The New Year Prank

KK came down from Bangalore and so did KaKhe from Pune for Diwali, so it was ideal to meet all high school buddies and other IIT prep class buddies in the form of a new year outing.

KaKhe and me joined KK,Nik, Tanveer and Archak at Toss n Grill and on our way to Carter’s CCD the chirpy Hitesh joined us. The scene was pretty cool as Hitesh started of taking Nik’s case joined in by Archak and KK. Nik bragged about his hardware know how and the keedas that he could do with his cell a Nokia 6630 as we discussed life in the open air seating . the best thing about CCD Carter’s is it’s open air seating arrangement that gives a cool view of the promenade and the happening lane next to CCD .

KK and Hitesh were constantly checking out the chicks around us and rating each of them as I tried to block the rays from the setting Sun trying to figure out what Nik was bragging about to Archak . AceNik (his BT name) was transferring loads of .cis files (software) to Archak via Bluetooth as I cribbed to him about the inability of my phone to execute .cis files as it’s a MOTOSLVR that runs on a JAVA environment. BLUETOOTH the divine platform showed a few gals online to AceNIk which lit a bulb first in his brain and then in mine. He jumped up with excitement with an idea to chat with them over BT without revealing his identity and I was struck with an idea to change my nik to “Pretty Angel” and continue what Hitesh had started: Tke Nik’s case … Royally!

“Hey look at this , this one is surely a gal : Pretty Angel others have Niks which can be that of guys, lets chat with her!”, said AceNik to Archak who just nodded.

But I realized that MOTOSLVR doesn’t have the ability to send/receive .txt files over BT , so I switched over to MOBILUK a BT chat software that has around 20 ready to use templates that get customized with the reciever’s nick nameand custom messages can be typed also.

“Toothing? “ , I sent

Nik got fully excited “Hey ive got a message, this gal wants to chat with me!”

“ Hi AceNik, why don’t we meet up together and talk.”

Nik did not expect this, he looked around for the source saw me fiddling with my cell and doubted, but I calmly made up in the guise of sms-ing my girlfriend.

“No Im not interested.” Nik replied (this was the first and last message of Nik’s that I accepted the others were simply rejected as I knew what they were)

“Listen dude don’t act funny or I’ll ruin that Cream shirt of yours with my Mochachillo!”

Nik did not buy this . He knew it certainly is a guy but was concerned as this person was able to see him. NIk changed his seat and sat next to Archak and tried to spot this BT person but to no avail.

Now I knew that my job was to convince him that it’s a gal so I typed:

“Ok dude at times I get a bit wild, but I find u vry cute and so jus wanna tlk to u pls don’t say no.”

That’s it, he bought in! But now he was puzzled, he did not know what to do. There was an element of fear as this person could see Nik while he couldn’t .

SO I used the next template:” Free ur mind Ace Nik”

He was startled to know that Pink Angel Knows he is scared!

“The Matrix has you.” Was the next template msg sent to Nik.

He laughed at this one and replied a lighter msg.

The last message and the arrival of the Balaji Telefilms gang behind us got Nik back some confidence. I had to curb this level of confidence. Suddenly Hitesh looked over and figured out that it was me, but then Hitesh was the most appropriate one to know about this prank as he helped me remove Nik’s confidence. Sooner KaKhe also became a part of the prank. But I deliberately kept Archak out of it to retain an element of authenticity.

“dont try to locate me .its a waste but talking isn’t” I typed and a gal walked upto NIk (his friend) and started a short conversation. What an opportunist Hitesh was, he tried to convince Nik that she is Pink Angel, where as KaKhe and me did not allow him to rule out the possibility of the hot gal sitting behind us in the pink halter top.

“Walk up to de promenade and we shall talk there and do nothing else”

“Why should I come ther, u come up to my table if u can see me”, replied Nik.

“Lisen, I find u cute and want to talk 2 u n don’t lk ur friends who hv bn giving me those stares.” This added a bottle full of authenticity to the plot as most of us were staring .

Some how we pumped up courage into Nik to walk upto CCD’s gate where we hypothetically spotted many gals in pink and I sent him this message:

“I see u AceNik do u see me?”

He was fully convinced that this was true and the fact that we pointed out to him a few gals that he wouldn’t like missing out on was enough reason for him to cross the road to the promenade.

Now good ‘ol Nik walked up and down in search of Pink Angel as we sat by.

After five minute of search I sent him the curtain raiser

“ luvarien here! Had fun?” and we all could virtually see the Bakra cap on his head as Nik gave a sigh of relief. Archak was told why he was kept out.

Nik tried to defend himself but then we all know that he walked into it and fell for it.

A gr8 Beginning of the New year : For Nik atleast!!

Happy new year folks!!

Project Pure Diwali

So Diwali is here finally!!

Like every year well be doing the routine Diwali chores :

Umm some cleaning/tiding up . shopping, arranging for sweets and dry fruits ,some decoration, calling ppl, sms-ing, bursting crackers

Aha there it comes. BURSTING CRACKERS.

Well why do we Burst crackers??? Any idea??

I know one story, which says that Lord Rama came back after winning over Ravana after 14 years of exile. To welcome him his subjects celebrated Diwali by lighting up the kingdom and bursting crackers.

So Diwali, since then , has been celebrated for the homecoming of Rama (attributed by a myriad of +ve characteristics and Lakshmi) as the festival of lights.

So where does sound and smoke come from??

Its from our minds primarily!

What began with paying a tribute to the Lord has now taken many faces like showing of your gut to burn money in the form of a huge ‘ladi’ or look fwd to Diwali to burst crackers in the name of some shagun…and the list goes on

We all we all know what happens when we do it: sometimes we don’t realize and at other times we forget.

So I thought of taking a little step to revamp this awareness and remind those who have forgotten:

What I’ve done is simple- made a set of greetings (unconventional) that u cud copy from here and fwd to your kith n kin in the form of sms, Orkut scraps, offline messages, IM messages, emails etc

Or may be get innovative and have your MSN ncks , Orkut nicks et all to say something like this.

Yeah the smses would cost a few bucks to fwd, but then you’ll be doing it for a cause isn’t it?

So here are some of the messages:(in sms lingo)

Dis tm I wont trble Mom Nature on the homecoming of Father Rama. What abt u? may u hv a pure n xhiliratin xprience dis Dwali.

Fr a chnge lets burn pollution dis tm cause brsting crkrs is out!May u hv a pure n xhiliratin xprience dis Dwali.

Sound and smoke swell in a discotheque but stink in Diwali. Lets rev upto smthng innovative dis tm. Wishing u a prosperous Diwali.

I don’t need de fire to have a blast on Diwali, do u ? Let there be just lights.

May u hv a blissful xprience on Diwali.

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Dengue, malaria n cholera hv spread already. Lets nt spread pollution!

Just light up and enjoy! Wishing u a healthy n happy Diwali.

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ACKREDATION

[You need some time in peace to get this one right]
That is how the term accreditation has been conveniently phrased by the junta on my campus. The term was on everybody’s tongue-tip and was used as blatantly as possible. It spiced many a conversations and salted a few fights, sparked many a rebels and hopefully should give many of us a chance to wish the college admin.: “HAPPY REALIZATON !”

Well, when the branch in charge walked in to announce the dates of the accreditation committee’s ( hereafter referred to as Ac-Comm) visit to the college the students were more than just elated, but sooner did we realize that this was just a façade. Three days before the Ac-Comm’s visit, the college suddenly seemed to beat the rate of change in the computing industry as every minute something totally new came up in the 5-storey building. I wonder what Gordon Moore would have said on that!:

MOORE”S LAW BEATEN DOWN:

Split a/cs, direction signboards , boards boasting about the college vision and mission, departmental details outside labs, charts and time tables within labs, new aquaguard installed in the canteen and other aquaguards being connected to the respective coolers, a building being painted in record 2 days, the quadrangle floor being leveled overnight, some lecture rooms and labs being painted from within, journals being corrected instead of being signed, assignments and test being given and done for the heck of it, power peons and bais beginning to smile exhibhiting courtesy, colorful curtains started flying on the lab windows to save the students from heat, the ‘neelkamal’ types plastic chairs being swapped by the plush red springy-spongy movable chairs for the lecturers (err sorry, profs), new equipment being imported fast and how into the labs , the student council being shown and explained the college accounts, student representative committees being formed and trained to present before the Ac-Comm., certificates being collected from students to boast about a branch (sigh , lemme breath a bit.) .

Yeah I was a part of one such training meet and was also among the selected students to be ‘presented ‘ in front of the Ac-Comm.. And this is where the PSEUDONORM lies:

FROM THE HORSE’S MOUTH:
Acredation is as important to us as it is to you (yeah, rite who gets to hike the fee?) from your point of view you would get good employment and better companies would some on campus (haven’t you learnt a new trick?), a better brand of the college would be created in the industry(there you are). No the fee structure and acredation are 2 different aspects altogether there is no connection between them (I think we’re the first one’s this morning) Don’t worry, all these are budgeted expenditures [we are not looking for a ROI] (There you’re, chor ki dadi mein tinka. Boss if all of the above are budgeted then was your finance officer sleeping these years, or was he training in book-keeping?) . Now when you meet the committee, you have to behave and speak well about the institute ( Buddy,we’ve got ample matter to speak more than just well about the insti.). If you find that there is scope for improvement in certain areas tell them that you have approached us and the matter is being looked upon (is there an equivalence between ‘upon’ and ‘over’?).


THEY CAME THEY SANG AND WE (GOT) BANGED:

Then there was the D-day and came the Ac-Comm. full of IITians and NITians,their background was sufficient to send shivers amongst all of us. Yet , I found many of the staff members more than just confident but one of them had predicted the fate which is yet to be declared as he has seen what it is to be groomed in a college of caliber. For A change students saw their teachers giving a viva. Our princi was taken aback when asked about the existence of a sexual harassment cell (She mustn’t have thought about it as she always banks upon the ‘culture’ that the college seems to be preserving {at least on the vision statement}). A girl fainted when the committee shot a question at her, but many others answered brilliantly to the committee except this BE kids who were placed in the Digital Design Lab to show off that project work goes on and eclipse the SEs from the committee. The Ac-Com guy straight asked him what they were doing in somebody else’s lab during lecture hours, and then came their viva which was enough to squeeze out their smartness for life. The SEs in the ECAD lab tackled the questions well thanks to their foundation laid by this very amazing prof of ours, however they went dumb as the Ac-Comm guy struck them with realization on this question “Is this what you pay 54K for”, he said pointing at the chain of 4 dusty computers with non-funct mice!!

The comment was enough to strike a realization amongst the masses: that we are the true proprietors of the institute as students. The lack of this realization is the root cause why we have been living through power peons and being treated as prisoners. A student walking in late has to wait for an hour with the watchman, then he’d be pulled out of the lecture room for a lecture with the princi on time management and culture preservation. But before that, he’ll have to assure the prof in class that his train wont run late the next time ( yeah, my pop owns the railways !). Fed up with the new recruits in college who teach to gain work-ex for an MBA, the student cant go home nor can he study in the library, all he has to do is jump of some wall to get back home and study in peace- making him a robber in his own damn house! A cultural secretary who has to literally beg the admin to allow the students to have a JAM session which apparently goes against the culture add to it the justification of a cultural festival in an engg college: these were the things that the Ac-Comm were lookin for as they were smart enough to judge acads and infrastructure. I know this is not new to you if you’re a fellow student, but there is a lot more to it if you’re not.

I hope this rebellion arisen by the Ac-Comm, takes some shape ( I think the BEs are the best one’s to take initiative here) and we do something to be proud of the institute when we refer of it as our Alma Mater!!

LASS_LESS.eng

If you were taken aback when the IITians unveiled their hornier side at an event in Mood Indigo ’05 , or probably raised an eyebrow on noticing the proximity among the VJTI guys making out together (the solution of a problem () or felt like a winner seeing a group of guys from VESIT dancing alone at the back, at a DJ nite…THEN LET ME OFFICIALLY WELCOME U TO THE WORLD OF ENGINEERING, MATE.

An average engineer while coping up with natural and self developed SEM-STRESS and the other ‘wannabe-corporate’- society activities tends to miss out on the “highs” and “lows” of life and literally so, given that the ‘chick-factor’ has been sucked out of their lives by dementors. Indeed, lack of ‘gals’ (u ought to get this 1 right!) has been topping the charts of ‘ Top 10 woes’ of engineers since ages. Even the forceful reservation for women ,which is highly resented by the guys during admissions just to repent later, by the government couldn’t raise fruit. But this ain’t the scene throughout. There are some colleges who enjoy the continuous ‘streaming ‘ of galz at an amazing rate of 5 kbps or more (kbps = kissed babes per sem; a unit of ‘flirt rate’ where kissed= met/bumped into (). Some of these dreamlands are TSEC, DJ Sanghvi, RGITand KJ Somaiya. When it comes to admissions , the folks avoid the ranks and convince their parents about their proved futility somehow and try their best to get into one of these; of course there are some who think otherwise (lets name them the “otherwise kinds”). As a result the asking rate , both scores and moolah have risen drastically in these colleges.

So now there are two possibilities : a) You get into a dreamland b)You are the otherwise kinds.

Case (a): A dream-lander finds himself oscillating between a fixed bandwidth, that varies with different colleges, with a continuously varying ‘flirt rate’ until he bumps into the ‘chosen one’ from whereon he attains saturation i.e. his ‘flirt rate’ exponentially decays to 0kbps. Many fall into saturation within 4 years of education , but those left out fly away for an MS. The majority here often exhibits an inclination towards management studies as they’ve managed a contrasting variety of things in life. Another characteristic feature of these dreamland colleges is an upbeat cultural fest. which has no relevance at all to their course.


Case (b) : The otherwise kinds who fall prey to the rankings and give into the luring institute brand value don’t have much to oscillate between as the bandwidths in these regions is pretty low. Some do saturate and most fly out. The interesting aspect about these, who form the majority, is the evolution of a varied species and a plethora of theories on topics like gals, relationships, virginity, life et all. The absence of gals in their lives gives rise to poets, painters, cartoonists, bloggers n writers (like me). The theories vary from mere classification (see box) to “words of weirdom” and from ace concepts like “a drink a day keeps the shrink away” to “fantasy in education” (Eg Rati AgNO3). Apart from getting into poetry n writing, there are other ways of getting rid of the lacklass ,like say organizing a fest and inviting non-engg colleges, busting into non-engg fests – especially the pronites where they could bump into gals just to exchange numbers n email ids. Most of them fly out or hunt in for an MS/MBA/Mtech and have a blast of a ball later.
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An IIT classification of gals / babes :

AA = Awesome n Amazing (imaginary/fictitious)
BB = Beauty n Brains (rare !)
CC = Cute Chick (the best bet)
DD = Damsel in Distress (avoid!)
EE = Exotic Eve (avoid if possible)

PS : AA to EE are grades in IIT
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All said and done, the next time u plan a visit to a non-dreamland engg. college or bump into an engineer at a pronite, plz remember ur ‘flirt rate’ and of course a fake email id !!

MOOD HIGH

“We IITians have been known for excellence in whatever we’ve done .”, righteously said Prof. Ashok Mishra ,Director IIT Bombay at the inauguration of the biggest cult fest in the country -MOOD INDIGO which arrived with the spirit of water, a cool bubbly blue mascot “SPLASH”, and a budget of around Rs 45 lks to rock the folks royally with its “AQUA” theme.

With around 30 events per day, divided into categories like LA, FA, Music and dance, dramatics, informals, talks+workshops and proshows , the fest seemed to put the average participant in quite a dilemma and left the spectators totally puzzled- which way to go.

Mood I manifested a myriad of effective workshops conducted by industry pros, some creamy ones being the Tango wrkshp by Anand Majumdar and the Grooming wrkshp by Raymond. ”Festivals like these give us great amount of exposure and let us learn a great deal of new things”, said the bubbly Prerna Narang from Cummins College,Pune.

The informals were a blast for the ‘window-shoppers’ ,who took away much more than their expectations –thanks to the benevolent sponsors. The food stalls , which comprised of a good range of branded and desi khaana , were strategically placed near the informals venue to ensure business and it did work out. Halla bol –street play and Hurricane-street dance ,the most popular PA events witnessed some ground-breaking performances .
The OC lived up to their word as a few of the major events were seen during the day this year. Hysteria: The battle of DJs saw some cool mixes being played which dragged the crowd on the floor right under the SUN !! Livewire elims also ran during the day much to the surprise of many a wannabe headbangers. Mantra-the Hindi band contest ,also a day event, just seemed to show the rising momentum in the Hindi/desi rock scenario.

Proshows by Shuffle Deamons (Canada),Indian Ocean, Shaan, Sceptre, Vayu, HFC had the crowd up there till late10 pm, the deadline being followed strictly. However, it was surprising to see a more than decent crowd turn over for the classical nite. The IISc attack had led to a tightened security on the last day forcing many to spend hours in the queue cursing the organizers (‘orgies’ as they call themselves () who took hours just to frisk people into the half empty OAT. As a result, many missed the Livewire finals which saw great performances by bands like ‘Access Denied’ and ‘Bhayanak Maut’ (the winners).Access Denied’s Ashish (IIT B) won the best guitarist prize: A Kramer worth 18K from Furtados.

“Pride is more important to me as money can be made up any time in ur life”, answered Rahul Dash(IITB) to a judge, minutes before he was declared MR. MOOD I –at the most sadistic event in the fest!! ”Hey if pride were more important to u, then what the hell are u doin here ?” , rightly asked the anchor Garry. The event was more of a puppet show , the crowd being controlled by totally by ex Mr Mood I :Swami Thakkar ,who’ll remind u of King Kong. He typed on the screen and commanded, the audience obeyed and paid respect. The fate of the candidates (who couldn’t see the screen) was in his hands. Well, this was seriously the wrong place if you were a non-IITian or a gal as the desperate IITians showered their vulgar side on both. Constant shrieks of ”Are u free tonite?” haunted the audi and the screen too; what more even the ex Mr Mood Is (all IITans) asked the hostess or the female judges the same damn thing when called upon (is it lack of vocab or a proof of their heavy-hornier sides?) The sweet li’ll Ateeya Khan, crowned Ms mood I had an experience that generally most cute gals face when a Virar fast halts by at the platform. ”Who cares a damn about his virginity!”, exclaimed Shweta Krishnan from Rochester university, after listening to a clichéd answer from Arvind Iyyer (IITB) the runner up. Krishnan, like many other non-IITians seemed to be pissed off with this ‘cheap’ attitude evolving out of the “cream students” in the nation..

Catharsis- the play adopted from PAF (performing art festival) dealt with a sensitive story of drug addicts and their rehab process, but failed miserably even after some excellent performances by Victor and Manav the protagonists and Prabhav the comedian thanks to the monotonous direction.

Hats off to the OC, who did one helluva job in making the fest :right from getting the Mega sponsors to managing the junta from over 300 colleges inclusive of their lodging. Apart from a good chunk of the 600acres land at their disposal, the key factors driving these chaps into success is their spirit full of confidence as quoted by their director and the mutual cooperation cum exclusive independence by the staff for the students which lacks big time in other colleges making their festivals look like more of a sham with poking profs and a shrieking staff. They roped in the industry biggies to sponsor them and I bet none of them would think twice to sponsor the event again. The marketing ,publicity and scheduling of the event was spot on as usual and that’s probably why folks from as far as Delhi ,Bangalore and Chennai turned up. The overall trophy was taken away by IITB followed by Rajhans college Delhi and KMC Delhi.

Certainly coming out of this eventful fest one would not deny exclaiming: MOOD HIGH !!