Friday, December 31, 2004

More than halfway to happiness

...that is my bracket tagline.
2 exams today- Operations Management and Managing People and Performance in Organisations.
OM was awful, miserable, terrible, atrocious, unspeakable and so on. I had done well in the last quiz and expected to do well in this one too but alas and alack!! it was not to be. From the word go, I was lost. Where I could, I gave free rein to my creativity even in problem solving. I made guesses randomly despite being aware of negative marking for incorrect answers. I made up my own frameworks for i didnt know any by the original propnents. Well,it was an unmitigated disaster from which I am yet to recover.
My entire preparation for MPPO was supposed to revolve around the 2hr break between the 2 exams.I spent this battling drooping eyelids and consequently didnt get much in the form of 'learnings'. Unsurprisingly, the MPPO paper left me blank.I then indulged in creative bullshitting for a while. I made up a couple of laws and legislations(future legislator in the making, yo!!), gave suggests left, right and centre about how to manage people and generally put in a lot of blah for an hour. After exhausting my imagination, I gave up the paper and came back to my room.
Moving on from my academic disasters...
I skipped lunch today to study and now the snack counter is closed. Im dying of hunger and there is not a morsel to eat. Ill have to bear with this for another hour when the mess opens for evening tea and snacks.We have very good breakfast but otherwise im heartily sick of the mess food. It doesnt taste bad...its just that there is no variety in the food at all and everything seems to taste the same.

Thursday, December 30, 2004

CorpFin!!

Had the 1st endterm today - Corporate Finance. It was three and a half hours of tapping the calculator and adding,subtracting, multiplying and dividing all the figures in the question paper indiscriminately. It was so bad I couldnt even fudge the figures to balance the Bal Sheet...and this Ive been doing for 5 yrs!! Im getting a D in this one. Am in the bottom of the class. But I will not feel bad about my imminent D till Jan 2005 when the grades are going to be out.Till then, I shall just celebrate the end of the course.

I really have only myself to blame. The 1st corpfin class this term...I put in a niteout 'resolving' personal issues. So I promptly fell asleep in the 1st CF class the next day. I did try waking up at intervals...my only takeaway from that class was a view of the Prof's butt. The next few classes continued in similar vein...Id wake up at intervals and vigourously nod my head or shout out figures along with everybody else before dozing off again. My classmates claim that man is a God-level Prof - I wouldnt know coz I slept through his course.

Id like to write some more but I slept at 7am and got up at 7:30 am today. Im on the verge of death. Im going to crash for a short while now and bounce back for the 2 endterms tomorrow.

Thursday, December 23, 2004

...and I ramble on

I think it is finally the end. There is still some part of me which is afraid that it is not over but then, another part of me thinks it is and I have been more at peace and looking and feeling better since yesday night than I have for the past 10 days.

A couple of days ago I was feeling really low...it was about 1 in the night and the only thing that could cheer me up was a hot chocolate fudge.So Amol, Ankita and I went to Brigade Road at that time of the night for my hot chocolate fudge.We couldnt get it anywhere so we ended up at this pseud looking place called Pinxx(yeah,everything pink in color and all) and ate some really bad icecream. But it was lots of fun.and this is the kind of thing I want to do throughout my life...go on an improptu trip one fine weekday, go on a long drive to bhimli sometime late in the nite, eat pani puri in PPT formals, eat icecream in the rain, dance on the terrace when it is raining...impulsive things....like how that woman used her shell shaped soap...:)

Its 2:30 in the night...we have a marketing report to submit in 6 hrs, end terms in a weeks' time...and I want to watch a movie now!! And I know the only thing that will stop me from watching the movie is if I feel sleepy. Im just debating which movie to watch.
hmm...my groupmates wont be very happy if Im sitting around here while they work...we are almost done, just some formatting work left to do.I guess Ill be off.

Thursday, December 16, 2004

pulling my hair out

Im pulling my hair out in frustration...ive been trying for months to get my picture up on the blog but there seems to be a problem with Hello Picasa and I cant do it!! And for those of you who havent seen me, trust me, its worth the effort. And for those of you who have, ahem...
Today, we had a Prof from France, who said India was not a secular country and in the same bretah said that secularism was the most important principle in France.Rajeev got pained at that.We passed notes, dont have the with me right now but it went something like this:

Rajeev: India is the most secular nation. How can she even say that? Has France ever had a President who belonged to the minority religion? Has the US ever had a non-catholic President?

Me: That is the general perception the western world has of India and to some extent it is justified. Do you remember the picture of the man begging for his life during the Gujarat riots? No country is secular when its citizens go through such pure fear just because of their religion. We would talk differently if we were Muslim.

Rajeev: It works both ways. What about the Kashmiri pundits who cant return home because of Muslim militancy?How would those in the Godhra train feel?Im not saying there is no room for improvement. Obviously there is. But it is hypocritical of her to say our country isnt secular but hers is.

And the conversation continued on these lines...about how most western countries, especially the US, were hypocritical and how they hadlaws different for themselves and for others.
About 2000 people died in the 9/11 WTC thing. 10000 people died during the Afghan war. So 1 American life equals 5 lives of people belonging to an underdeveloped country.What kind of a skewed world are we living in? Why is it that the life of a wealthy person is much more valuable than the life of a poor man?? What is worse about the whole thing is that Afghanistan went through much more turmoil than the US ever did through the whoel episode. People observe 9/11 as an anniversary...they call it ground 0...they are planning to build a memorial. And the rest of the world shakes its head in sorrow at the tragedy the US had to face 3 years ago.
The rest of the world has forgotten Afghanistan, which happened later. And the rest of the world is about to forget Iraq, which happened so recently.