Twisting and shouting

Ten years ago to the day, there was tragedy. Around this time I was home. That day I remember my father’s usual Ambassador (his office car) wasn’t available, so he had come in a blue WagonR which looked like anything but a government car. Not that I could see too well, though.

Back in 2004, spectacle lenses made of plastic weren’t yet popular, and even if they were available they were quite expensive. I remember having a shell frame back then (like I do now, except that that one was an ugly-ish brown). The lens was made of glass – the kind that could shatter on impact and enter your eyes.

And shatter and enter it did. I had instinctively closed my eyes, so not much had gone in, though. My first reaction at that point in time was to remember the phone number of my usual opthalmologist (yes I still remember things like that). I even remember calling that guy’s office (yeah, back on those Nokia phones you could type without looking). Friends, however, were of the opinion that I should go to the nearest eye clinic. And Shekar Netralaya (JP Nagar 3rd Phase) was where we ended up.

It was among the freaker of freak accidents. I was playing badminton. <lj user=”amitng”> and I were on one side, two others on the other. We were both close to the baseline when the opponents sent the shuttle high. Both of us went for it, <lj user=”amitng”> slightly ahead and slightly to the left of me. Both of us drew our rackets back with a slight backswing. And that was it.

His racket caught me flush on the left spectacle lens. The lens duly cracked, and parts of it entered my eye. I remember that the game immediately stopped. I remember that one other guy’s car was right there outside the court, so we could go quickly to the hospital. And back in those days there wasn’t even a signal at the Delmia junction, so the U-turn was taken fast so that I could go to hospital.

I don’t remember what they did at the hospital. I think they cleaned up my eye, but one or two pieces remained particularly troublesome. I remember going for a follow-up test two days later. And I remember that one day after the accident I went all the way back to IIMB (after the accident I went home, in my father’s temporary blue WagonR) so that I wouldn’t miss accounting class (yes I was in my first semester so such youthful enthusiasm can be expected). And went back again the following day to write a test which I nearly aced.

And then there was the back story. 2004 was the first time that the IIMs decided to make public the CAT percentile. They had used an algorithm to allocate percentiles, and allocated it up to two decimal places. So if your “percentile” (with decimal places the term doesn’t make sense) was greater than 99.995 (i.e. you were in the top 0.005% of the 130,000 odd people who wrote the exam), your percentile would get rounded up to give a weird-sounding “100.00 percentile”. Top 0.005% of 130,000 means about six or seven people. Two of those were at IIMB. I was one of them. <lj user=”amitng”> was the other.

During our inauguration the certificates for the “directors merit list” of the senior batch were handed out. It was possibly meant to tell us how important being in the top 10 of the batch was, and I’m sure it did inspire a lot of people. And having been the top performers in the entrance test, people perhaps considered <lj user=”amitng”> and I top seeds (neither of us ended up getting it, though he got considerably closer than I did).

And so when I got injured before our first ever unit test and he was in some ways culpable for it (though in fairness it was on the field of play), there was scope for conspiracy theory. And when you have a bunch of creative youngsters and scope for a conspiracy theory, you can well expect someone to stand up and do the honours. And @realslimcody rose to the occasion. And Twisted Shout was born.

The name of the organization has its own story. @realslimcody is a Beatles fan, and he suggested that he name the yellow journalist enterprise as “twist and shout”. Madness heard it as “Twisted Shout” and the name stuck. A couple of episodes later I duly joined Twisted Shout. And we did a lot of twisting and shouting and yellow journalism. If you were our contemporary and not slandered by Twisted Shout you might consider your stint at IIMB of not being worthy enough!

Of course in a place like IIMB, you don’t do something just for the heck of it. Everything has to result in a “bullet point” in your CV (back in 2005 I’d planned to write a book called “In Search of a Bullet Point” about IIMB, but that again didn’t take off. I put NED, I guess). I think I wrote in my final resume that I was a “co-editor in the campus informal journal Twisted Shout”. I think the placement committee (which whetter all CVs) let that one remain (bless them). And as with all such campus endeavours TS quickly died after we graduated (though I tried to resurrect it in a separate blog on this site, it didn’t take off).

It’s ten years since that landmark incident that sparked the birth of Twist and Shout. I must mention my eye is fine – fine enough for me to wear contact lenses as I type this. There’s a scar inside my eye, though, and that’s something I’ll carry all my life. But it doesn’t affect life one bit, and life goes on!

Oh, I wasn’t right on that one – after the injury the doctor had told me that I shouldn’t let sweat enter my eyes. Two months after the injury I managed to get myself a red bandana (with skull and crossbones on it), and I ended up wearing it at all “sweatable opportunities” – when I played or partied. The bandana got legendary in its own way, and its story shall be told another day (or perhaps it’s already been told somewhere on this blog).

 

Snow White meets Gandalf

I don’t know how to describe it. “Writing club” or “literature club” makes it sound too serious, and if it were indeed one, then we need not have put “informal” when we put it in our CVs. “Slander club” makes it sound like we were all bitches, which we were not – though I must admit that once in a while we used to bitch a bit. We weren’t even doing campus journalism – we were hardly regular, and never came in print. And we weren’t storytellers, either, since most of what we wrote was based on what actually happened.

Twisted Shout began when Hunger tried to murder War. However, the defining moment for the group happened when Snow White Meets Gandalf (a trilogy in five parts) was released. I must say it was a fairly random story. So random that most of you won’t understand it. If you are not from IIMB, you can give up every hope of figuring it out. If you are from IIMB but not from our batch, you might understand one joke in the entire trilogy. If you are from IIMB and from my batch and not from my section, you might probably understand half the stuff.

SWG had so many characters that I won’t blame you if you would get confused. Most of these characters are based on people in my batch and the batch senior to mine at IIMB. And it’s not a one-to-one correspondence between real and fictional characters. Some people in my batch were so colourful that multiple characters were based on them. On the other hand, the entire commie half of Sumo Yet So Far (my quiz team) had gotten merged into one character called Swaadisht.

We drew inspiration from several sources, with the primary source being our first test in Economics, which had a certain Queen Shilpa taxing coconuts. A number of other characters, and scenes were built based on interactions in class in term 1. There was heavy punning on people’s names, and even seemingly random sentences like “I find Aishwarya Rai so hot that I want her as my wife” found their way into the stories.

If my memory serves me right (it usually does in the long term), the first three parts of the Trilogy were written by Disease, who then proceeded to put NED (this was a full three years before the term NED was coined, btw). Madness, the correspondent from H Base, joined the great institution when he wrote the fourth part. The fifth part, which involved a Great War, based on the Mahabharata, was appropriately penned by War. And he had ensured that he gave due footage to himself, as well as to the Footage Queen.

The beauty of the series was that characterization was not constant. People would change sides more frequently than Disease would change his shorts – which means that they didn’t change sides too often, but did it once in a long time. Characters would disappear from the plot, and occasionally reappear at a strategic time. There would be sudden updates in relationships between characters – to account for similar changes in the real world. Every event of note that took place on campus, and even some insignifcant ones, got due footage. It was a masterpiece of its times.

Looking back at these stories today, I’m feeling nostalgic, and at the same time proud to have been part of such an august institution. We were to come up with a few other masterpieces during our tenure, but SWG would remain our best known work.

Two months back, more than three years after we had first folded up, we thought we should make an attempt to recreate the magic, and thus started the Twisted Shout blog. I admit that we haven’t been too regular in updating it, but each of us has been managing an important transition in our lives, and thus haven’t really had the time to update it. We hope to fix this in the coming months, though I’m not sure how funny we will be since we will be writing for a general audience. In hindsight, it was really easy writing for a restricted audience that knew exactly who each character was based on. Making inside jokes, it seems, is much easier than making generalized jokes.