Almost a month

Let me define knowledge as knowing the meaning of something.


"I know the meaning of knowledge"



Random thoughts do strike one's mind when one is emptying his/her bowels, especially when it’s after an exam and with no exam in the horizon, which means that you can dwell on thoughts which are not academic (although this is academic for me as I have a philosophy course which covers a bit of epistemology, I never considered it a serious course anyway). The recurrence in the above statement is pretty amusing, but after a while it gets boring and you get on with life (and get outside the bathroom).

Anyway, coming back to the real world, life has been really generous with me these days, with almost everything going right, risks paying off, and most of all, inner satisfaction which arises from eating a grand meal off someone else's pocket. Also, I have been able to utilize time more fully, thanks to constant retrospection. Last semester I had vowed to watch more movies, because sometimes I really felt out of a conversation, and being made a complete dumbass of in the Lit Soc Main Quiz due to a question on Pulp Fiction didn't help either. This semester I finally got down to working towards reducing that deficit by watching at least one movie in 2 days from the list that I had prepared. I keep updating the list at intervals.

Lit Soc started off pretty well for our hostel, with we garnering decent amount of points in Fine Arts (although there was some weird business in some event where the judge apparently didn’t evaluate some themes at all, we aren’t complaining – it’s of absolutely no use). Queen of Sheeba was awesome this year, with our hostel coming first. Queen of Sheeba is this event where you are given a list of assorted items (some are really tough to find). Some of the items from this year’s list were-

Photo of guy with a unibrow, ship in a bottle, scabbard, cracked cell phone, light up shoes, diary from 1996, broken pair of Bose headphones

Now obviously the people who prepare this list, even unknowingly, will give an undue advantage to their hostel. Last year another hostel had 2 coordinators, and they won. This year we had a coord, we won. So whatever defense we try to put up against the allegations of cheating heaped upon us, other hostels won’t back down from their moral ‘high ground’, so I didn’t bother putting up one against my friends. However, the coord in our hostel told me how they had prepared the list, and trying to be as just as possible, I felt it was pretty fair for all hostels, and the advantage of the coord’s hostel is nullified to an extent. For very obvious reasons, I wouldn't want to disclose it here, or anywhere.

Choreo Nite (the inter hostel group dance event) was a shock, because the judge said he couldn’t give our hostel a position in the top 4 because its last sequence was copied from a dance video on the net. That to me seemed unfair, but I really don’t have the sufficient knowledge to comment on that. When a hostel band covers some actual band’s songs, it is not penalized for it. It might be different for dance, but it was really unfortunate because the team had put in a lot of effort and the plagiarism accusation notwithstanding, they were pretty amazing and definitely deserved a place in the top 3, even according to the judge. But still, from a guy who has quite a few left feet, the top 4 performances were pretty good.

Mono-acting was an event in which we didn’t have any high hopes on, and needless to say, we didn’t get anything from it. But it was a fun event to watch, with the last performance going through the ceiling and far far above, in terms of entertainment. If by some weird luck you ever get the chance to hear the musings of an eccentric hardcore Communist Mallu who has a huge grudge against someone and doesn’t need alcohol to lose inhibitions, please don’t miss it.

Next on the agenda is sports. Liverpool’s woeful form continues, which seriously makes you wonder why Liverpool have traditionally always had poor bench strength. Maybe that is the reason they haven’t been able to win the Premier League which requires good performances every weekend, unlike European League which comes only once a month on an average. Also, Lucas is definitely not a good replacement for Xabi Alonso, and until Aquilani starts playing, Liverpool are going to remain in their current state. According to me, Chelsea has the best squad in the league, and from being 4th on my list of favourite clubs in the EPL, it now is 2nd, demoting Arsenal to 3rd. Manchester United will remain 20th on my list, although Ryan Giggs is the awesomest left footed football player I have ever seen, and my dream is to run down the flanks with the ease of Giggs, and put a perfect cross into the box. As usual, I haven’t been following cricket, mainly because of the TV being in a common room, where going frequently doesn’t appease to my lazy side.

I won’t bore whatever readership I have left with further mundane details of my life. Consider it to be more of an update post, than one on something solid. I have been trying for a long time to write a post on the objectivity of morality, even more after this –



Me: Sir, I think morality is subjective, like almost everything else in the world.


Prof: I promise to take this up some time later, and making you say with your own mouth that morality is objective.




Interesting.






Post Script. Any comments on the fairness of Queen of Sheeba are not welcome from people with whom I have chatted directly. It is a very pointless argument going nowhere, and we would rather not start it than start it and leave it unfinished. Comments on anything else are welcome.

Year in Review - and Plans for the Future

As my first academic year in IITM nears the end, I have discovered that there are some things, which I would like to pursue for all my 4 years here (3 more). One important thing that you have to take care of if you want to make full use of your time here (apart from academics) is to prioritize. I and my friends have had a lot of discussions on this. You can’t keep on trying stuff till 4 years get over and there is nothing you have gained. I am of the view that all the trying should be restricted to a maximum of 1 year, and then you should prioritize, pick and practice (wow! I came up with a 3P prescription………make that 4P). I have made a list of 4 things that I am going to pursue over the next 4 years – music, football, quizzing, and LitSoc in general.
Till now, I have always played music alone, which is interesting, but not half as much as fun as when you play in a group. When you play solo, you don’t need to take care of coordination, volumes of each instrument, tuning, and other things, which are very crucial when you play in a band. It is also a lot of fun when you play in a band, the late night practices, grub sessions, and the general banter (in insti lingo- farting) in between practices. Here I discovered the joy of playing with other people, and I want to do that for the next 3 years also.
I think it was around class 11 when I gradually shifted from cricket to football. I do play cricket occasionally, but if you ask me to pick one of them, it will always be football. Even in my JEE days, I played casual football quite regularly. When I came here, I saw that I wasn’t very bad compared to others, so I started playing here too. I bought my first football boots after coming here (and have already worn out 2 pairs here). I got through the NSO selections (which by the way is a very big farce) and made it to the hostel team, which ensured that I played football almost every day. I plan to keep playing football till I can, and am going to try to get into the insti team next year, as I heard that both the left wingers are passing out this year.
Quizzing for me starts way back, in 3rd standard where I was gifted the whole set of Bournvita Quiz books by my parents. I was a big fan of the show when it used to be good (and when it used to be quiz, before it became a talent show) and it was like a religion – watching it on TV at 12 on a Sunday. Throughout my school days, I quizzed and enjoyed quizzing, and I carried that enthusiasm into college, and though the quizzing style here is very different from what we had in school, I still enjoy quizzing here. Recently I put up a quiz of 15 questions for the Quiz Club Meet, and my questions were appreciated (though almost all of them were very easily answered).
LitSoc – Here is one thing that I realized very late into my 2nd semester, quite recently. I had planned to pursue my other 3 interests even before coming here, but LitSoc is one thing that caught my attention and made me interested in it. For the uninitiated, LitSoc is the inter-hostel trophy for LITerary and SOCial events. Competition has always thrilled me, and I thrive on the competitive spirit, bordering on RGing (there simply is no non-insti lingo word for this, so please forgive me). So I thoroughly enjoyed the competition between different hostels, and was disappointed even more to lose it to a rival hostel (and later, even lost the 2nd position). I have decided that next year onwards, I will work towards getting the LitSoc trophy back to where it belongs (we have been winning it for 3 years, before this year).