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)

Lets go Clubbin'

The water coolers are one of the premier hubs to ascertain any activity that's happening on campus. So much so that during the cultural and technical festivals there's a serious space problem and a cold war takes place where every club/association tries to strategically place their posters so as to clearly block the viewers vantage point and distort it to their advantage.

As I finished gulping down the cold water, half of which was splashed onto my hirsute face, splitting further into numerous tributaries, I stare at the wall which is filled with posters of quizzes and talks and meets but one such poster caught my eye.

It was about a club called TRENDZ. A club meant for "designin".

In my two years at BITS I have seen quite a few clubs emerge out of no where. Started with a tech boom catering to the ever increasing needs of Open source disciples who came up with BLUC( BITS Linux Users Club), though I did hear a rumour of another BLIC(BITS Linux Installation club) coming to surface.

Then came the environmentalists and the social entrepreneurs and we had MY INDIA aka Nirmaan aka Bharat Nirman Sankalp, aka you get the idea, set up a year before I came. From what I have heard, they have also set up camp at a lot of other places and generally help in social service and having tutorials for people in and around Pilani as well donating clothes to needy, something I got to know after seeing their propaganda-esque posters. Also was the emergence of bigger brand names such as Rotaract, a club that after some difficulty with the administration finally took off. Their modus operandi is to find innovative ways to create awareness amongst BITSians, mainly on environmental issues, be this through panel discussions, acoustic jams or open air documentaries.

Wall Street Club(WSC) of BITS-Pilani took off right under my nose, as one of my friends was (then) a core member of the club, and they basically wanted to foster the spirit of making money and introduce the n00bs as well as the pro into the world of business through late night skype sessions and even investing in mutual funds(the first of its kinds)

And then came Symposiarch, a club that has an active collaboration with the Languages Group of BITS Pilani. Comprising of a wide variety of people, they wanted people to speak out and from what I hear "wanted a platform where people could speak their mind through debates and group discussions, which would in the later future also help them in their GD/PI". The latest on their list is the Koffee with Karan version of BITS creatively called While the Coffee lasts.

These are amongst the lucky few that took off. Yet there were many which couldn't, which I am surely assuming had nothing to do with what they stood for. I strongly feel that its about time that BITS actually need an official Peacock Surveying Society or a Blue Cross or a Collectors Club.

With more clubs coming up this surely gives the students more opportunity to choose from and definitely makes it easier for the administration purposes. A student who wants to pursue something now has many choices to choose from instead of just on centralized clubs, instead now there are 5 centralized clubs. It also surely helps during festivals, where all the clubs need to host their events. More events obviously mean more people winning (for most of the events are clashing with something or the other and hence there can't be the same winner) which will surely boost the morale of the average junta who are anyways depressed with academics.

Obituary

It wasn't exactly an exquisite piece of art, yet I adored it. With 500 MB of memory and powerful earphones, it was my compensation for an IPod, with a 1.3 Mega Pixel camera, it was my makeshift digi-cam and with Monster Truck Madness installed, it was my time pass while waiting in long queues. Oh yes, it could make calls too.

After four years of begging, I had finally got a cell phone. Before that, my parents never quite found the need for me to have one. They never had a problem with me chatting with my pals at 4 in the morning. Whenever they felt that I might be going to a place where I’d need to contact them, my mom would give me her phone and for other times, they’d just hope that I wouldn’t get myself into a shady corner with no public phone booth.

Been nearly 2 years, and it has served me well. Squished in between books in my bag, dropped more times than the number of times a Mexican can fart, trampled upon, farted upon, played the ball in numerous dodge ball games, it withstood the test of stress and strain.

Loyalty seemed to trot in its circuit. It always did find it’s way back pretty much like the omnipresent pug which we all know from commercialism, despite its careless owner. Despite being quite dependent I always treated it like dirt, probably took it for granted too, ergo its little journey to the end of the world. That’s when it showed immense resilience and earned my respect. However the aftermath was evident. The incident did eventually take its toll on the gizmo. Gone were the days when it’d last awake all night long, gone were the days when I could put an alarm and count on it to wake me up for a 15 mark tutorial. Frozen screens would epitomize its new look which would obviously incur my wrath upon it. I’d through it around like stereotypical brute of a husband through manhandle his meek wife.

It has indeed passed its prime and was making its way for an untimely demise. And then today it happened.

After getting a 220 buck recharge, I switch it on and a message greets me

Start-up failure. Please contact the retailer.

Thought for the day

What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca Cola, too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

Marketing Strategies

In a town like Pilani, where a samosa chat acquires the status of lasagne, the primary food station is a roadside stall (or simply called a redi).

The other day I was sitting at one of these redis and was contemplating over what to eat and I saw him squeeze around 25 lemons into a glass. My eyes just widened. As far as food is concerned my tastes are totally feminine. I love sour foodstuff. So I asked him he could make a lemon soda using that pulp.

“Umm…this has 30 lemons in it. You know that right?” He said in his rustic Hindi.

“Ahuh, imagine how sour it’ll be.” I said enthusiastically.

“I am sorry sir, but I cannot serve you this. I just cannot” He shot back.

And then he went on about how 30 lemons would simply kill me. It would just cut through my skin (him giving examples of how lemon juice can erode walls). He said it was his moral duty to stop me from harming himself.

Oh now we’re on to something I thought.

He continued saying how my health is quite important to him, for I was one of his regular customers. He later said that he wasn’t greedy and that, he could have very well made that mega-lemon soda which would have cost 50 rupees (for lemons aren’t cheap in Rajasthan these days), but then what? Would that make him a millionaire? No. Instead he was at a risk of losing me for a couple of days, which would result in losses far greater than 50 rupees to him (for I eat quite a lot).

There is cut throat competition amongst the BITS-Pilani redis. The redi owners (at least some of them), everything works on trust and honesty. You would rather build a relationship with a customer rather than try to get hold of his money (even if that is what you eventually want to do), for the student is going to be around for the next four years. It makes business sense to tell him that the redi pretty much belongs to him and that money isn’t an issue at all.

Also this particular rediwallah also knows that students can bitch a lot (after all he listens to them all day long as they gobble his food) and that he should provide them with the best service to his capabilities. And this makes them loyal which in turn makes these loyal customers as a sort of brand ambassadors.

Later on, this rediwallah also told me quite frankly how the other redi wallah( his main competition) is totally unlike him. How the other person would have readily given me the killer lemon soda with a smiling face. He also went on to say how in a college since we’re away from out parents, we’re like his children in some respect and it’s his duty to at least warn us before hand.

So by now:

1) He’s shown to me that he’s really cares about my health, for I am his main customer and that my health is quite important to me.

2) His competition is a money hungry leech quite unlike him

There is a reason why this redi wallah is so successful. Today he owns a taxi service, couple of restaurants, yet his major source of income is this redi which serves refreshments to over 400 people in BITS-Pilani. He is the undisputed tycoon here. And how does he do it? He keeps his customers happy and takes good care of them, because only if they are healthy will they spend more money on his venture. What he also does is that engages in some pretty interesting conversation. As a result you end up spending more time and hence more money at his redi.

I am planning to do my Economics thesis under him.

Elite institute of technology

The last few days, nearly everyone has updated their blogs and nearly all the editorials contain the same topic. After all no institution in India features mores in various forms of media than the prestigious IIT.

Content wise, it all been heard and everyone has almost taken sides. Yet this caught my eye. It’s an open editorial by one Aditya Jha, the global branding guru of Infosys Technologies, who also once in a while writes for outlook magazine. This time he chose the Indian Express to express his views. And quite interesting ones too.
While talking about the establishment of the hazaar new IIT that are going to be set up in various parts of the country, he says

The newly set up IITs are going to provide the HRD ministry with the democratic votes and moral position in an enlarged IIT Council, like Canada and Bermuda did to Dalmiya, that will drive one regressive law after another to finally reduce the original “big 5” IITs to a totally hopeless and supine position.

This strange analogy might still make sense to some but will this?

In a country of a billion people, what’s wrong with 10000 IIT-ians passing out each year? To begin with, it blows apart the core value of brand IIT: super brains.

Or this

Brilliance is elitist. There is a difference between brilliance and above average. The IIT entrance exam, the JEE, was designed to shock and awe and separate the brilliant from the above average. There is a difference between JEE rank 500 and 50,000.

If we end up producing 50,000 IIT-ians every year, we would, most certainly, be killing brand IIT.

For someone who has actually spent four years in IIT, one would expect that Mr Jha would know that all people who get through JEE are not exceptional or alternatively framed, everyone who missed out on the JEE isn’t really below average. Especially with the current pattern of the examination where questions are multiple choice, the JEE has certainly become an easier exam from the dreaded mains where the cut offs would be quite low.

Please let me clarify my point here lest someone points it out to me later. What I mean is that although its no surprise that IITians are quite smarter than the average lot (and some of them are really brilliant, I mean way above the rest of the lot), this in no way means that every IITian is “brilliant” or “super-human” as he claims to be.

If read carefully one can see that this isn’t a vent against allowing the OBC/SC/ST into the institution based on their caste or their past, but it’s a rant against diluting the IIT brand by allowing more people to gain access to it.According to Mr Jha, IIT should remain that hot blonde who can never be approached, the Holy Grail that can never be found, the horizon that can never be reached. By allowing more IIT’s to be built we’re merely destroying its sanctity.

Later he goes on to claim

Brand IIT is not about IITs; it’s about IIT-ians. And, mostly, it is about undergraduate IIT-ians at that. People who have done M-Tech from IITs always feel discriminated against. Since they never cracked the JEE, there’s no way they will be accepted into the tribe.

For his sake, I hope his boss doesn’t read this.

A quick look at the comments section of the article and one can gauge the agitation of the crowd upon seeing something like this.And he also acts cheeky by putting something like this in the article.

An IIT-ian friend of mine once went out for an arranged date with an air hostess in Hong Kong. As the music changed gears, the air hostess kept asking him to dance with her and my friend kept declining with a polite, “I can’t do the twist/disco/cha-cha-cha.” Finally, the air hostess lost her cool and is reported to have demanded, “What? You can’t even do the Can-Can? What can you do?”

To which, the proud IIT-ian responded, “I can do second order partial differential equations; can you?”

Now as Confused so brilliantly put it, how is this relevant? Seriously, how does solving PDE really make you super smart. For all I know, the IITian probably gave up an opportunity to score.

I don’t think Mr Jha read his post all over once before sending it to the Indian Express. Seriously I understand that one should be proud of one's alma mater, but seriously dude...

Crossposted on Mutiny.in

Critical analysis

Gone only...

Remember the chatter about the OBC/SC/ST quota last year. The row which made Arjun Singh into an instant villan and increased the number of hits belonging to his name by a crore-fold. Well, there have been some updates to the whole issue. And they're pretty SHOCKING. The supreme court today gave a nod to the 27% of seats to be given away as charity to the OBC's.
According to Rediff News:

A five-judge Constitution bench cleared the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admission) Act, 2006 providing for the quota, by a unanimous verdict...The verdict came on a bunch of petitions by anti-quota activists challenging the Act. They vehemently opposed government's move saying caste cannot be the starting point for identifying backward classes. The inclusion of creamy layer in the reservation policy was also questioned by the anti-quota petitioners.

Well seriously speaking for all the brouhaha about how the nation's population majorly falls into the above mentioned categories, its tough to accept the fact that most of the people giving the JEE belong to the backward classes. Its also tough to accept the fact that when you go to write the JEE, one of the most competitive exams our country has to offer ( though it has become relatively easier), you're basically fighting for just half the seats, which to begin with aren't a substantial amount.

This decision is going to be implemented from the 2008-2009 academic year across the IIT's, IIM's and other government colleges.

The IIM's are going to be the ones losing the most. Seriously the top management institute in Asia cannot have half the seats( which are around a thousand to begin with) going away by reservations. But from what I know, the reservation factor in IIM's comes only once the candidate has cleared CAT, which makes it a somewhat better process as compared to the "easy" way that seems to be case in the JEE.

I guess now the best thing to do would be to switch on the TV. Every channel will be showing the protests and there will be panel discussions and probably some hunger strikes I suppose as well. This will be followed by satires, editorials and what not. The government is really going to get it this time.

Also, I can almost count the number of seconds before I see every person on my gtalk list change his status message to "Proud to be a BITSian". As proud as I am about my institution, I feel this is a concern for all Indians.

Attack of the clones

Indeed it is.

And they're pissing me off. Those darned LGMF's (no relation to Little Green Men FYI) and those moths have engulfed my premises. Then there are those strange looking insects who for the lack of a better name have simply been called, "Peter" or "Michael", but as any BITSian would tell you, these are the most dreaded of the lot.
A tryst with Peter (who seems to have a strange affinity to people's crotches) and you'll be busy scanning the shelves for all sorts of Itch guards and Ring Guards. I've already decided to keep my nails lest some serious skin scratching be required.

Gone are the days when I could sleep wrapped up in my razai, gone are the days when my door would be open and lights switch on, I guess summer is seriously the time when we SHOULD practice and ore importantly market all the power saving tactics and events such as the Earth Hour. For people are low on enthu and seriously not too keen to turn on the lights.

This is also the time when I wish there were more lizards in my room. Despite my uneasiness around them, I still would want them, so they somehow seem on my side. But then that's probably because I haven't woken up with one staring down my throat.

Filling forms

There's something about filling forms manually that makes me very uncomfortable. In today's one-click and then refresh world, where I am accustomed to filling forms online, when I do fill manual forms once in a while, I just go blank.

Yes I know that was a bad one.

But bad puns aside, watching me fill a form is a treat for you black humor lovers. Like a retard, slower than a snail, my eyes squinting at the form so that I don't make a spelling error. Its like I can see the future. But despite the foresight I end up committing the blunder and end up writing the D as an O. Though higher up in the hierarchy of form filling sins are screwing up the cases and the worst of them all, filling the wrong blank.

Those darn boxes aren't of much help too.

I always take 2 copies of a form if I can help it. It helps me calm down, re assuring me that there's always a plan B.

Origin of creativity

Here's another comic strip I came up with in my free time.