divided into two parts, one with discounts and crazy offers, nearer to the baggage claim and one a little distance away. And when I say crazy, I mean crazy.

Buy one get one free.

I'm pretty sure that phrase cannot be found anywhere else in the world, it's just so swadeshi. That was all that was required to get me going. I hadn't shopped either at the Cairo Duty Free(well if any of you guys ever visit that Airport you'll know why. Despite all the mysticism and history that helps it get its tourists, that country has one down market airport with hardly any duty free shops worth going to). I am definitely not losing any weight this summer, not with all those Lindtt chocolate bars(85% cocoa, I love my chocolates dark) and wine.

So if ny of you people have relatives from abroad coming over, do ask them to do your bit of shopping. It's worth it.

On attending IPL Matches in Hyderabad

Image by miss_rogue via FlickHaving attending the last 2 IPL matches, I can say without a doubt that Hyderabad, Deccan Chargers, has been the unluckiest team in the tournament. Neither do they have the excuse of Bangalore, who can say that they have a test team. The only excuse they have perhaps is the lack of quality bowlers. Bu hey, this post isn’t about their “vurssht” performance as a team or succumbing in the final overs EVERY single time. It’s about what goes on outside the playing area.

Needless to say, there’s total chaos. As I make my way to the stadium from the main road, I observe 2 complementary trends. One is the price of the cold drinks and water. Albeit marginally, but still rising. Other is the temperature of the bottle, which drops as we get nearer to the stadium entrance. So when the guy says “Thanda matlab Coca Cola” you can’t sue him. However minutes after buying the bottle, we had to part ways for bottles werent allowed inside. Now this made for quite spectacle; for next to the cricket crazy fans trying to get inside, there was a big group furiously trying to finish their water and colas and juices so that their investment doesn't go waste.

Inside the stadium, I can safely say that there’s unless you’re in the balcony you’re missing the action because in the lower pavilions (the 500 and 250 rupees ones), cricket crazy fanatics can’t sit on their seats and have to stand up revealing their tushy to me.

The cheerleaders need to be applauded for only in Hyderabad would they have had to hear stuff like,

Arrey dhang se hilao ji, kya pukkat mein aye kya.

If that doesn’t send any Hyderabadi into rivets of laughter, I don’t know what will. Apart from this, because Hyderabad is still not as big as many would want it to be, you will still run into a lot of familiar faces (something you would not always desire). A strange observation that I made was that, water was sold at rupees 5 a glass in the 2500 Rs pavilion where as was distributed free of cost in the 500 rupees/250 rupees arena. Care to explain the funda?

And now comes the most interesting thing to happen to Hyderabad's sporting history. Induction of a Mexican wave. It is rather amusing watching thousands of Hyderabadis stand up with their hands above their head and take part in this massive wave, but they become memories to cherish once the wave attains perfection and then goes on and on and on, till it becomes annoying.

BITSAT 2008 and changes in admission procedure at BITS-Pilani

This is one time of the year when the number of phone calls increase, even surpassing those during my birthday. Yep, its the examination season and all the mohalla-wallahs want to know whether pappu paas ho gaya ki nahin. All the aunties from random corners of the nation want an in depth understanding of the BITSAT procedure and all Babloo's and Chotu's want to know how many questions to attempt so that they don't screw it up.

So what is different this year?

Firstly all you Biology fundoos now have a chance to get a Masters(Hons.) degree in Biological Sciences or a Bachelors in Pharmacy.

BITS-Pilani has one of the best pharmacy departments in the country and it might as well become your one way ticket to some really good foreign universities for higher studies, for example Purdue University, Max Born Institute etc.

More information about this here.

Secondly, we have three campuses now.

Well four if you count Dubai, but then lets not get into that now, shall we? The Hyderabad campus offers all the B.E degrees that the Pilani campus does. Oh and some really kick-ass faculty is on its way to the Hyderabad campus, bidding adieu to the campus in the desert ;P
So rest assured the BITS Hyderabad campus will not miss out on the "quality" BITSian education which is so revered throughout the educational circles.

But the biggest worry of all the little ones are CUTOFFS. It's like they can't really think beyond this. So let me give my gyaan on the cut offs for this years BITSAT.

The main factors affection this years cutoff are going to be
1.The Hyderabad Campus
2.Increased awareness in the media regarding BITSAT and BITS-Pilani
3.Newer rival institutions being opened

In my economics courses, we use a term called Cēterīs paribus. Cēterīs paribus is a latin phrase, literally translated as "with other things the same." Now when discussing cutoffs, all we can do is take each factor individually, assuming other things to be the same w.r.t to last year and then analyze its effect on the cut offs. Since we can't predict by how each of these factors will fluctuate the cutoffs, we can't really algebraically sum their net effect on the cut off.

The Hyderabad campus, with its increased number of seats will obviously decrease the cutoff you might think. Well yes. That would make it a fair enough assumption. But then there's another effect. Opening a campus in Hyderabad will motivate a lot of students from nearby towns to attempt the BITSAT. A lot of these students are those who would probably clear BITSAT but are so attached to home or are not allowed to trot outside the state and this includes a legion of above average girls who can very well crack BITSAT. So does this imply that the Hyderabad campus gets more booty? Well not necessarily, since it depends on how much the girls score and how many boys want to be in the hyderabad campus(since the number of boys exceed the girls), but it has definitely increased the number of people giving the exam.

As I have noticed after spending two years in Pilani, the general awareness as well as popularity of BITS is increasing. Be it through social media(blame it on the net savvy BITSAT crowd), or the sudden increase in the number of BITSian achievements in entrepreneurship etc, but we've definitely getting more airtime and print space than what we used to earlier and this has helped lure many gullible young ones to consider BITS as their future alma mater. Effect on cutoffs? More students giving BITSAT, competition getting stiffer. Cutoffs rising.

Three new IIT's have been opened. So thats about 360 more seats, minus the reservations.
But with the whole reservation brouhaha creeping in again, BITS has suddenly gained the respect of the people out there in being the only engineering institution of a high repute selecting purely based on merit. I see a lot more serious aspirants giving BITS a thought while going for that JEE counselling session. In-fact I see a lot more of serious preparation for BITSAT even by the students who are confident of clearing JEE because of the reservation.

I'd like to end this sub topic by saying that according to me the cut offs for each branch will definitely fall, but by how much, that I can't even speculate because anything can happen. So if you do score around 250 plus I'd say you're still in the race.

Tips for BITSAT:

Carry a pencil and an eraser with you. For the sake of your favorite deity, do this. Because you will not be given rough pages, you will be given a little booklet to scribble which will fit in your palm. So you'd want to use the space preciously and then re-use it.

Please use unconventional methods to solve the maths questions, if you see a god damn trigonometry question and substitute theta as zero without thinking Well not without thinking but you get the hint. Don't waste time on traditional methods of solving stuff. Grow up.

Accuracy is as important as speed, so its not only about attempting those 150 questions, its about not getting many wrong.

Please please please don't fucking guess blindly. At least narrow it down to two options and then just GO FOR IT. Don't not, NOT guess if you have two options, just guess.


Ah feels nice.
Peace out.

Next post: Myths bout BITSAT!!!

Ads campaign for Obama in the hood!

Image by stevegarfield via Flickr
Bro's before Hoe's Y'all

Egypt Diary-1

Yes, I am back from Egypt and what a trip it was. Yes it was action packed with every possible element which made this a trip worth remembering. Probably not as long as any other of my trips abroad, but then it's all about what you do with the time there rather than how much time you have.
Ofcourse I'd have loved another week there so that I could visit Alexandria, Luxor and Aswan Dam, but oh well, getting to see the Pyramids as well as the ANTI - Narasimha was good enough.

What topped it off was that I got to go inside Khafra's Tomb, which BTW is this:
You think I am bragging?
This is just the beginning boys.
So I went inside Khafra's crib and it was really stuffy and I could hardly breathe. There are 2 entrances to the tomb and one of them is locked right now.
The next day I went to the world famous Cairo Museum and saw the hazaar statues of Cats and Kings and their bitches, all of who obviously had their nose chopped off by tasteless Britons or Arabs. The highlight of the museum trip had to be this!

And of course, these guys couldn't let the remaining gold go to waste so why not build 3 gold tombs, and place one inside the other. Oooh almost like a birthday gift. The third one being made completely of gold for the poor boy to R.I.P. And yea lets throw in a couple of these as well


Oh yeah, the I went inside the Mummies chamber and checked out the corpses of Ramses the great, his pop Seti who suffered a head injury, well that's the least I can say considering his mummy has a cracked skull.

All this is really historic and all, but the highlight of the trip....

I got bitten by a lion.

Ever been to Manali, where the old women there make you hold those cute little white rabbits and take your pics, well here in Egypt things are done a little differently. You pose with a harmless lion cub who is all awwww and shit. That's until he gets a little too heavy and then bites your frikkin hand.

And the beautiful aftermath of that:
Rabies shots for the next two fortnights.

Encounters on Gulf Air

When you change 4 flights in eight hours crossing two time zones, things get a little freak, especially if you have had a lot of wine on board (its free right?)

While on GF130 (that's Gulf Air) from Bahrain to New Delhi, the gentleman in front of me was hardly a teetotaller, after chugging three glasses of whiskey the dude wanted another shot, just for old times sake I presume. The steward, who looked arab but sounded jamaican came forward and in his polite tone asked Jack Daniels to ease it a little bit. But our fermented soul would not go down without a fight.
If the alcohol is free then why should it ever stop flowing. Its not like I am going to harm anyone. Let me be.
Something on those lines.
Steward replied in hindi, in his thick jamaican accent, that the guy should just sleep and enjoy the high for he ain't getting another peg. What continued for the next half an hour was a one sided negotiation between the drunk man and the steward, the steward simply brushing away all possibilities of a consensus, asking the man to go to sleep. He also said that drinking a lot would only make this man reveal the true animal that was inside him(for he didn't seem to have the capacity of an irish dock worker from any angle) which would only invite the police who would be more than happy to invene to bust his sorry ass.
Finally our man just reclined back on to his chair and started murmuring some gibberish.
Just an after thought:
I wonder if airlines possess strait-jackets.

Invitation

Party of the year!

It's going to be insane.

Loud music, lots of chaos and hopefully lots of people.

TIME: Post lunch till whenever. No RSVP, drop in whenever you like before 6.

Dress code: A fcking broom will do.

The things I have to do to gets things done. Sigh.

Nearly there!

Just one more exam to go and then I'm off to Egypt!

So everyone in Hyderabad, mail me your wish list!

Opening Salvo

Cliches suck. Big time. Yet we use them. Like hello world. Now just many fucking times have we seen this being used? Yeah Yeah I know, its like standard procedure, something akin to saying "hello" while answering the telephone or saying "check" while testing the microphone.

Why the baseless bitching?

No reason in particular.

Sometimes don't you simply want to find reasons to get worked up about issues which are always at the back of your head, yet you didn't give them enough importance earlier for they just seemed so trivial? But come the day when your head is exploding with rage and this acts like that little magnesium ribbon you read about during your school days, which were filled with those uninteresting experiments in those tailor-made-for-prisoners style text books which were wholly printed in just one color(as bizarre as bottle green). People living in developed nations obviously cannot associate with this phenomenon. For they always had glossy hard bound text books with real pictures and multi colored illustrations. Anyone who has studied history from the India's Central Board of Secondary Education text books will bear testimony to the fact that history was indeed written in black and white. When they did finally give color illustrations a shot, it gave rise to some pretty interesting pieces of art. Like the girl in ninth standard who for the first time read about the scrotum and little love ovals which dwell in them had to suffice with a violet nut and an orange vas deferens.

Yes, I agree immense digression has taken place in the last couple of paragraphs and you should give yourself a little shag if you managed to get to this point.

Be god with ye...

IIM CAT and BITSians. Results out!

The IIM results were out this morning, though not all at once. This year onwards, an extra IIM at Shillong was introduced(though one had to apply externally to the newbie). With the reservation shock handed to the CAT cleared junta in a smelly sack, I can only imagine the agony and frustration apart from the testicle crushing eagerness to know the result. Thankfully some of the seniors I knew personally have got through. So kudos to them. If you are aware of any BITSian who have got through just leave it as a comment, and yes a blog address would be helpful as well. So far I know only of:
Vernon Fernandez(IIM B), Rehan Jiwani(IIM C, IIM A WL 75), Dhruv Vishrani(Dum)(IIM L), Rakesh Lalwani (IIM A & IIM B), Saikat Banerjee (2002)(IIM B),Pavitra (Puppy) (IIM A), Swetha Raman(2002)(IIM L), Shrek(Music Clubber)(IIM C, IIMA WL 11)