This House Believes That...

Ladies and gentlemen

This post is meant for all those kgpians who are anyhow involved in any damn literary activity on the campus. I’d be dealing with the following issues in order:

1.       1. The motivation behind this post

2.       2. The status quo

3.       3. Can we have some action please, ladies and gentlemen?

Coming to my first argument, that is, the motivation behind this post, I’d share with you, in short, my experience at the National Law School Debate.

I, along with 3 others from our insti, went to an international parliamentary debate competition at the NLSIU (National Law School of India University), Bengalooru. It was actually international, in the sense that the adjudicators were outsiders and a few teams (which were atleast 30 times better than the team of our best debaters) came from across the subcontinent. The team from IIT Kharagpur won 3 matches and lost 3, which actually was a decent achievement for any first timer team and we were praised by the adjudicators too, finally being placed somewhere around 25 out of 64 teams. Hence, to be precise, the motivation behind this post is the difference in the standards of professional debaters and those of ours.

Moving on to my second issue, that is, the status quo, I’d discuss with you, ladies and gentlemen, where we presently stand.

Well, what we currently have as the inter-hall debate is actually a mockery of itself (not to even mention the open IIT debate). We fight in sub-coms over the rules of this prestigious inter-hall debate of ours, and come out with something that a good debater from the US, or take for that matter even the Delhi University, won’t consider worth even laughing at. The problem lies in the fact that we repel the approach of any change to our so-called well-established system that itself is debatable and that actually stands far away isolated from where the world is moving, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is the motive behind this post: to initiate this change, for I now know what the status quo of the ‘earth minus IIT kgp’ system is.

For those of you who don’t know what parliamentary debating is, it is the most widely accepted form of debating today in the world, wherein two sides, one the proposition or the government and the other the opposition, debate on a topic revealed 15 minutes back, with alternate 7 minutes speeches from each side, giving and beating arguments in a very very structured manner. The dynamics and speed of this form of debate compel the debaters to bring every flucking piece of concentration, prior knowledge and on-spot reaction ability of theirs out in an environment where someone is sitting right before you to rape you openly with words and all that you can do to save yourself is to give the same fate back to her/him.

Getting to my final issue, ladies and gentlemen, I’d talk about the existence of that something that might creep into our to-think-about and to-do lists, after getting to know that in this domain of debating, even the best people of our institute actually stand nowhere before the best in the business and we can nowhere be satisfied but at the top spot. What we need to do and what I plan to do in the next semester is to start this culture of parliamentary debating in our institute using the platform of the upcoming debate club, firstly by teaching the interested speakers how to go for it, secondly by having regular practices and thirdly by going nationwide and participating in PDs all over to gain experience. The administration seems a bit supportive this year which is actually a decent signal and thus the debaters will not have to worry about anything else apart from debating.

The reason why I am suddenly advocating PD at our place is not a first time exposure to something that seems glamorous or a non-excellent performance somewhere that we are not used to of giving, but (a) PD is the most widely accepted debating format at international level and we never think below that (right?), (b) we have the best people but just not the right guidance, (c) PD involves the real test of one’s wits and intelligence and smartness, (d) once you are a good parliamentary debater, words will be all that you’ll need to rip apart absolutely anyone and (e) PD is extreme fun (believe me on that!).

Hence, ladies and gentlemen, I sincerely hope that this thought doesn’t bury itself with this post, but gives us another domain to win over, the domain of real debating. I invite the people who are genuinely interested in PD to contact me and we can work over what I just proposed above. With that, I rest my case.

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Hey guys!
The torture is back! :D
Well, a friend of mine asked me to help her in answering a question in some scholarship form of hers where a pic of a maze was given and 400 words had to be written on it. Random! Right?
And so my reply to it goes as follows. Hardcore random and bullshit! But it's got some meaning too.. somewhere deeeep within! Read on!

A maze? You want me to write on a maze?

All’s a maze and everything amazes me! My world, my life, my mind!
This world is so harsh, so cruel, the life so mysterious. You start walking and you see three paths emerging and you know that one of them would be a dead end and the second would bring you back to the same point and you don’t know which is the third one! And so you keep walking and keep bouncing back from the dead ends and keep cursing the Almighty who made this maze when you hit the same starting point every seventh hour.

Your mind is no less cruel, your mind is no less harsh, your mind is no less sadist, your mind is no more yours! It amuses itself by confusing you and by irritating you by confusing you and by torturing you by irritating you by confusing you. It shows you eight paths and gives you ten valid reasons to follow each path and twelve valid reasons not to follow each path. Then you scratch your head and think and think more and pull your hair out of your over-burdened skull and finally choose a path and suddenly your mind gives you a ninth path, again with ten pros and twelve cons.

You wish that you were taller enough to see the way out, way taller than the walls of the maze. And so you strive hard, you flow your sweat and blood night and day and night, but all you see all around yourself is a maze and a larger maze and a much larger maze that never ends and you never grow tall enough.

And so the complexity of the maze inside your mind keeps growing, the paths keep intermingling amongst themselves and tightening their hold on your petty fragile self. You feel congested and suffocated and you crave for more and fresh air but all of it has already exhausted and all you find around yourself are the walls of the maze, growing taller and narrower, closing up on you, leaving you lesser space to walk and lesser air to breathe and lesser time to live and think and get confused and get irritated and get tortured.

And Bingo! That’s the way out! Yes! That’s the way out… to the next maze!

The Butterfly Effect

If you think that it’s going to be about a yet another very stupid subject (like my previous posts), with all kinds of very stupid words, written again in a very stupid tone, your God just saved you. This post simply compares our country with some of the so-called developed countries. Now, is it going to be boring? I will make sure that it is not. Because what I am going to compare is the mentality of the people of these two almost different worlds.
Now, what could have motivated me of writing such a weird kind of piece? The answer: the German roads! Ehh… why? Because they are very very very clean. Now, probably you have an idea of the thousand-times-told-story-kinda-boring-and-predictable things that would follow, but I humbly request you not to stop reading.
From the very childhood, we are taught in the subjects of Moral Science and EVS (I still don’t know its full form though), that we should keep our country clean. So we mug it up hard. We should keep our country clean… We should keep our country clean… We should keep our country clean… and then we go out of the school, buy a Centre-Fresh, throw the wrapper on the road, run back home, spit the chewing gum outside our house and enter shouting, ‘Mom, we should keep our country clean!’ A reply of the same volume level hits our ears, ‘Better keep your house clean first and then think of the country, you useless creature!!’
And we grow up like that. The sense of responsibility lacks from the very beginning.
We live as ‘I, Me, Myself.’
‘I am leaving this hotel today anyways, so why bother about using the toilets in a clean manner.’ Yes, that happens.
‘If I throw this one coffee cup into the dustbin, the other thousand coffee cups lying around won’t fly back into the dustbin on their own and a single me cannot make the country clean.’ Yes, we think like that.
Fine. I don’t intend to make this a long monotonous school-principal’s speech. All I want to say is this.
Forget about the poor illiterate people who don’t even know the meaning of cleanliness or country. Forget about the rich illiterate people who don’t even know how to run the country even when they have the power. Forget about those rich literate people who don’t bother to look outside the windows of their imported cars because they don’t have time from being intimate with their darling well-dressed dogs. Don’t expect anything from them. Think about yourself and how you can bring about a change.
Bring about a change? WTF!
No buddy, I am not going to ask you to clean up the roads or join NGOs or put up awareness posters or to do something great for your country, neither am I going to ask you not to go and live abroad.
All that I urge for is that please keep the wrapper of the chocolate that you ate in your pocket till the time you find a dustbin even when the friend who is walking along with you has already thrown her/his wrapper on the road and is laughing at you.
May be you are a laughing stock for the first couple of times, then you are not paid any heed to the next couple of times (because it has been assumed that you are nuts), but if that person has any kinda self respect, a day will come when the same dustbin will be blessed with two wrappers instead of one!
And then, in the next say at least 70 years that you live for more, there would be millions of iterations like these that would result in may be very very slowly obtained but yes, some positive solutions. And that’s how the Chaos Theory or the Butterfly Effect works, right?
And then, you can dream of at least dying in a cleaner India! =)
With that, I sign off.

Swades?

Hello junta. Read on this story of mine. Why? Firstly, because I love you so much and therefore you are going to leave a nice comment for sure (isn’t it?), and secondly, you are going to find absolutely everything here – drama, thrill, pain, emotion, suspense. So fasten up your seat-belts and get ready to be the victim of this typical-Indian-movie-kinda-crispy-chilly story; because this is the story of my internship.

Phase 1

In the summers following my second year, I underwent a 45-days training at Bosch, Jaipur, which to a budding mechanical engineer was no less than an international-level experience, Bosch being a German MNC. So I like kinda made up my mind that in the next summers, I would definitely be flying off shores.

So came the month of September and boom… I joined the rat-race of mailing CVs worldwide. I had developed my own theories for this process of mailing that even worked quite well, in the sense that I got a lot of replies. Lets not talk about what those replies were although!

Or okay, let’s talk about them. These torturous replies rained over me from all over the globe, from institutes of all kinds, from profs of all ages, ranging in a wide scale of politeness. Some were just too sorry for not being able to recruit me. A few were either retired or about to retire. A lots were out of the country during summers and an equal number were very poor. And almost all thanked me from the cores of their hearts for my interest in their organization.

And then, also there was this giant called Illumination that ate up so many of my nights and days and took proper care of the fact that I should not get any time to waste it on mailing.

Fine. So that was Phase 1. Nothing special about it. An inherent part of the life of every IITian. Now comes the cream. Now comes… the phase 2.

Phase 2

All kinds of companies started coming to recruit students for summer internship and the department of mechanical engineering has always been a favorite amongst them. The first one to knock the doors was ITC.

I thought that I would be going to a foreign land anyways so why not have some good practice of group discussions and personal interviews. So I applied for ITC, not knowing that I might eat up a seat that somebody else would have got, which now I do realize and am sorry for that. But anyways, that was my first formal GD and I enjoyed going through it to the PI. Now emerged the big question: to go or not to go. I met a friend (name not disclosed due to official reasons), who had come from ITC for the selection. I knew him because we had worked together for one year in robotix. He told me that my CV was so well suited for their company that they would hire me even if I do some African dance in the interview, and after listening to me, he suggested me to keep trying for an FT (ie a foreign training if some non-IITian is reading this).

And so finally… I didn’t go for the ITC PI. The news spread like I had never imagined it would and thus made me the victim of the harsh thrashings of this cruel world. A few were kinda angry because I wasted a seat that somebody else might have got (sorry again L) and so many were calling me mad because at least they wouldn’t have even dreamt of leaving a chance of going into ITC. One guy, this neighbour of mine, said to me that there was nothing wrong in what I did because at least I had it clear in my mind what I had to do and that was what actually mattered. Love you Sid! J.

Then there was this very famous university of USA (I won’t disclose the name of course) that short-listed me for a special summer internship program that they have exclusively for IITians, and after making me wait for very long, crushed all my hopes. The bas***** had done the same with me the last year too.

So in a double mind, I started applying for Indian companies too. I used to go to almost all PPTs and people used to give me life threats if I even thought of applying to any one of them. The only person with the same fate as that of mine probably was Nimisha because even she didn’t go for the PI of HUL. So I always enjoyed meeting her in these PPTs!

My CG was too low for HUL and even after clearing the GD and giving the best PI that I could have to Schlumberger, the bloody double-faced people didn’t took me because they couldn’t offer a PPO to the dual degree students. And then I didn’t even apply to normal companies like Reliance, Tata Steel and the like because to leave ITC and go for them would have been like to go on a lunch to some road-side dhaba with some XYZ bandi when you had already rejected an offer of a candle light dinner with Aishwarya (when she was unmarried) on a beach!!

The mailing process although continued, but no use!

Fine. So that was phase 2, full of hide tides and low tides, flowing in and out of my mind. Now begins the fun. Now begins… the phase 3.

Phase 3

I had lost all the hope by now. My God was in deep sleep and so my prayers (read screams) were not able to strike his ear drum with the required high amplitude. So suddenly a strange kind of love for my motherland emerged into my heart and I realized (with a sigh) that even India has a lot of good opportunities to offer! But I had already shown my longest finger to all the companies that came at my door. Hence now I started looking out for contacts in various companies and met a lot of seniors.

And now the rate of flow of time increases…

Seniors are Gods… they assure me of a good place… in Tech Mahindra, LnT or RTDC… Thanks Amod and Anurodh!… am relaxed… but still not satisfied… I mail… mail more… the alluring foreign lands… Hyundai, Honda, Bosch… I mail to all… no use… it’s March already… and then an angel appears… Swapnil…my friend from the 1^st year… says… Dude! I got an FT in Taiwan and my prof wants another chap and I am giving your name… could I be happier enough?… The prof calls me up and bingo… I have an FT now… can’t thank you enough Swapnil… Taiwan… ohkkk… not bad… but not very good either… LnT comes to the department… in dilemma again… to go or not to go… swadesh or videsh… I decide for swadesh… apply for LnT… sit for the GD… but then… oh no… am confused again… swadesh or videsh… I decide for videsh… don’t even move my lips in the GD… Taiwan… there I come… I get the tickets… I get the visa… make all plans with Swapnil… it's April 25... and then appears another angel… Nitin… my friend from class 7^th… says… Dude! I got FTs in Japan and Germany and I am going to Japan. Would you go to Germany?… phew… I say no thanks dude… I am satisfied with Taiwan with all things done… and then I think… saale Apurv… what the hell… what are you doing… it’s Germany… and I call him back and say yes… and it’s done… and now I have… I have… 2 FTs under my belt… phew… is that really me?… the same me who starved once for a single Indian training?… God is great!…and so are you Nitin =)!!!… I get the NOC in one day after lots of drama… thanks to Kishen… but it’s not over yet… it’s time to go to Taiwan… and I still don’t have the German visa… time to make a choice… and I take the risk… Prof in Taiwan gets the news that I met with an accident and I cancel the Taiwan tickets… no German visa yet… a week passes… I postpone Germany tickets… the wait continues… and then… then… it’s there… the visa… in my hands… a darling visa!!!

And so here I sit today, in my 10^th floor apartment in Germany, with a breath-taking view before my eyes, enjoying this paid holiday. Still can’t thank you people enough, Swapnil and Nitin. And yes, it’s all about luck, and okay, I was just lucky enough, but yes I was.

That is it, people… as Miyan Shah Rukh Khan would call it… Happiezz Endingzz… and so I take a leave with that. Tataa!!! Or as they call it in German here… Tschuss!!! =)

The Dream Begins

Hello everyone!
This is my latest poem. I wrote it before coming to the IIT, 4 years back! I was quite naive back then!!
So go through it, don't laugh, and leave some nice comments!
Here it goes...

Tell me, I asked
How can I reach
There, where
There are no footsteps
And mine would be the first.

Tell me, I asked
When can I go
There, where
People go
When they sleep.

Tell me, I asked
What should I do
To be at those pinnacles
Which are higher
Than everyone's imagination.

Tell me, I asked.

And I was told
Rather, I was asked
To wake up
To get up
To walk out
To look out
For all that could guide me
For only they could lead me
To my heaven.

And so I looked for them
And so I found them
And so I followed them
Till the height they could reach.

And then all by myself
I climbed
Higher and higher
Because I knew
I could reach there.

And then, there I was,
There, where there were no footsteps
And I made them.
There, where people went in their dreams
And I showed them
That dreams do come true!

Kaisi hai?? =)

The G-Sec Speaks

Hello all!

The first post.. Indeed it is special. And so here it goes. This is what the General Secretary - Social and Cultural, Patel Hall of Residence wrote for the hall magazine.

I’d take absolutely no pains in keeping this piece a short one. Because I want each and every Patelian of atleast the next 5 generations to read this.

Why? Did we win the GC? Nopes. Then?

Some hall that won the GC the last year wins it this year too. Congratulations. But what’s the big deal there?

Patel... We were second from the end the last year, and the very last the year before that. Patel was nothing more than an underdog. We were literally non-existent.

In my second year, I heard things like… ‘Patel ka secy hai yaar.. teri life mein tto peace hi hoga.’ In the first sub-com of this year, I got to hear… ‘Patel se kya load hoga kissi ko.’ Such was the image of this hall – harmless to anyone.

That was Patel. But, that was Patel.

Today, all of this is past; and the rest that happened this year… is history!

People from other halls have come to me and said,
‘Patel ko yeh kya ho gaya hai??’
‘Abey yaar Patel bahut load de raha hai ab’
‘Kuchh machaayaa hai Patel ne iss baar’
‘Yaar Patel is the only hall jiske efforts ki dil se taarif hoti hai hamaare common room mein’

This is Patel now, and thus I proudly say that

WE ARE INTO THE TOP 3 NOW!!!

And had there not been some very unfortunate decisions against us, we’d have been at the second spot with visible ease. The mere two seconds that deprived Kanwa and Arjit of a Gold in their passing-out year, our awesome awesome English drams performance that had to be satisfied with a petty Bronze, our again awesome awesome Western groups performance not getting a place even in the top 3, and many more like these. But nevertheless, IIT kgp knows now the caliber of Patel, and more importantly Patel itself knows now the caliber of Patel.

But all of this has taken months of planning and months of hardwork and scores of people giving scores of night-outs and day-outs.

Still, I’d specially like to mention, and acknowledge, the contributions of one person here. He was the sole guy who didn’t let the left-over traces of soc-cult culture die down in Patel the last year, produced a batch that had the capability of innovating and leading and created a platform that was worked upon this year. The vision, the innovation, the determination and regular scoldings =) of this person that kept everyone in motion were the keys that opened the path up for Patel this year. Sandy, had you not been there, it’d have been very difficult for us even imagining any scene like this. Patel owes this to you.

Time for a few more acknowledgments.

Kanwa, Akshay, Tuhin, Arjit, Parth… It has been rocking working with you guys.. the GODS!! Two superb groups performances and a shocking (for the other halls) GOLD. Awesome!
Amod, Tudu… The Goddest! (That speaks everything)
Singh, Nag… Your mere presence there, no matter for how long, has been motivating enough and a hint big enough of the fact that things have changed.
Raunak, Mandal Da, Sumit… Brilliant efforts, which we won’t let die.
The 3^rd years… We absofu*kinglutely ROCK guys !!
And finally the 2^nd yrs… You people have a tremendous amount of talent in your batch guys and you seriously deserve applause for that. Keep it up.

In my soap box when I was asked whether Patel would get the GC this year, I remember I replied that I won’t mind Patel winning the GC because rising that high from the very bottom seemed next to impossible. But I also said that my aim would be the third spot and even that sounded so difficult to achieve back then. But, we did it. And I am a satisfied G-sec in the end. =)

Here’s what the ex-ex-ex G-sec wrote to me.
‘It's nice to hear but we have still a long way to go, but path never ends and this milestone is seriously no less. What matters to me more is your last line that "the culture that has been developed this year is sure to continue and we'll ensure that." If this is going to continue I ensure GC is nothing in front of it. It will just follow.’
Same was told to me by the ex-ex G-sec.
And we are surely going to meet your expectations Rohit and Baba… surely!

Time to end this stuff I guess.

Ahem ahem… It has been a wonderful excellent awesome tenure and a most memorable one. All those painful 4^th positions, all those so-many silvers and bronze followed by all those thunderous tempo-shouts, all those infinitely-infinite chaos, all the Patel-vs-rest of IIT kgp fights in the sub-coms which I so much enjoyed winning =) and finally getting into the top 3 while giving the 2^nd spot-holders such lot trouble and leaving the others comfortably behind. Patel gets into the top 3 after God-knows-how-many years.

It has been one awesome tenure!

To the next G-sec: Naman, leave no threads loose for there’s more work to do for you. Best of luck dude.

To kgp: This was only the trailer folks. Keep waiting for more and better!

And to Patel: The stage is all set guys. All we have to do now is… not to lose the rhythm and… rock them all!