20 000 eyes under a blog

I apologize for the v v corny title of the post.. i've had 20k page views. When i started blogging last year, i didnt think i'd stick to it for this long. Over the years, my mom has paid for guitar lessons that lasted a month, bought a "shruthi" box that gathers dust in my loft and patiently cleaned up after my innumerable attempts at crafts (candle making, quilting, cooking, sewing). Low attention span and laziness mean that i usually get bored pretty quickly. And yet i've continued blogging through bad movies and boring months.. often writing without having much to say.

For the benefit of being Mr Kite..
oops.. for those who are thinking of starting a blog : (drum roll please)

Benefits of Blogging
* You get to keep in touch with old friends who're too busy to mail you, but atleast read about what you're upto on the blog

* You get to make new friends (and i've made quite a few)

* You get to voice your own opinion. Even if you think main hoo naa was nice and Zaheer Khan is cute and remixed hindi music is rockin!!

* You get to say "i write" even if you dont manage to get anything printed :)

* People who want to check up on your functional writing skills have a readymade portfolio.

* You get to check your page hits counter three times a day and feel good when it hits any number ending with a zero.

* You usually discover that you are not alone. For some, this is scary.. since we are comforted by our uniqueness. But often, its nice to know that at 4 am there are other souls who can't finish a vikram seth book and enjoy cheesy mainstream hindi movies and are as confused about life as you are.

* No editors

* No deadlines

In other news, Week 4 and another WAC submission are over. Sleep is as elusive. Tiny threads of long forgotten thoughts string together now. Randomly. What was the name of that guy who every girl had a crush on in the 8th standard? The one who wore the coolest adidas sneakers and ran track?

When did i realise i'm addicted to cold water? And when did i fall in love with deep loud rock music that can make any day seem survivable? what would i do without metallica and matchbox 20? Or tang? Why, at 4 am, is remixed punju music STILL blaring outside my door?

When did i figure out that my biggest competition is with myself? The race i'm running is not against anyone other than my expectations. My parents i know, are never disappointed with me. And i couldn't care less what anyone else thinks.. so it boils down to this... what i expect of myself and what i rationalize away to make myself feel better... what i'll put up with... and at the end of the day, the only person i have to answer to is myself.

You'd think this would be a lot easier than explaining your teachers' note on "chalk throwing incidents" to your mom. It isn't.

The problem with dealing with yourself is that you somehow manage to see through all your excuses. :)

This doesn't really go anywhere, this post. It just exists. A random thought. Like me. Work in progress.

There are those who live in the boundaries of guilt and fear, in the limits of imagination. One must dance in the moment. Reach down and pull up a song. Spin and chant and forget the sorrow that we are flesh on bone

- Book of Osiris, Egyptian Book of Dead (From Suhas's signature on dBab)

Harry Potter and the half baked plot

Finished the sixth harry potter book today
or what you might call a book
i thought it was an eight hundred page prequel to book 7

She pulls in all threads from the past 5 books.. sets a hurtling pace.. and then bang.. she .. uhm.. stops...

so there you go.. big things will happen in book 7. this one is just a teaser.

And its got romance, death, revenge, truth, mystique, and a quidditch match

[spoilers follow]

but her heart doesnt seem to have been in it. Romance is cursory - they yell for about eight pages on the pros and cons of snogging and devote two lines to pulsing hearts and thats that. Death is another two words. Perhaps she was too excited by book 7 to devote enough attention to the building up of suspense.. For a major part, the book reads like a log or recording of facts.

She's said elsewhere that this was the first book she wrote.. sure looks like it! the basic plot is there but without too much development. Everything from the dreaded inferii to rosmerta's curse to the felix felicis is dealt with cursorily. With the same tired words reciting these things. The plot has been formulated, but the book has not been written.

She's also tried to squeeze in too much. So unlike the previous books, there are twenty different mini climaxes, fights, matches, deaths, curses, romances put in. but in the end it still sounds more like a grocery list and less like a book.

Potter himself puts it best when he says in the end that he wasn't hurting as much as he did when Sirius died. Neither did we. I remember how heart wrenching it was when Sirius died. I threw aside Book 5 and refused to read it again so that i could go on pretending that Sirius lives.

This is not the same thing..

[spoilers done]

All in all, read if you're a potter addict. If you've just woken up to the phenomenon, then give this a miss (and do tell us which planet you're from btw...)

Week # 3

The days are upside down here.

You sleep in the afternoon and stay awake all night.

I've spent this week watching FRIENDS and batchmates campaigning (Talking about elections more than specifically campaigning - sac c please note) on dbab.. for elections that happen next week.

considering that about 20 ppl in my class are vying for the post of CR (class representative), people like me are in great demand to sign nominations for them :)

I'm acting in a play put up by the drama club here (called, very imaginatively, IIMACTS). We're doing vijay tendulkar's play "Kamala".

Week 3 was good. We had an amazing ops class and three quizzes! I've finally gotten my ibm r52.. which looks tres sexy ;)

elsewhere, mindless terrorism continues. London recovers from the shock without the paranoid anti muslim backlash that characterized previous attacks elsewhere.

My sister just finished HP6 and doesnt want to talk about it. In writing a darker more adult book, perhaps JKR has diluted the original franchise and spoilt a fun story?

Will review it after i read it.. which won't be for a while.. and no, i'm not going to tell you who dies.. though from what i hear, its hardly the point..

One of my favorite poems

The tree that never had to fight
for sun and sky and air and light,
but stood out in the open plain
and always had it share of rain,
never became a forest king
but lived and died a scrubby thing...

..Good timber does not grow with ease,
the stronger wind, the stronger trees..

- Douglas Malloch

Why this weekend Rocked

1. I submitted my WAC assignment on time.**

2. After that i slept

3. Was too lazy to go out for dinner so ordered pizza along with a few girlfriends

4. Watched Friends season ten on my laptop with aforementioned pizza and aforementioned girlfriends

5. Had a long (well ten minutes.. but long by wimwi standards) shower, finally feeling human :)

6. Went for a "ramp". Which is both a verb and a noun in this place. It is also a place where WAC'd first years meet at ungodly hours to head bang to loud punju and hindi music. Till three AM.

7. I slept till 12 this morning

8. I downloaded about 200 songs from the LAN and have been blasting music all w/end

9. I auditioned for IIMACTS this evening. No CV points, No grade points, No CP marks.. pure fun

10. It's 12 and i have only two hrs of work left.

** WAC is a course we take in terms one and three. Every few weeks we procrastinate endlessly on a case analysis, stay up all night on friday, pray to the Porter (god of competitive strategy), and type out a thousand word analysis of a case.We then print this out on lan printers with great difficulty, change into tracks and run to the classroom to submit the assignment in time for the deadline on saturday afternoon. I made it with half an hour to spare and hopefully the Peerless Starch Company of Blair, Indiana will be saved.

It's been a good day...

..And if you have a problem with all of this, tough luck. Because for those of us in the marketing department you are not our Consumer, you are our Product

- Marketing Prof describing the Marketing core curriculum on induction day

Bylines

got published in the deccan chronicle today..
in their section called "blogger's park"..
if you get the paper, do check it out.. app has a pic o me as well :D

*Update*

The write up is accesible here under the teens supplement section


(c)Deccan Chronicle

Life or something like it

Its 10 : 30 pm as i post this.

Week 2 is almost over.

A small sigh of relief at having survived so far. :)

This place has a strange way of changing you. Some of us realise whats really important to us. Sometimes it takes a week away from home to decide that you want to work where your family lives. It takes three more days for this place to make you forget all of that and get swept away in the tide of cg's and i banking jobs.

It's very easy to lose yourself. Spend 24 hours a day in a relentless pressure cooker and soon you forget yourself. Other people's goals become your own. It happens so subtly that you often don't notice it. Until suddenly one day you're in the Singapore division of an investment bank and you remember how years earlier you had wanted a marketing career in Delhi.

There is no life outside of this place for us. Not for the next 9.5 months. The outside world ceases to exist. We know of the floods because our laptops won't arrive for another week. We know about the F1 race because some seniors were watching it on our floor. But we *fachchas* have no life for the next 9.5 months. And the ones who struggle the most are the ones who resist that.

Bschool isn't all that bleak. But it is fast paced. You have enough time to prepare for tomorrow. Long term planning is deciding whether to have dinner at CT or in the canteen. There simply isn't enough time to think of anything beyond that. Cases to prepare for. Prayers to say, wishing you dont get cold called.

The classes, though, are amazing. Mindblowing profs. And each class challenges you to think and apply yourself in ways that you've never done before. You end each day amazed at what your classmates do, and even more amazed that you can do it too.

I think i've learnt more in the last two weeks than i did in years. Both inside and outside the classroom. I've learnt i'm far more disciplined than i ever gave myself credit for. And capable of surviving on much less sleep than i'd think possible. :)

Cases on QM and Eco tomorrow morning
So good night all

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