Author: SK

Click here for part 2 of the story

Click here for part 1 of the story

Getting to the main thing now…

Dear Mom,

Today’s L^2 party was good. Had a lot of fun. I mean the last one I attended was over seven months ago. Initially was a little hard to get involved in the action but then later managed to quite enjoy myself. I must tell you that I didn’t drink (psst… had a couple of *drops* of rum and vodka). I didn’t need to. I told you I’m on a perennial high right? And as always, the best part of the party was the conversation I had for the last hour with a couple of KT (kannada type) juniors.

The party was sponsored by our juniors who won the AVB scholarship this year. And i trust they didn’t have half as much fun as we did last year. Probably the fact that they were all girls while we were two guys and two girls made the difference. They came quietly, cut a cake, at all of it, danced for a few minutes and left. The sidelines, though were interesting.

One guy, a regular drunkard, got drunk again and took to hugging some exchange females. Another, who was in the final scholarship shortlist but didn’t make it, got drunk for the first time in his life and had to be carried back to his room. Felt a little sorry for him.

Then there was this regular quota of outsiders who unfailingly turn up whenever the booze is free. There was one pretty girl but it looked like she had come with her boyfriend. Those people were around even when I left the party half an hour ago.

Attending a party after seven months, it was initially difficult to settle in. There seemed to be some fixed groups on the floor and I didn’t seem to connect with any of them. Did some brownian motion and proceeded to talk to a few drunk friends. Still hadn’t gotten hang of the party. Tried dancing but my cellphone kept in my shirt pocket fell off and the LCD is broken. Dunno if i’ll be able to fix it. Oh god, it belongs to dad’s office right?

Then I came back to my room, kept the phone, changed into a more comfortable cotton shirt, tied my red bandana (to prevent sweat enterign my injured-forever (thanks to ) left eye). People said I looked like a VHP activist. Don’t mind that comparison actually.

Suddenly the party took a turn for the better. Music got better. I got headbanging. The bandana slowed down the rush of blood to my brain, thus getting me higher. Managed to gel with some juniors and a few batchmates.

People kept talking to me about falling in front of girls and hugging them (reminding me of episode one). Didn’t find any of the girls there huggable or fall-at-feet-able. Got a little senti though when i remembered i had had a fifteen second crush on a number of them. Nothing untoward happened.

Then I met 3 KT juniors and we got talking – about how people from NPS indiranagar have a lot of attitude and stuff. Was damn good fun. And the music got worse. Some arbit punjoo stuff. Dunno how people can tolerate those songs. There were a couple of English songs in between but they were rudely cut out leading to shouts of “DJ sucks” by the exchange students.

Finally made a move when I realized more value couldn’t be added by the party.

Once again, mom, I had a lot of fun and learnt a lot also. I know better how people behave when drunk. I was able to do soem arbit research on social networks (nohting concrete though). Lots of other stuff I learnt which i’ve subsequently forgotten.

Yeah, i’m going out for lunch today. Will be back home for dinner. And yeah, more importantly, the running nose I had at the beginning of the party seems to have stopped running now.

Bye
Karthik

called up my mom today and told her i’ll be going home only late in the evening tomorrow because we have a party on campus tonight. she went on this long senti trip saying why i shouldn’t booze.

sample this: “don’t you like those cute babies that come in the johnson ads? if you booze, your blood will get corrupted and you’ll get ugly babies”; or “look we’re not from that kind of a family. and drinking is not part of our culture so you shouldn’t drink”; or “i’ll refuse to help you out with chickfinding and even if ;you find someone i’ll convince her that you’re a drunkard and convince her to ditch you”; anyways, the “best case” that was mentioned was that i won’t be allowed home.

dad was a little more pragmatic. he said “look at some point or the other you’ll want to live with us. and such things are not tolerated in our house. so if you want to booze keep in mind that you’ll get thrown out of the house”…

ten minutes of senti later, my mom asked me to promise her that i won’t booze. i told her that i won’t but i can’t promise. i told her that i don’t believe in breaking promises and wouldn’t like to promise in something like this where i may not be able to keep it. more senti.

mom said that she’ll come to my room early tomorrow and make sure i didn’t drink tonight. i start laughing loudly. then mom says that i’m already high and might have started already. i try explain to her that of late i’ve been perennially high.

she fails to understand, puts lots of senti and says “i won’t talk to you” and slams the phone down…

my cousin’s recent wedding was weird – the reception was on wednesday evening and the wedding on thursday morning. and it so happened that due to other commitments, etc. i attended the reception and my parents attended the wedding. here follows the approximate (and translated) transcript of a phone conversation with my mom yesterday night…

I: Mom, I must tell you, for a change, I saw a few pretty girls at yesterday’s wedding
Mom: You’re right. Even I saw quite a few pretty faces today.
I: hmmm..
Mom: Did you make an effort to find out who they are?
I: No, which is why i’ve been telling you i missed you at the wedding. Had no way to find out. And no one to ask for a second opinion. Even putti (my cousin who i’m pretty clsoe to) wasn’t around.
Mom: I thought when i told you I’m not going for the reception but for the wedding instead, you’d get the cue and change your plans. This is what happens if you don’t listen to me.
I: ok…
Mom: Anyways, there’s a wedding in Mysore next month. The same crowd is expected there. And now you have another good reason to come there. And this time, if you notice something tell me so that we can try make some progress.
I: (speechless) ok i’ll come
(hang up)

had been to my cousin’s wedding reception yesterday. didn’t meet too many people so got bored. set me thinking about our “culture”…

the other day I was seeing the photos of a northie friend’s wedding. looked like it was a lot of fun – at least from the looks of it (i haven’t attended any northie wedding). While ours is purely ritual based and apart from catching up with relatives and friends, there’s no fun.

Similarly with our festivals. once again they’re majorly ritual based and the only good thing about them is the networking part – visiting each other’s homes either to see a hundred ganeshas or to distribute eLLu on sankranthi. no way you can have fun by yourself!

the other day i was telling my mom how disinterested i was in the festivals and that the only festivals i liked are diwali and holi. and she flared up saying “but they are not big festivals for us – they’re north indian festivals. how can you not like ugadi, ganesha, *several species of small festivals*, etc.? ”

*lost the flow here, so i’ll stop*

dunno if i’ve written about this earlier but in the last couple of months i’ve been perennially high. and no, i haven’t touch alcohol for the last 4 months. never doped in my life.

perhaps it’s because of listening to pink floyd all my waking hours?

my cousin, all of 20 years old, got a wedding proposal. And her mom has already consented to it – without asking her. And it looks like quite a few others in the family are also happy with this proposal.

a few months back, during another cousin’s wedding, this cousin had got another proposal – from a distant relative. and my grandmom had consented to it. so did my aunt and uncle. and a few other relatives. immense pressure was put on my cousin to accept and she’d started crying. finally my parents had to step in and resolve the mess and bail her out.

thankfully my mom has told me that she’ll step in only if i fail to find someone by myself…

Early in 2003, when it was suggested to me that I should start writing, I started off with sensational writing. Wrote a couple of articles in the IITM magazine, one of them strong enough to shut down the magazine. The newsletter I wrote at the following Saarang seemed like a check on the Saarang coordinators.

Came to IIMB. Found the Cultural Committee really sucky (though they’ve stopped sucking this year), started an anti culcom campaign – enough for the cul secy to tend his resignation (which wasn’t accepted). Similar excesses on my part followed and it is only of late (after I started this journal) that I started writing about serious stuff.

However, given my background, there has been a tendency for sensationalism to creep into my writing. The fact that I am publishing it only on this journal (which I “own”) means that I haven’t put enough control systems in place and at times have misrepresented facts. In a bid to make things more interesting for readers, I have started inventing stuff and spicing up my stories (exception being the one I published in the times).

Now, one of these excesses has unfortunately proved serious for one of the people involved. Looks like the signal has been distorted so much that what I wrote is totally different from what actually happened.

And because of all this, it looks like currently there is a friendship on the line. Haven’t been able to contact the person in question yet, but hopefully it hasn’t gone bust already.

Had this thought midway through this morning’s “social entrepreneurship” class. What kind of interest rates are applicable for microcredit?

On one hand, farmers are typically poor people and can’t afford to borrow money at high rates. Hence rate of interest should be much lower than that for the urban/middle class counterparts. This is just like Public Distribution System where the poor are given essential commodities at low prices.

On the other hand, going by pure financial basis, the inherent risk in lending to farmers is really high since the probability of repayment is low. Hence, the credit spread charged should be high and these people should pay a higher rate of interest. Another argument supporting it is that the traditional moneylenders usually charge insane rates (sometimes over 100% per annum) and in this scenario, an interest rate of 25-30% per annum from a commercial bank shouldn’t be a problem for the farmers.

Comments please.

met prof. BS Ramachandra Rao (BSR) today. A retired professor of maths from IIT Bombay, BSR now teaches at BASE, the biggest JEE coaching center in Bangalore. was talking to him about the JEE pattern change.

He said that the basic motivation for the IITs was to reduce the burden of valuation of answer scripts which no one wanted to do. Apparently, IITD has been outsourcing valuation of answer scripts to DU profs since none of their profs want to do it. Similarly with IITK. And there have been no quality checks on these valuations which might be producing fraudulent results. Remember that even a couple of marks here or there in the JEE can move you by a few hundred ranks.

I then asked him as a coaching factory teacher, how he has reacted to the changes. He replied that the focus now was on concepts (as I had predicted) and that his teaching methodology hadn’t changed except that he doesn’t work out long problems in class now. He was a little pissed that the other teachers in the factory had changed their methods too much and have started neglecting concepts – which he maintained were still paramount.

Interesting… and yeah, he hadn’t read my article in the papers. Said he would this evening.