We had a surprise quiz on marketing after our lectures yesterday and hopefully I perform better on this one. (there is a clarification about something I wrote in my last blog entry, 45 people who got zeros in the first quiz were not from my batch, they were from last year or so I hear … this time the number was lower .. somewhere around 20). The marketing quiz went off quite well and it didn’t require you to mug up anything from the books, you just had to know what Kotler says and then apply it to your real world examples.

I am getting quite drawn towards marketing, something I had never expected. I somehow always considered myself to be a finance guy because I thought I loved the concept of numbers and also loved to sit down with work that demanded attention to minute details. What I did not know was that financial accounting would involve really weird concepts of balance sheets and double entry systems and what not, thankfully Dr Sanyal is teaching and so he makes the subject interesting. It is too early to decide upon what subject I will take up, I need at least till the start of the summer placement procedures to make up my mind as to what I want to do.

We had our class representative elections today and it turned out to be a really political affair. The candidates were supposed to prepare agendas and deliver speeches. I thought that Dilpreet would win but he did not and so Mohit Jain is the new CR. There was one point of time when I actually contemplated standing for the CR election myself, but gave up the thought when I came to my senses. I have applied to Imperium (the cultural festival) and I have applied for the Marketing magazine (JAMM) and I will apply for the Delpique panel discussions. Hopefully I should get selected at more than one group.

I am struggling with excel, we were asked to make the FA balance sheet on excel which involved just addition and subtraction and that was manageable, but the probability and the distribution problems involve some analytical functions and macros which are proving to be difficult. I hope to master that by the weekend because there is a huge Anwar Ali assignment in the box.

Today a really funny thing happened in the class for OCPS (the communication class) we were supposed to give a two minute extempore on any topic in front of a rolling camera. The topics had to be as diverse as possible and since no one had covered sports, I thought I would go on about the life of David Beckham. A matter of fact to be noted is that when I had appeared for the preliminaries of mastermind India, I had taken this as the exact subject for my area of specialization and so I was confident that I would kind of know the basic facts at least. Before the presentations started I got the news that we were going to have a QMM quiz in the next class. This is the same subject which got me a zero in the first quiz. This kinda freaked me out and so the normally cool and composed ketan while making a speech started having scary thoughts in his mind and the glare of the camera lights didn’t help. I started off pretty well and then lost it about 10 seconds into the speech. I was supposed to say that David Beckham was born of middle class parents and when the words came out they sounded “david beckham was born of middle aged parents” and the whole class was in splits. It was at least assuring to know that they were listening to me. I managed to say something about a world cup in 1996 but thankfully it was only for about two minutes and so I was spared from any further embarrassments. As it turned out, we had no quiz whatsoever.

Here there is a tradition that in case it’s your roomie’s birthday, he gets the bumps, but even you get the bumps. Unfortunately it was my roomie’s birthday, which earned him the bumps at midnight. Nitin Kumar had the good fortune of escaping with just one round of birthday bumps, but his roommate (poor me) had to make do with three. I got one set at midnight and then the next one in the acad block when I was drinking water during a break in the lecture and the third one on the terrace at night. I guess I haven’t made many friends around here. This I believe is the first time I am writing an entry at a decent hour of the day when I can actually hear sounds outside and its daylight. Or else all the other entries were made at some ungodly hour of the night. I have a late lecture today which starts at 12.00 and that means I could actually afford to wake up at  7.00 and not do much. I do have to go through the economic slides the prof sent us and also through the case in LAB (legal aspects of business) which is going to be a really difficult subject this semester. I need to go and get a shower because the rains just refuse to visit gurgaon. One more thing I realized is that now the entries is more of facts rather then my gyaan, I think it is because I get so much of that around here from seniors and know how boring it is to listen to all of it, I am sparing you guys from the same dose of boring gyaan.