Victorious at home turf

Have been extremely busy for the past one week thanks to Confluence - IIM A's annual B school meet .The speeches by Chandrababu Naidu and Anil Ambani, and Santosh Desai's ad workshop were nice. Missed out on the Vijay Mallya and K Birla's speeches, and the Arun Shourie panel discussion.

Finished 3rd in the "management beyond the obvious" game and won Biquizitive - the quiz conducted by Harsha Bhogle - teaming up with D. and A. It felt really special winning a quiz in campus , especially after last year's debacle when we finished third.
Initially I was very tense as we were sandwiched between 2 of our strongest competitors. Also,I get really psyched out about quizzes which have half marks for pass questions. We trudged along till the halfway mark, trailing the other home team by 10 points and well behind the ISB team who had a lead of 25 points over us.But the second half was good and we comfortably romped home with a lead of 25 points over the 2nd placed team. And it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. Many thanks ( from the bottom of my heart ! ) to Joy Bhattacharya for setting questions which weren't too "biz-quiz-like". There was a generous dose of questions on pop culture - movies, a whole round devoted to music , cartoons , media etc -- topics which , sadly, you don't see in biz quizzes. To give an example, there is this standard round in all Harsha quizzes where you have to select the six things from a grid of nine which are part of a certain group. Though some topics were predicable, like Ford car models and P&G brands, there were other really interesting ones like F*R*I*E*N*DS guest appearances and TIME 'man of the year' awardees - our topic. I was slightly disappointed that we managed to get only 4 of the 6 awardees given that this is something I have been reading up on for quite some time. But hey, being prudent paid off in the end.
Overall it was damn good fun to take part in an interesting bizquiz (an oxymoron, if ever there was one!).

Am going to Rishikesh in my term break and then to a resort in Zainabad in the Rann of Kutch for ERI - Explorations in Role and Identity - an academic course i have enrolled for.

Memories of Chepauk

Having attended every match that was played in Chepauk between 1993 and 2003 (including a Bangladesh Kenya ODI!), the stadium has a special place in my heart. There are some memories that I will treasure forever – the MRTS train rides over the cooum, the salty breeze wafting from the Marina beach,the adrenalin rush when you approach the stadium and hear the crowds , bumping into long lost pals enroute to your seats, the pleasure one gets when a cricketer waves in your general direction and a zillion others.Of late though, I don’t seem to have the enthu to want to spend a whole day in a noisy sweaty stadium. Is it a sign of a waning interest in cricket or I have become too presumptous?

I plan to write about my favourite cricketing moments in Chepauk in my other blog .And there are tons of them – a fact that prompted me to choose the subject as my topic in Mastermind India. It should be out in a week’s time.

Whatay Weekend!

Pic: Glocalisation at its best - Ronald McDonald dressed like a Mughal prince in Gujjuland .( Its an ad for their new shahi paneer dish )

Friday: Dinner at McDonalds -- McAloo burger, shake( medium ) and fries (medium )
Won the Combos Entertainment Quiz conducted by Addu and DD. This was easily the best quiz I have attended in my year and a half at IIM A. I felt really good at the end of it as it wasn’t really my kind of entertainment quiz – Lots of questions on counter culture( Burroughs, vaguo 60s bands) , cult rock and classic literature etc which are not really topics I am good at.Formed a good combination with new partners T and K who knew a lot of stuff.

Saturday: Went to catch the HP flick (visually stunning and damn funny!) and had a late lunch at McD (again!) -- McVeggie burger and an uber-large shake . Felt so heavy that I couldn't finish the whole drink. Woke up at around dinner time to watch the match and again stuffed myself with roti and paneer masala ordered from Metro.

Sunday: Brunched at the Tea Center – Pancakes with maple syrup and honey, Waffles with chocolate sauce, Cheese and Tomato Crepes, Vegetable florentine – sinful to say the least. Hopefully burnt it all in the 45 minute walk back to campus.

Have resolved not to eat outside for the next 1 week.Let's see..

Are Augusts in Delhi more English than the ones in Chennai?

I have been reading the Delhi edition of The Hindu for the past one year and I have noticed one striking difference when compared to the Chennai edition. The pages are choc-a-bloc with ads by IAS entrance coaching institutes. These multilingual ads-in English, Hindi or a mixture of the two-are ultracolorful (yellow and red seem to be the most popular), come in various sizes-quarter page, half page, sometimes even a full page-and have very similar formats

• A showcase of the institute’s credentials (“35 years of success”, “By Prof.B.Ramakotiah, simply the best Maths Teacher”, “most reputed courses ever”)
• Flowery testimonials from Basant Garg, Hemant Jha, Nitin Kumar ,Sanjay Kumar etc accompanied by their passport photographs( Why do all of them have scrawny moustaches ? And why are they all always dressed in suits?)

On the contrary, in the Chennai edition, you see a lot of ads for JEE, MBBS, and increasingly nowadays, for CAT exams, but rarely for the IAS. I am guessing it is indicative of the fundamental difference in the aspirations of the youth. One explanation a friend of mine, a Delhite, came up with is that Northies read the Hindu only if they are giving the IAS or have to attend B-School GDs/interviews. (yeah, yeah, I agree there are probably “n” exceptions to this rule) He also clarified that the IAS craze is limited to students from UP and Bihar who migrate to Delhi for preparation as all the coaching centres are located there. If that’s true, then the institutes are doing a smart thing by focusing their advertising resources to ads in the Hindu as it has the maximum possibility of attracting the attention of their target segment. But then, the craze for IIT is equally strong in the north, especially in places like Kota, where the entire economy has piggybacked on the success of the JEE entrance market. So how come I rarely see ads for JEE and MBBS in the Delhi edition? Is it because they restrict themselves to more popular newspapers like the Hindustan Times and TOI? Can any enlightened soul tell me please…

The blog about nothing

There are lots of fleeting thoughts that run through my head which are, well, fleeting. I want to preserve these for posterity but don't like the idea of imposing these fascinating insights onto the unsuspecting reader( replace with plural on national holidays on which there is no cricket match ) of my other blog .Hence this blog.For those quivering like a molting hen at the prospect of reading some profound Zen-Ayn Rand stuff, let me inform you that this blog will only contain stuff written by yours truly, a human being whose brain processing speed is not good enough to even complete a full sente..