Day 429 - 17th March 2012

A pretty routine day today. Started reading No Angel - Bernie Ecclestone's biography. Sujay's birthday party was held in Chinar which went on till the wee hours of the morning. Spent an hour or so at aamchair before calling it a day at 6 in the morning.

Day 363 - 18th December 2011

Had a full day of classes on Entertainment Media today. The sessions dealt with the business of music in India. There were two visiting faculty members, both of whom had experience in the music industry from two different  perspectives - one was an artiste who was part of India's first all boy band and the other worked for record labels. The revenue distribution models of companies alongwith the different types of royalty paid were covered. The problem of piracy was also discussed and how some bands were actually using it to their advantage. The lecture ended with a live performance of one of this song :D Dinner was at Havmor with Sania, though the place serves only vegetarian, the food is really good. Tried the chinese cuisine out there which was unexpectedly good. Got back to campus and had another round of sweatshirt distribution to take care of. Satya's birthday was celebrated in Chinar at midnight, luckily there was no dunking involved! Spent a good two hours just chit chatting with Apu, Manu, Jayati, Sania, Satya and Kore. The topics of discussion ranged from ragging in engineering colleges to campus gossip! Was up till 3 in the morning. Have 3 assignment submissions and 1 end term exam over the next couple of days, but will get down to tackling them from tomorrow :P

Day 298 - 24th August 2011

The sports marketing sessions started at 1045 today. Today’s sessions were mainly about consumer behavior in sports marketing wherein we studied the different types of fans. Did get a little too heavy in the middle, but the prof had warned us well in advance that the first half of the day was going to deal with theory. Post lunch we had the first guest lecturer for the subject – Joy Bhattacharya, Team Director of the Kolkata Knight Riders. It was a brilliant 2 hour session with the first half on the business model of the IPL and the second on brand KKR. Invariably the discussion had to veer towards Sourav Ganguly and his exclusion from the team in the last season, it was a tough decision to take, he did admit that but it was taken from a long term perspective. Though he did acknowledge the fact that Ganguly is West Bengal or should I say Paschim Bongo’s favourite son. “Tagore, Satyajit Ray and now Ganguly, us bongs don’t have too much of a choice when it comes to our heroes” :D The best part about the discussion was that he patiently answered all sorts of questions ranging from the Fake IPL player to match fixing in the IPL. In a reply to one of the questions of player fatigue and the debacle in England he brought to our notice that India’s rise to the number one position began in 2008 and culminated in 2011 and the IPL was present in that very period, so it would be unfair to pin all the blame on the league. The best line of the lecture though had to be his opening line “Let’s make a deal, you don’t ask me about Shah Rukh’s sexual preferences and I wont bore you” :D

Played cricket in the evening in the Kachnar courtyard. Its always fun to play with a hard tennis ball on tiles, its akin to playing on Perth :P Played for a good hour at least. Post that there was a session on handwriting analysis conducted in the audi by a batchmate, which was pretty interesting. Have 3 birthday celebrations lined up tonight. Posting this one before they begin!

Day 295 - 21st August 2011

Didnt have any classes today still managed to wake up at 10 in the morning. Caught up with an alumnus at Chota over a cup of chai. The weather was amazing in the morning, not humid at all, spent almost an hour at Chota. Spent the afternoon working on a brief write up of the dissertation that had to be submitted to the dissertation guide. Moved to the library for a bit for that. Came back to the room and slept for a bit in the evening.

Tomorrow happens to be Sir's birthday, so Kalkar and I went to this place called Masty to pack food for the night. Since we had to wait for so long we decided to have a few starters ourselves out there ;-) Got back to campus by 1130 and a mailer was sent to PGP-2 inviting people for Sir's birthday which went like this -

It's HIS Birthday!

On this occasion of Nullujayanti which is a national holiday in South India (except Telangan of course), we invite you to Kachnar at the stroke of midnight for the following celebrations -

1200 - Shloka recitation

1215- Abhisekam

1230 - Prasadam (Donation passes available at all MiKore outlets)

1245 - Visarjan

Things went according to schedule with a havan also interspersed between Abhisekam and Prasadam ;-) The Visarjan finally culminated at the OAT! This was followed by a feast in Kalkar's room where the food bought from Masty was devoured by the residents of Kachnar south west. All of this went on till about 4 in the morning which when I started feeling sleepy. Have a rest day tomorrow on account of Janmashtmi after that a full week of classes followed by an AFM end term!

Day 280 - 30th July 2011

• Last session on AFM - capital markets
• Lunch at Mainland China (bbuurrrrpp)
• Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara - one time watch
• Palaash dance practice - we seem to be improving :P
• Birthday celebration in Kachnar - awesome chocolate cake from TGB
• FIF1 work
• Will read a bit of Pundits from Pakistan before calling it a day

Day 207 - 17th February 2011

Once again had work deja vouz in the SCM class today when the topic being discussed was transportation management. Brought back fond memories :D

The highlight of the day though was dinner at honey9. I cant help but reiterate how high the food/bill ratio is over there, especially when u take light eaters along ;-) Came back to campus at around 11 and started working on the IPL article for WARC. Lots of data mining needs to be done! Had another birthday celebration in Palaash, was very sombre compared to last night's drama. :P

Day 161 - 16th December 2010

Study leave today and it reminded me of my study leave days during engineering. Most of the day was spent in the room studying. Have SM and CR tomorrow, SM is a one hour MCQ paper with 20% weightage overall and by around 9 in the night someone had managed to get a slide deck from the publishers of the text book. Its amazing how resourceful and efficient people become during exams ;-) Also managed to finish the Imagining India assignment today, will go through it once again tomorrow or day after before submitting it. Also had to submit an AM assignment in which we had to play the role of an account planner and write a creative brief for Bru instant coffee.

The highlight of the day though had nothing to do with MICA. At around 1130 in the night got a call from an ex-colleague, there were some major issues at work which needed to be resolved soon. Yours truly managed to give remote support from here and the work got done :D Was surprised to see how much I still remembered! Sports marketing nahi to SAP hi sahi ;-) Had a birthday celebration in Palaash at midnight. Birthdays during the exams aren't the best thing that can happen to a person plus one of the birthday boys is a founding member of PJComm, the unofficial committee which takes the trouble of sending one PJ a day to the entire batch. So you can imagine the amount of frustration that was vented out. :D

Day 59 - 24th August 2010

After a long time had a rest day with no submissions on the next day. Most of the day was spent outside campus. A friend of mine returning from Pune, went to the airport(drove his car) to pick him up. Driving in a new city is a good experience, Ahmedabad comes very close to Pune when it comes to traffic discipline. Throughout the drive I was reminded of Russell Peter's joke about traffic lights in India - they are optional :-D In the evening went to city on my bike to pick up a birthday cake for a friend. Since the bike has come every outing has ended with me coming back drenched! Today was the worst of those experiences, it started pouring when we were riding on the highway, there was no place where we could stop and wait for the rains to subside. Had no choice but to keep riding, everything and I mean everything got drenched :-D Hostel birthday celebrations never cease to be fun. Today's highlight was the guys from Palaash refusing to enter Parijat because of some incidents that took place last week ;-) We even sang happy birthday from the badi court, it was only when the cake was brought out did the resistance cave in.
The cake cutting was followed by a dancing session in the Parijat courtyard and then some tp at a friend's room.

Rest day's get over too fast! I thought I could make up for some lost sleep today but I guess I have just accumulated more sleep to catch up on.

Day 48 - 13th August 2010

Woke up at 930 today which meant I missed the first lecture, got to know later on that half the class was absent for it. Attended the remaining 3 lectures which out of which the PM lecture was pretty interesting. Any class that involves major DCP can never be boring ;-) After classes had to complete some formalities regarding the quiz at NITIE next week. One thing I liked was that apart from getting clearance from the admin we also need to inform the MCSA, this is something that I was not used to during my graduation, where the students were a part of any major decision making process.

It is a friend's birthday tomorrow (today actually since its already 3 in the morning), a few of us went to the city to buy him a gift. In the process I also ended up buying some clothes for myself. Had dinner at subway, which is one of my favourite fast food joints and also got some subs packed for people back in the hostel.Bought some ice cream and pudding on the way back for the birthday celebrations, kept them in the fridge at Chota.

Birthday celebrations in the hostel are a sight to behold. The birthday boy/girl is made to stand at the Palaash courtyard and is first dunked with cold water from the top floor. This is followed by the all time favourite birthday 'bumps', which only boys are subjected to. This is followed by some more dunking by the people who missed it the first time around followed by the cake cutting. The last thing done with the cake is to eat it, every other possible use is found and the
cake is smeared all over the birthday boy/girl's face. There are also certain people who, irrespective of whose birthday it is, are always dunked and it looks like its their birthday as well :-D

The highlight of the day though was the ice cream and pudding eating session a few of us had on the Asoka terrace followed by some extempore entertainment. Also had an excellent photo session and some of the pics have already found their way to facebook :-)

All in all a good day, need to get back to assignments and deadlines tomorrow, but right I have an appointment with my bed and pillow and I donot want to upset them ;-)