Term 3...

I've just come to a slightly sad realisation. I'm either blogging about impending exams, thus a long silence, or I'm blogging about exam results, thus a longer silence. But fact remains, blink, and you miss a mid-term. Catch 40 winks...and whoosh! Term's over! It's not like I don't feel like blogging. My time management needs some tweaking...still.

So here we are in that now familiar cycle. Break --- Rejoin --- Get rogered -- give exams -- crib over unfairness --- get more rogered --- End terms. I don't remember the last time I truly stopped to smell the roses, pick up the wildflowers, etc etc. Or the last time I got that poetic.

Anyway, so term 2 was (yet another) disappointment exam-wise, but it was truly an eye-opener. For instance, I'm not taking any sort of job that requires me to do linear/non-linear/binary/integer or any other form of programming. NO MORE DMOP! That rules out ops. With every passing day I'm actually ruling out finance and marketing as well. So that leaves only strategy as a potential major. Believe me, I really didn't want to arrive at this conclusion by elimination!!!! Let me state here, for the record, that if the administration gives me a degree today with a GPA of slightly above 3.0 and kicks me out, then I'm more than willing to accept.

Bombay was great, as ever. The nervous energy is intact, my friends just as busy as ever, and my dad as relaxed as ever. Colleagues are rocking Network18, while I rocked Juhu Beach and Janata. Missed the better half. Kind of reminded me on what I was missing out...and it's not even a good trade-off!

We've got interesting profs as usual. One of them has sincerely requested not to blog about/videotape his lectures and leave it for the world to see, so I'm doing just that. It's the subjects that I'm dreading. Corporate Finance (CFIN) and Management accounting and decision making (MADM) seem difficult enough to make grown men cry. As if DMOP didn't do that already!

ELP (Experiential Learning Programs) begin in earnest, ostensibly, this term. So does Aikya, where we get 'adopted' by a local Hyderabad family who become, in effect, our guardian angels, friends, confidants and suppliers of home cooked food. Fooood, glorious fooood!

Home...home again!

Well, not yet.

But my marks are nothing to write home about. I did ok in Economics, horribly in DMOP. That's Decision Making and Optimisation for those out of the loop. So yeah, there are four exams next week. But somehow it doesn't matter too much now. I've now bowed out of the race for grades.
So onwards to home!

I insist on calling it Bombay, cuz that's the city I grew up and lived in, and it's always been Bombay to me. It's likely to rain, but seriously, I don't want anything else but to be back in Bombay! Chai at Juhu, sit at Sea view with a cold one, walk down Marine Drive, go to Mondys, maybe have a long session at the press club and various other things that I can't hope to accomplish in five days.

Yes, I'm very homesick now after what seems like an eternity at Hyderabad, and given the option I'd do the rest of course by "distance"...sit there and attend lecs and give exams remotely.

PS - Is there any power on Earth that can make Prashant Kale come back to ISB ?

A mid-term and a mid-term break...

Before I could blink, term 2 has almost zipped by. The end -terms are less than two weeks away, which means two weeks before I can go back to Bombay. Which also puts into perspective that I, wander-lusted as I am, didn't go anyplace in the interim - just stuck at ISB and Hyderabad.

That changed last week. Nine of us decided that two day break after midterm was just right to take off someplace, and we went overnight to Hampi. After getting ribbed about all sorts of "hump" jokes on campus, I think we were the most envied. So what did we do in the two days? Eat, sleep, drink, cross rivers, hike across ruins, eat, sleep...And discovered a beautiful hippie village called Anegudhi across the Tungabhadra river. No prizes for guessing what we did there - that's right, eat, sleep, drink. The food there is lovely, the erstwhile Vijayanagara kingdom capital too spectacular for words, and the hippie village, manna from heaven. On a personal note, I've now travelled randomly across nearly 18 states. Missing are the seven NE states, Bihar and J&K. Would love to go the NE before really backpacking across Europe.

Apparently we've also set a new benchmark for a holiday at ISB - the earliest that any of the previous batches at ISB took off for a holiday was not before Term 5. Next up --- Pondicherry, Term 3. As Samsung would have said it - Everyone's Invited