Day 184 - 24th January 2011

Quite a loong day. Had the cultural studies workshop from 9 to 2. This course is being taken by a Danish professor. Today's session was about the evolution of culture through the ages. Got to know that there was a human fair at Paris in 1889 where 400 'rare and exotic' humans were on display!Based on today's class we had to submit a 'reflection paper', which is an assimilation of our thoughts on the session. This needs to be done for all sessions! Had EB and SDM lectures after that. Today was the first day of 9 to 5 classes and it seemed to take its toll on a lot of people. Hopefully, we'll get used to it though.

The highlight of today though was completely non academic. During the term break I had come to know about a company that was looking for people to cover World Cup matches in different cities, so I applied for the matches in Ahmedabad - 2 group games and a quarter final. After 2-3 rounds of phone calls and another 2-3 rounds of emails I finally got the offer from them to cover the games in Ahmedabad! :-) Now the only problem was that the quarter final clashed with one of our end term exams, so had to talk to the college admin today regarding the situation and what needed to be done. They were extremely supportive and ensured that I would be given the chance to give the examination later or earlier. Something to look forward to :-) Need to set the ball rolling with regards to the accreditation for the World Cup.

In the evening we celebrated Apu's birthday with the traditional dunk,cake smashing and gifts. This was followed by the start of the annual badminton tournament organized by SCAM. The main match was the battle of the communists - two bongs v/s two mallus. The build up to the match was exceptional, in fact it would make a brilliant case study for sports marketers ;-) E-mails were sent to the entire batch informing them about the epic encounter and slogans like 'be red or be dead' were floated to generate buzz :-P The baddy court was packed by the time was about to start and we had arranged for a music system to be setup courtside to keep the atmosphere as lively as possible. The mallus entered to 'I am a Malayalee' and the bongs entered to 'Korbo Lorbo Jeetbore' :-D Even the MCL never generated this much buzz :D The match lived up to its expectations and went right down to the wire, with the bongs winning by a whisker. But at the end of the day, Communism won and the comrades prevailed ;-)

After the heady excitement of the politburo badminton game had to get down to working on the cultural studies workshop assignment. Have been doing that for the past hour or so. Will call it a day now, another long day ahead!