An annual ritual in IIMB is the “ATF Attack”. ATF standing for “arbit task force” – the group of people who lead the ritual, something like the priests in a temple. Plebians are also allowed to participate, and if they show enough bhakti to the arbit cause, they will also be promoted as priests.
The objective of the ritual is to visit all discussion boards on the IIMB internal messenger (BRacket) and have “arbit conversations” on them. In other words, spam all boards with talk that is totally irrelevant to that particular forum, rendering it useless. An immensely fun exercise, where the fun grows as a linear function of the square of the number of participants!
But what before BRacket, you may ask, since BRacket was founded only in 2003. Dibyo tells me that in those prehistoric days, people used mail instead. The entire ATF converges on the computer center (those days, not everyone owned a comp) and one guy starts by sending a mail to “@IIM”. And soon a series of reply alls meant that people would have immense fun when they opened their mailboxes the next day. However, since profs and admin were also copied on those mails, this had to happen only after the convo!
One of my greatest regrets in IIMB is to have never been part of this esteemed ritual. I don’t recall why two years back. Last year, I chose that particular time to call up woomaan and put blade. And yesterday (yeah, alumni are allowed to participate), I had left my comp in office.
Immense grief happens.