The deplorable practise of Tea-flinging

An interesting thing happened today. The day began quite as planned with me getting up at 11:30 , then having my morning cup of tea and following that up with lunch. After lunch I had …..another cup of tea. Now when we went for this second cup of tea i got to see a very unique way of expressing displeasure. As I don’t want to take names and vilify people here, lets say it was Me, Aunty and Flippy Bong Ghissu  (for your convenience the shorter version of the nickname has been used). So there we are sitting and having a mindblastingly  hot cup of tea when Aunty starts discussing about the people who work and the ones who dont. One accusation thrown about is the one pertaining to Flippy Bong Ghissu’s work habits. Now Flippy (now I’m just being lazy) normally does not get pissed enough to actually cause bodily harm to people. But, oh my , we saw another side of her today. within seconds of the utterance of the fateful slanderous accusation Flippy grabbed a cup of scalding hot tea and emptied the glass* on Aunty’s head. I don’t know if you’ve ever had tea-flung at you, but trust you me, it hurts.

This story has several morals:

1. Don’t cast aspersions on people’s work habits especially if they have any of the following on them:

Boiling hot tea, acid , rdx, grenade, napalm , knives, machetes, revolvers , sandpaper , pianos , portable iron maidens, management books , tarantulas or kittens.

2. Even if aspersions are cast about your work habits , it’s not cool to hurl blistering hot liquids across rooms onto living beings. If the beings are human/arachnids  it may be acceptable in some circumstances , but for anything else its out of the question.

3. And most importantly , whatever happens do not waste tea , especially when farmers are dying in Vidharba.

And finally , in order to stop these shocking acts of unrestrained violence and horrific wastages,  I demand the Parliament comes up with a law criminalising tea-flinging.

* Some parts of this article might be slightly exaggerated, apocryphal or at least wildly inaccurate.

 

Its called a ‘test’ godammit!!

My current college and my old college are world apart. There is almost nothing that is common between them. HOwever there is one very irritating similarity . The fact that both the colleges like to call ‘tests’ [as in the kind where you study and write and get marks for which go on your academic  record] as ‘quizzes’ .

I would really like to give a piece of my mind to the person who cameup with the idiotic terminology. Quiz is a hobby. Its timepass . Its FUN. Tests are NOT!!

Call a test a test. Why do you need to screw up the reputation of quizzing by associating it with academics ?

 

Sometimes

Sometimes I wish I wasn’t as wacked out as I am. Sometimes I wish I could just let my beliefs go and enjoy myself. Sadly that never seems to happen. I have to say I tried though. Last night there was a party in college as part of one of the committe interactions. I really really tried to forget all my views and beliefs about music and have a good time . I just couldn’t . The noise that was blasting at top volume was sheer torture . I just had to leave . I guess I’m really gonna have to learn to go temporarily deaf.

Shya!

 

XLRI

Its been about two weeks now that I’ve been at XLRI , Jamshedpur . So far it seems to be a great place . Beautiful campus (amazing cleanliness) , excellent  facilities and of course very nice people . I can hardly say the same about the city of Jamshedpur though. The city basically consists of two roads . There are a few good restaurants but very limited possibilities. I guess its something we’ll learn to live with. There are two things really worth seeing in Jamshedpur : Dimna lake and Jubilee park . I’ve sadly shown remarkable lack of foresight and seen both in the first week itself. Both the experiences were great though. Dimna lake is beautiful especially in the evenings. The fact that it rained that day added to the experience. Jubilee park itself isn’t all that great . But we did go for the Laser show. The pre-show music noise was the choicest of Dhinchak sidey Hindi numbers which may have prompted me to act in a slightly inappropriate way . The show seemed to be pretty good. The extremely low expectations that I had  in the first place may have contributed to this perception. But seriously , the show was actually pretty decent. Nothing compared to the Shaniwarwada show but c’mon , this is Jamshedpur.

The one thing that I really have to bitch about is the weather. It’s sweltering hot here and to add to the misery the humidity seldom goes below 80-90% which means we risk death by dehydration everyday. The rains have also been delayed this year (experts blame the awesomely named ‘Cyclone Aila’). Lets hope the rains come soon and bring some solace.

That’s all for now. I don’t how much I’ll get to blog given all that I’ve heard about the B-school lifestyle , but I’ve try to post at least twice a week .

 

Lazy Mirror

Today’s Pune mirror carries two outdated stories sourced i.e. stolen from British tabloids. And to make things worse , I think they’ve been printed in the Mirror before.

One was that of Hitler’s statue’s head in Madame Tussaud’s being hacked off which happened  (if i recall correctly) sometime around July .

The other was the present Pamela Anderson gave Hugh Hefner on his 82nd birthday (which was on the 9th of April !!) complete with Kendra Wilkinson’s thoughts on the same .

 

08-08-08 is finally here

After months of hype and build up the Olympics , the second biggest sporting event in the world , have finally started. The opening ceremony was quite good , though as usual the march past of all the countries was very boring. The fact that the DD commentator kept screwing up the names of the countries and the whole coverage was shabby at best. I particularly liked the part with some guy very loudly telling the commentator that the old guy the cameraman was focusing on was the President of Brazil.

The 100 m dash , tennis  and the football are the only events i plan to watch . Most of the rest is boring. And India  will surely live up to expectations and come up with nothing yet again.

 

The last few days

The  past few days have been quite good.

On Sunday morning , i took my first SimCAT at IMS. I realised that I totally suck at DI. Maths and English are okay.

Then went for the BCQC open quiz conducted by Sumant from The Bombay Quiz Club. Teamed up with Kunal after a really long time. Actually , it was just the second time we teamed up (the first time being in the VIT music quiz where we came second). This time we put in quite a good overall performance. We topped the elims . Incidentally , the elims also saw our greatest moment in quizzing : we (widely considered to be hindi film illiterate) correctly answered a question on hindi films which Ramanand and dada got wrong. How amazing is that!! We probably should have got a few questions in the finals. Definitely should have cracked the theme earlier. If it hadn’t been for a disputed answer (the definitely-not-the-same-thing-ness of ‘Death’ and ‘Grim Reaper’ in the Sandman series) we would have come in second. Ahh well , these things happen. Anyways the quiz was amazing. All the questions were great. It was all out hard-core, totally workable ,  ‘intellectual’ quizzing for a  Shammanthesque 5 hours. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a quiz that started at 3pm and ended at 8pm . It was a great way to spend my Sunday.

Went to college today. It was pretty uneventful until I saw the certificate  ‘in appreciation of endless efforts’ for the Basketball team that Megs was proudly showing me. Now Megs’s actual name is Maeghun Vadgaama. Not the most normal name , you would say . If the double ‘a’ in the surname doesn’t stump you , the  sliding vowel coupled with the ‘u’ (where an ‘a’ is customary) in ‘Maeghun’ is sure to.  So it’s pretty amusing when one comes across an official document in which both name and surname have successfully taken off the bails and left the writer looking like a complete idiot. The certificate for participating in the , AHEM, extremely successful franchise that is the girls basketball team had in fact misspelled both name and surname. And it wasn’t the kind of normal mistake one would expect with such a difficult name. Normally ‘Maeghun’ would be misspelled as ‘Meghan’ but ‘Vadgaama’ would be spelt quite correctly. On this certificate however in addition to the expected ‘Meghan’  , Vadgaama was spelt as ‘Vadaghum’ ! The bugger hadn’t even bothered to write Ms. before the name and left it as Mr./Ms ! . We had quite a great laugh about it. Mr/Ms Meghan Vadaghum has also blogged about it.

 

I’m confused

The Pune Mirror (who else?) reports:

“Gisele Bundchen has posed topless for a fashion magazine , giving her male fans a treat by showing off her perfect bum.”

Hold on , hold on there. Let me get this straight. She took off her top and showed her bottom? Wait , that doesn’t make sense. Someone want to help me out here?

 

A post-GRE post

So my GRE didn’t go as badly as I thought it would and I ended up getting a respectable score . I’m quite proud of myself actually that i got past my aim of quadruple digits quite comfortably.  More than anything I’m ecstatic that I got my score by studying for just five days. I had had many bad ideas about how much suffering people go through studying for GRE for over 2 months. So following Kapeesh and Rohit’s posts about how to do well in the GRE (if you have about 60 days and are absolutely kaam-dhanda less), here are a few things you could do in case you  want to put in minimal effort and still salvage a decent score.

Verbal:

-Do NOT do anything more than Barrons . It has a brilliant wordlist and literally no more than 3-4 words come from outside it. Five days is not enough time to mug up the dictionary. Just stick to Barrons.

-The exercises in Barrons are quite pointless. They all are very basic and very different from the stuiff the actually ask in the GRE. Do NOT waste time solving them.  Instead solve Dilip Oak’s material (if you can get your hands on it)

Quantitative:

As Rohit says ” GRE IS CRAP, it tests 7th std maths”  and as Kapeesh says “Aiming for anything less than 800 here is unacceptable.”

Seriously , I thought i was gonna get screwed in the DI section because i kept making stupid mistakes , but it really is very simple. Most of you will be able to get an 800 in your sleep.

Also , do not sit solving the Barrons maths. It is very simple and there are qute a few wrong solutions. You are likely to get complacent and also replace your good concepts with incorrect ones. Instead solve the entire maths practice section in the ETS powerprep.

AWM:

Here’s an helpful tip. If you are writing your first serious essay after your 12th standard board exam , the GRE is NOT the place to do it.  Trust me. It doesn’t work! Write at least 2 essays before your GRE to get into the groove and remember your phak-ing skills. And you should draw up points for about 5 issue topics and 5 arguments.

 

Bizarro

By now , you’ve probably guessed that I’ve lost all hopes of a good score in the gre , so might as well sit blog about Pune Mirror.

They once again screwed up today by calling Jensen Button ‘Jensen Butt’ !

speaking of Pune mirror , I feel I should mention here one of the only things I like about Pune Mirror. The tabloid has introduced me to Bizarro , an awesome comic strip written by Dan Pirrarro . If you haven’t already, you really should check it out. The blog’s pretty funny too.