Two Months @ IFMR

An absurd way to start but just thought of bringing some life back to this inactive 'blog' of mine.. so what could have been better than giving a glimpse of my new life here at IFMR. It's been exectly two months today since 6th july,2008 when i arrived here at chennai. With a friend from agra,Reema, i set foot in chennai early in the morning and was welcomed by the station authorities charging us some heavy amount of money for carrying more than the prescribed amount of luggage. phew..!!! our start was not that good :) Reached our college and had to call another friend with whom i had just chatted and talked on phone and who had reached early & was sleeping at that hour to carry our luggage since we had rooms on the second floor :) But it was really sweet of him to wake up and come down for us.
Our college is a nice place, with greenery all around and especially the balcony attached to my room... from where i can see coconut trees and squirrels who start making strange noises at around 1 A.M. everyday. Life here is not only about assignments, group-work { where one or two ppl are sometimes inactive thinking others are there to work :) }, long hours of classes (all about bunking them also),late night group studies the night before the tests, but also about the fun and enjoyment with batchmates and seniors. The first 1 week here, we had the so-called ragging sessions, of which some were fun ice-breakers and one or two that ended in someone's tears.After that we all gelled quite well.

This place is full of active, talented and intelligent people who keep on practicing their hands at TT (including me ofcourse), playing carrom (with very different styles of striking coins ) , writing blogs, organising various fun club events etc. One such fun thing that happened in the first month was a 'treasure hunt' organised by seniors where we had teams of three ppl each and each team was given clues at different stages. The hunt started at around 9:30 to 10:00 pm. One could see seniors juniors running around like maniacs, wracking their brains with the clues, looking for places all over the campus to get to the next level , trying to cheat from other groups, getting "wet & white" in the process :) {now, this needs clarification. actually there were ppl in the organising team who knew where the teams wud look for the clues, they were waiting with buckets of water to throw upon us.. yes i say "us" coz i got drenched thrice and secondly "white" coz they wer not satisfied after drenching us, so some other threw flour on us... made us crawl from under the "TT Table alias tunnel " and clicked pics } .. Here's the proof but this is after i had washed my face a lot many times ........ :)

In the hope of winning some treasure, we picked up all sorts of insects, went to some seniors girls rooms ..clicked their pics and in the end performed stupid skits only to please the organisers. and yes i must show you what treasure my friends got .... he he he he he Nripen , Arun and Aminarta won some "chillar" for coming second

This is not how mad we can get... there's more, example the b'day parties (we had many b'days in the two months) where guyz get bumps on girls b'days ( ofcourse friend of the girl :) and if she has none such friend then nowdays its bhavnesh who is the default choice and for boyz, all the roomies of the boy if its his b'day.... and whosoever the guyz want to kick ... ) we girls enjoy the fun of cheering them. Sometimes we ppl get kiddish that is climbing down like monkeys hunting for TT balls and breaking tiles in the process, calling each other on gtalk while in class just to have fun (actually the underlying motive is to wake ppl up from their deep slumber coz of the lullabys our proff's sing )

As for me personally, the two months had highs as well as lows... but in all had many new experiences like visiting a disco for the first time , watching a late night movie show etc :) . Not just this but some constructive experiences as presenting a paper at symbiosis and winning the second prize though was least hopeful and yes the most exciting, trying to communicate with tamilians here esp. autowallas and shopkeepers with all sorts of "tuti-phuti" tamil, various gestures and sign language. Let me tell u some tamil words that i learnt.... "tanni-water", "anna-brother, "akka-sister", "illay-no", "venda- do not want" etc etc... otherwise my post will turn into an amateur level tamil to english dictionary...

Moving on, something that i enjoyed the most here was our freshers party .... danced for full 2 hours without a single break and with so many people around dancing as couples, in groups etc to both hindi and tamil songs not caring who was around, stomping each other's foot and some non-dancers showing all sorts of weird moves. Getting ready for the freshers was also a challenge coz we were divided in groups according to states, ie punjabis, haryanvis,bengalis, assamese, biharis, maharashtrians, tamilians , gujju, mallu etc and we had to dress according to our assigned state... i was a bengali... what u see in the picture is thus the result of the pains that i took to arrange the attire in just 1 hour which includes running to senior girl's rooms, calling up day scholars and then going to a seniors house who literally opened up her wardrobe and i selected one which we thought could pass for a bengali saree coz she didn't have the typical red and white one....plus around two hours of getting ready... trying to find someone who could help me wrap it in a bengali style... dunno how much we succeded but soma did a fine job on me... thanks to her !! We had to walk the ramp in our group and answer questions by the panel.It got all too funny when haryanvis turned up with lathis and the mallus and tamilians in their gold... the punjabis doing bhangra and the gujjus playing dandia...when we had to introduce ourselves, wat i did was saying this line with a bengali accent " aamar naam rani mukhrjee" :)

Reema and ME at the freshers DJ party

Apart from this we had various dedications from the very obvious duos (will not say couples ) for each other...some couple dances between them and ofcourse the popular "bhai-behen" dedication. :) and lastly great food!!

There's so much to write about but really the time is very less... and it is now 3:00 am and my sleep is beckning me :) i leave you with a video of our freshers... pathetic ramp walk of us bengalis :) chow for now !!