Weekends can get really boring here, mostly because all the delhites run away to mom or dad or good food or great bed or ac room or whatever …. Not necessarily in the same order of preference though. I am talking as if I study so much during the week that by the end of the week I have become really irritated at the concept of not having to study much. But it feels weird not to do much after a week of working, but after what we have been told by the seniors … we just need to wait for another week or so before the assignments start pouring in. I was kidding around with some delhi guys that MDI should regulate the number of times they get to rush off home in a month and according to me that number should stand at 0.5 … I mean it really doesn’t go off all that well for the non delhi people. I know we came here on our own free will (Dr Sanyal will agree to that) but I guess for the non delhi people its not like their friends get to go off home while they cannot for the next six months or something, but its more of the concept that somehow the delhi guys will never gel with the campus in the true sense (I can already sense some dilli walas drawing out daggers). It is but natural that they want to visit their old friends in town but then again when you know that you have a support system outside of campus at a distance of half an hour or a local call away … the amount of dependency on the people in your batch obviously decreases … while on the other hand for people like us … we have to depend on the friends we make here (But then again .. I am not complaining … it’s the loss of the dilli walas eventually)

On Friday evening we had a placement committee open house, which is like a session where the new batch gets to interact with the placecomm (that is what it is called at MDI) and get to know about the activities they perform which includes coordinating with the corporates and to get them to campus for placements … they have the responsibility of placing 180 of the new batch for summer internships and by the time it is January, the juniors would have taken control of the placecomm and they would then place the 120 students of the senior batch. It is an effort which demands commitment and integrity and hard work and guts of the highest magnitude. I was seriously contemplating about whether or not I should apply to such a high profile committee (the selection procedure itself is highly tedious and stringent) but then I after two days of thinking, talking to numerous seniors and finally my mother, I gave up the thought. There were many different reasons, the main reason being, I still do not know what I would like to specialize in, so that means if I take up Finance as a major then I have major problems with my grades going down due to placecomm. With other majors like marketing, the low grades are more than compensated for by the amount of exposure you get in the placecomm, but it’s a risk with finance. The other reason was that I am genuinely interested in applying for an exchange program to study for one term abroad, in case I got into placecomm it would mean that I would have to let go of the exchange option. The third and the most important reason was that I was told by many seniors that once you got into placecomm, your interaction with the rest of the batch becomes almost nil, you would be the best of friends with the people … your batch mates in the placecomm, but I don’t think its worth staying out of contact with 166 other people.

So I guess placecomm will have to do without me … but placecomm’s loss is JAMM’s gain, I am applying for the marketing magazine and then I am also applying to be the cultural festival in-charge. The procedures for the same would start this week and go on into the next week. By then many things would be clear and amongst them, the election of a class representative. I had given some not so serious thoughts about applying for this post also, but gave up considering the fact that the CR has to hear abuses from his class as well as the faculty (and I have already have had my share of abuses).

On Saturday night, there were about 15 of us who were sitting in the lawns next to the golf course (yes there is actually a golf course at MDI … it has 6 holes … you do have to search for them most of the times … or sometimes you accidentally get to know where they are when you leg gets stuck in them) and singing away to glory. Old hindi songs, new hindi songs, item numbers, urdu ghazals, bryan adams, air supply and what not. It was great fun and it ended around 2.30 in the night. By the way my problem of whether to refer these unholy timings of the night as being in the night or in the morning has been solved by someone while we were sitting in the dark in the lawn. Sadly I cannot credit the solution to anyone in particular because I don’t quite know who it was. But the solution was genius personified, the solution goes like this, when you wake up at like 0300 hours then its 3.00 in the morning and when you stay awake till 0300 hours then its 3.00 in the night.

Previously on Saturday we were shown Van Helsing which is a really pathetic movie, and in the AC auditorium made about 15 people fall asleep.
Today afternoon I was invited to lunch with Dr Kotwal at his house; he is a family friend and live about ten minutes away from college. He and his wife and their daughter royally spoilt me. I don’t think that I am going to enjoy the mess food for this week after gorging on Prawn curry and chicken and chocolate cake and ice cream and cold coffee and banana cake and what not. I was telling them that in case they want me over the next week also, I could not guarantee that I would necessarily be going back to the hostel  

I have to analyze the budget now because Dr Sanyal said that he could take a quiz on the budget … just to check our general awareness and it would be included in the financial accounting credit. Life is fun at MDI. We had Chinese stuff (notice the use of the word STUFF ... I don’t know if I can call it anything else) in the mess for dinner and believe me that all those people who had gone out and missed the food could be considered to be blessed by someone up there.

Funny isn’t it? I mean the very first quiz I give in mdi, I flunk. It was a nice Tuesday morning and the first lecture was some boring Hbo (Human behavioral organization) which is a lot of management gyan filled in an one and a half hour lecture. After the lecture gets done with, in walks Mr Anwar Ali with a nice big brown envelope which we all have learnt to associate with quizzes. He tells us that he is taking a surprise quiz and we all sit down to do it, it’s a very easy question about some combined probability about some defective machine parts and I get the first question correctly and then like a wise ass, I went on to find out four individual probabilities for machines A,B,C and D but to my utter horror (which I fell into after I get out of the class), the order was not ABCD for everyone, to prevent copying the Prof had given jumbled orders for different papers. So that meant that I had marked the answers as ABCD but later I discovered that the real order was DCAB in my paper type. So I get two marks for my first correct answer and a -0.5 for all subsequent four answers which took my net score at an amazing 0.00.But I must add that this in fact was not the lowest score, some poor people who thought they would make a quick grade by looking over into the neighbour’s landed up with a -2.5.

So it turns out that my very first quiz at MDI turns out to be really incidental. The second quiz I gave was an accounts quiz where I managed to get a decent score of 3.5 on 10. the average score for the class is around 3.5 but the mean is even lower, some CA studs apparently got a 9 on the test.

So right now my life is already buzzing with quizzes, the only quizzes I knew before I came here were the general knowledge ones and I really looked forward to them, now every lecture starts with the hope that we don’t get to see a brown envelope. As for the general knowledge type quizzes, I am hoping that they too would happen some time really soon, I plan to be an active member of W5H (Where, When, What, Who, Why and How) the quizzing society. There is a business quiz sometime next week and I am hoping that I will someday represent the college on University Challenge on BBC. It has been my life long ambition to stand in front o Siddharth Basu and try my knowledge against him. I came close on two occasions when I attempted the preliminaries of master mind but couldn’t get through. But lately my personal opinion of the show has taken a nose dive with the level of questions they ask taking a similar nosedive.

Day before yesterday we had an inaugural night of performance of the music club called mandolins. It was planned to be a Nirvana Night but it soon branched out into other directions. Rahul Raj Singh, the coolest dude on campus, who is a senior played “come as you are” “man who sold the world” “all apologies” but had to concede to public demand to play “hotel California” “sweet child of mine” “highway star” and then finally his favourite song “Sayonnee” the sufi number by Junoon. After that I reluctantly had to get back to studying Accounts and some rather dull income statements of HLL but it of course helps to have some ladies in the group who not only help with the accounts but also make it a not so boring experience. It is really fun, to sit around campus, at night there is not much light in the campus but the buildings are very well lit so we sit around the buildings and on the floor or on the many “kattas” and punch away into the calculators. A late night coffee by 2.30 doesn’t do much harm, but actually goes a long way in improving your networking skills.

I wasn’t able to update the blog for quite some time because I was really busy with the work and also because the only time it has rained here, the water came in through the window and wet my keyboard. So now I am having major problems with the typing. I am having to type the keys extra hard and every once in a while I discover that one particular letter refuses to be typed at. But during the time I could not update my blog, it made me really sad to know that some regulars like eq would have to go back empty handed. It makes me wonder as to what this simple blog makes me realize, more than anything it gives me the feeling of creating something and a little ego boost in knowing that my life is not as miniscule or boring or mundane as it sounds, especially when it is written in the style of a story. By the way … did I tell you that on the very first quiz that all of us took, 45 people got zeros … so I guess I am not all that alone.

It’s 4.45 in the morning and believe it or not, I am just back after having a nice cool shower, the fourth shower within a period of twenty four hours to be precise. The occasion was the Fresher’s Party organized by the senior batch of MDI and did it rock or what? The reason why I absolutely needed to take a shower was the fact that all my clothes were wet with sweat and so was my entire body, add to that the fact that tomorrow there is not going to be electrical supply in MDI from 10.00 am to 5.00 pm and along with that the fact that there is not going to be any water supply as well. (keeping that in mind I also happened to check out if the two washing machines on my floor are idle … but it was a futile exercise as they almost never are. One thing I have discovered after coming here is the fact that there is no such thing as NIGHT or DAY in a B school, everyone works according to just one clock … the one which shows the deadlines. In the first week we were here, I have heard “Deadlines are Deadlines are Deadlines” at least a million times. So that means we had the various club presentations at 12.30 in the night and also some weird people like me prefer to stay awake and use the washing machine at 4.50 in the morning and a QMM professor keeping 5.30 am as the assignment deadline.

The shower before that was taken at 8.00 pm, before I left for the party coz I was just back from playing some tough games of table tennis in the common room and with the kind of temperature we have here, it meant I was drenched with sweat. Some people reading this might actually be forgiven for asking the question of whether I study here. well the answer is that I haven’t really started studying in full flow as yet, but yes with the schedule of all the lectures of all the subjects given before hand, you are supposed to do a lot of reading before you set foot in the class or else it could imply dire consequences if you are COLD CALLED in the class. This is a genuinely B school term which means that you are sitting on your place in the class and the prof walks in and the first thing he does after the attendance is ask a question and then point at you to comment on it, the very question or case you were supposed to have read the day before. So once proper college starts, which it will from Monday, it’s back to the grind.

The shower before the table tennis match was when I was returning from the theatre workshop and it rained for the first time in these parts of the country and obviously I couldn’t let go of a chance to get wet. The rain wasn’t much but it was beautiful nonetheless. I don’t know, in fact some people might really call me a pervert or something but I really think that there is something sexual and spiritual associated with the rains. The whole concept of the first rain is in itself an issue which deserves spiritual treatment, but even without all the philosophical crap I think that the rains symbolize a lot of things; most of all hope and best of all renewal. Getting wet in the rains is all about losing yourself. Like Morpheus said “Free your mind”, one thing that I have been trying to do ever since I got here. as I rightly believed that coming here would be a exercise in opening up closed doors within the mind and its proving to be exactly the same. I’ve done so many things since I got here, interacted with so many different people, attended a theatre workshop, did adventure sports, danced (Believe me, when the music starts, my feet get set in concrete) though I must admit that the dancing part I owe to a couple of drinks and the patience of a sweet lady (for reasons of discretion, let her remain unnamed). The rains really made me miss home for the first time, just today when my sister called me on the phone, she was telling me that it’s pouring cats and dogs there (I’m feeling really disgusted that I used that same century old clichéd expression here) but anyway its raining really heavily there and I wish MDI was in Bombay.

I was talking to Manisha today in the mess and she said that the one thing that all of us have felt after coming here is that MDI doesn’t seem like a strange place, it feels as though you have lived here all your life. And though you have to ask some people their names over and over due to the overload of names that have taken place in the past week or so, but even with that you somehow connect with the people.

The fourth shower, or rather the very first one in the day was taken at 7.30 in the morning, in the third floor bathroom, singing a really bad version of “I can’t help falling in love with you”

Mobile, that’s what they call me here. It all began when they gave us these bright yellow name tags to be worn at all times on the shirt pocket. Mine obviously said Ketan Mohile and some smart alec thought that it looked like Ketan Mobile from afar and so the name stuck, so much so that the other day when Anil Sir was asking people for their names, I got introduced as Mobile and now even he calls me that.

After a week of hell called the induction program, we have adapted to the lifestyle here, so much so that sleep doesn’t come all that easily. The whole exercise of sleeping for just four hours in the first five days has made us budding insomniacs. Just last night I was out till about 2.00 in the morning sitting and talking near the canteen. The day before that I was out with a bunch of guys listening to a girl play the saxophone. It was really cool and almost everybody who came there wanted her to play Unchained Melodies and all those people eventually tried to pitch in with their vocals and failed miserably when she was doing such a nice job of it. Karishma her name is, I think. Last night some seniors were joking around with us and this guy called This (Thisampathi) came up with this really smart joke. It seems as though some gal had put up a notice on the board saying that she had lost her ring in the ground floor bathroom of the girl’s hostel. So This comes up and adds to the notice “I tried getting to the bathroom, but couldn’t … you could try searching it in Google” it was really hilarious and we burst out laughing and couldn’t stop for a really long time.

The seniors here are way too cool and go out of the way to help us out. So much so that we already talk to some of them like old mates. I guess it has got to do something with the fact that they need to trust us so much right from the beginning as we would eventually be handling their placement processes. I read something about some molestation issue in XLRI when some seniors got drunk and tried to harass some females who had to run to the safety of their rooms, really pathetic for a college as great as XLRI, my dream college. Now I am happy that I am not there. The seniors took a surprise quiz based on general fundas, marketing, finance, operations etc. When the results came out the seniors were more amused by the variety of answers that were displayed in the test. So they published a newsletter which carries some really gem of answers.

 

Q. what is the phenomenon of “A snake in the tunnel”

 1. it’s a dead end from both the sides.

2. When a snake wants to hide from the dark and goes to the tunnel and then the tunnel   can’t accommodate it.

3. A deadly trap that does not know it’s a trap.

 

Q. what is MPS and MPC (Its marginal productivity of cost and sales)

1. miles per cent of petrol

2. different types of music files.

3. marketing per customer and marketing per sales.

 

Q. what is the Philips curve

1. Curve given by Philip Kotler.

2. It is the curve of the river in Netherlands on the banks of which Philips is located.

3. shape of the curve of the television screen.

4. the shape of the curve of the Philips logo.

 

It was so much fun to read all of this yesterday in the mess where these letters were stacked up and all through you could hear sudden burst of laughing as someone read some immortal lines from somewhere. The worst part is that they have put in the names of the people who said these things.

Other than that, life in a B school is really swell, many things as I had heard about them and many things not like I had imagined. My classes start tomorrow and I guess then I will really have to get in the groove of keeping up late. There is a particular professor called Sahay who is notorious for his quizzes. There have been instances of his class finishing at 1.30 for people to rush to their hostel rooms or the computer centre to give an online test and failing miserably at it. A statistics graduate got zero on the very first test which was entirely statistics and an arts graduate topped it. The secret to studying for these quizzes is to hope that God likes you.

The mid term exams are on the 9^th of august and I am already kinda freaked out. The finals are on the 22^nd of September. Seven papers, I don’t know how I am going to manage all that. The subjects are also was too weird. Financial accounting, general and business communication, marketing planning, company and general laws and what not. This coupled with the fact that there are two papers on the same day.

The day before yesterday we had a workshop called Experential Learning. It was this workshop in the outdoors where you had exercises that help you build team spirit and lets you know the importance of team work. It also had individual activities like rapelling and river crossing and it was a whole lot of fun. It was carried out by this anglo Indian guy called Micheal Mitra who looks like a typical firang but speaks the most amazing hindi. He kept on trying to convince us that he was a dropout from XLRI who wouldn’t get a job anywhere, so he started with this service. The other firangs on the campus are the two german dudes, Tim and I forgot the other guy’s name, they are doing their Phd program and are really fun people. The other day during the party they were trying hard to shout and did manage to succeed at saying “ek do teen char, bandh karo yeh atyachar” and when the other guy was asked where Tim was, he says “Tim kahin marwa raha hai”

Anyway I have already typed for about 45 minutes which is a premium on most days. I need to get ready in formals for an address by the director of the institute, Dr Pritam Singh and then later in the evening we have Mr Satish Pradhan … VP, HR, Tata Sons. In the night, we have the screening of the movie “Ek Ruka Hua Faisla”

Yesterday evening we had a lady, Mrs Pradnya Parashar who is the HR head of E Funds to talk about leadership and management and she was asked as how she coped up with the work … being a mother and a professional at the same time and she replied to it by saying “Just as my husband copes with being a father and a professional at the same time”

I wanted to send this as a mail to my friends as well, but I am thinking about the disadvantages of such mass mailing. The problem is that I do not get more than half an hour of free time per day. Any extra time I have to generate by waking up early, and when you sleep at 3.30 its not that easy to get up at 7.00 everyday.

I am making an entry here after a long time and the reason being that I was caught up with some formalities remaining for my passport verification at the local police station. And knowing about the business affairs at any police station for that matter I am not surprised that it’s taking me so long. My packing is almost done. My computer has to be disassembled and then various parts go into different bags, but that will happen some time on Sunday after I finish typing my pre joining assignment. Oh yeah … I forgot to mention that I have received this pre joining assignment from my business school (MDI) and it was a pain … a big pain somewhere deep down when I thought I would get to enjoy the remaining fifteen days or so of my so called vacation. It involves writing short articles on a variety of issues and some industry analysis all of which was manageable.

The worst part was the personal section where I was supposed to write stuff like why I really wanted to be an MBA … or I had to write about my dream company and why I would like to work there … all this is understandable, but doing it in 300 words flat is kinda asking too much (or too little should I say)

There is just one article I have to write about some business problem that happened in the past three months and what I would have done to rectify it. the problem here is not the number of words (500) but I cant find a problem … which shouldn’t have been a problem in the first place as business is all about problems. So tonight I will take to the information superhighway and try to find out problem. Speaking of tonight … it reminds me … yesterday I was talking to my friend Shehzia on the phone and I was telling her that I would call her later that night and by mistake I said “I’ll call you today night” and she really burst out laughing … how could I forget a simple word like TONIGHT … me who prided himself on his reading habit was really weak when it came to simple words … she was having a gala time ragging me.

Some background on Shehzia … we met about four years ago … of all places on Rediff chat and we got chatting and then after some months talking and well as our lives went on .. we became really good pals … and now this month .. 1^st of June to be precise we met for the first time, a whole three years and ten months after we got to know each other. It was really cool … in fact we had made this deal about not meeting at all … but then now that I’ll be leaving for two year, we thought we’d meet. She is really one person I can bear to be shouted at by.

Now I have to go to the police station and take someone along who will vouch that Ketan Mohile does stay at the address mentioned. How stupid is that huh? Then I have to take those papers from this police station to the one at the place I used to stay earlier. There some overworked, underskilled guys will make me bring photocopies of god knows what and make another two trips to give you a lower estimate and hopefully three months later I will get my passport.

Sometimes I wonder if writing a Blog is supposed to be fun or is it like a duty thing. I mean the question arises … am I supposed to write into it even if nothing remotely interesting has happened in my life … or am I supposed to write anything and leave it to the people who read it to make up their minds whether its interesting or not. Well I am talking as if half the civilized world logs on to blogdrive.com to read this stuff … but I can’t help but wonder. I have put up a counter at the site to find out how many people actually reach the page … forget reading the whole thing … but I’d be happy even if they managed to reach here and come across my personal universe.

P.S forgive me for the different fonts every time i post ,,, I am still trying to get a hang of it.

Last night a Glow Worm flew into my room and was sitting on the window. It was a really cool sight and I didn’t want to miss out on the magic. I caught him in a plastic case and after some close observations I let him fly in my room. I turned out the lights, lying in my bed and saw him flying, creating tiny streaks of light, almost like a small meteor flying by my room, my very personal meteor. I don’t know when I went to sleep but he wasn’t there in the morning. This was around 3.00 in the morning (I accept that 3.00 is early enough in the morning). I was tuned in to watch the Spain Vs Russia match on TV which started around 12.15 but then it got so boring that I had to surf channels. Nowadays with alarming regularity, I have noticed that the best movies, the best sitcom episodes, the best music videos are always on when you have made a promise to yourself to stop watching TV and get back to studying (which makes breaking such promises a whole lot easier).
As I was shifting channels, I happened to notice that the movie Khwaish was on … it’s that same crappy, smoochy movie was on. I had heard that they had picked it up from Erich Segal’s love story line by line and so I really wanted to find it out for myself. Believe me people, I was not disappointed. Love Story starts with “What can you say about a girl who was 25 … and blah blah … and who loved the Beatles and who loved me and blah blah” and the movie starts with “what can you say about a girl who was 25 who loved R.D.Burman and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and loved me” how pathetic can Hindi movie directors get??
Well I somehow managed to stick around with the movie as Spain were at their pathetic best and Mallika Sherawat was at her skimpy best and it did provide me with a lot of laughs and a whole lot of pity for Love story. I was messaging my friend in Chennai, Roshini and in a really eerie coincidence it turned out that at that very exact moment she was reading Love Story. (Another eerie coincidence between us is the fact that she was born on the 18th of June, Paul Mc Cartney’s birthday and I was born on the 9th of October, John Lennon’s birthday … but the fact remains that she loves the Beatles and I hate them … they are all so Goody Goody)
The best part about Love Story is the fact that you can pick up the book and get it done with in about an hour’s time at the most and then curse yourself for why you picked up the book as it will make you cry every single time you read it. Therein lays an argument which has its roots in Love Story. When Jenny dies, He asks himself if it was all worth it, the whole experience of going through love worth the experience of pain after you have lost the one you love. Is the whole experience of reading the book worth the pain and the sadness you feel when you are done with it?? I mean … every Love Story fan knows the book by heart and so we could just live with the memory of the book rather than read it again … but No, we do read the book and we do fall in love again
I managed to doze off around 3.15 thinking about Oliver Barret IV and Jenny and the glow worm

Exactly 10 days later I will be leaving for Gurgaon, to join MDI (for those who came in late .. Management Development Institute ...its a pretty good Business school). I know the starting sounds really cliched ... but in case you want to follow this blog that is something you will have to put up with. I am an amateur writer and have a penchant for using words and cliched expressions where I could do without. My name is Ketan Mohile, an electronics engineer .. shit ... I forgot ... I am not yet an engineer ... the results for my final semester exams will be out by the second week of july. Anyway I have decided to pursue a degree in management and plan to start this blog to keep track of my life through two years of business school and the things that happen along side what I hope is going to be a wonderful experience.
This is not my first attempt at writing, I have written two short stories already (you'll get to see them later when I know that you are sufficiently immune to the cliched style) but this is my first attempt at writing a blog. I may have started this but i dont know how long I would be able to maintain it. Business school is tough ... at least the people who are already there say this, they also say that four hours of sleep over the first trimester is a luxury so if I was in the right frame of mind, I should have been taking in all the sleep i can and not writing this blog at 1.00 in the morning (is 1.00 sufficiently early to be referred to as morning?)
I guess one more reason why I am writing this ... well I always wanted to start writing a blog ... but I mean the reason why I am writing it today is because all my friends have left for a trip to manali and i really wanted to go, but couldnt as they would return just a day before I will leave and it would have been a real hassle for me, so I suddenly have to deal with this "Oh my friends are gone and I wont get to spend time with them before i leave" feeling. I Know if you actually read upto here, you would be trying to get hang of the real me, but i suggest that you wait and discover me with each new entry into the journal. New people will be introduced as and when required and whether you like it or not ... you would get to listen to the constant cirbbing I do about a whole lot of issues ranging from TV soaps to world peace.
Anyway the bags are dumped in my room, getting filled with whatever items I can manage to shop in a day of 12 hours and from what I reckon I have collected yet is close to half the stuff. the seniors at MDI have told us that formal clothes are a must for the first two trimesters which is like the next six months. For someone like me whose definition of formals was "Non Faded Jeans" ... its gonna be a tough time coping up with those full sleeves and plain shirts. More shopping is scheduled for tomorrow (two pairs of jeans and three pairs of formal trousers), hopefully I will keep on writing here and right now before i hit the publish button I am throwing in a silent prayer for people to actually read stuff right till the end. And thank god there isnt anything like a cyber Tomato which can abe splattered across my screen by people who go crazy reading stuff right upto the end.

P.S - In case you are wondering what the title means ... Mandevian is like the generic name given to a student of MDI .. like IITian .. or Mumbain or anyname you can add an IAN in the end to.