Monday, October 31, 2005

Just B'coz

Am blogging in the wee hours of Diwali... er... Deepavali :-D ... just b'coz.


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I love Bombay during this time of the year... it's so full of life. Even more full of life than it usually is. And it's so colorful... even the dreary chawls look beautiful with all the lights and lanterns.

And watching fireworks from the balcony... overlooking the lake. Can't help wishing there was someone to watch fireworks with. It's the second most romantic thing in the world.

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I did a Thane to Currey Road commute today... took me two long painful hours. Argh.

Thursday, October 27, 2005

Wannabe

People are always pretending. There aren't too many moments in life when you see them in their truest form.

It's not a particular set of people... it's ALL of us.

When some people blog they write pretentious poetry. The thought behind the poetry is almost always very beautiful. But these thoughts would sound much more beautiful if they're put down in plain sentences.

Then there are people who don't understand the poetry so they pretend to appreciate it.

But then, it takes all kinds to make up the blogosphere.

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People pretend to be happy just to avoid uncomfortable questions.

People pretend to be sad, just for a little extra attention.

People pretend to have done pre-reads so that they can sit in class and blog.

People pretend to be asleep during drunken parties, so that first time drinkers don't knock and accidentally puke on their beds.

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Hm

A question that has been in and out of my head since the "Who am I? Who are you?" classes with PAT...

Is it possible to love someone & not expect anything at all?

Trying to find the answer(s)

Monday, October 24, 2005

A look back and a look ahead

It's over.

I wonder if it is right to focus all of one's energy, time and hope into one thing. Maybe it isn't. There is something called getting too involved. Then you start seeing flaws that only you know about. And all the flaws look far greater than all the good things, even if people tell you that it's the other way around.

MICANVAS - my dream for six months now just ended yesterday. My friends tell me it was awesome. But then, they don't know the whole story.

Argh... I'm too young to be this cynical :-)

On the whole it was fun. Crazy amount of planning, insane number of phone calls, hours and hours on Photoshop and Dreamweaver, a few trees worth of paper, enough e-mails to be banned from Gmail for life, 8336 unique visitors on the website and 3 days of non-stop work (with 3 sleepless nights thrown in).

Don't think I'd ever want to do an event (for free) again. There are too many people involved who have to be kept happy... too many egos to be smoothed or it becomes impossible to get work done by them.

It was a great place to network. Met some nice folks from NMIMS, FMS, ISB, LIBA... Realized that things that we complain about at MICA are pretty much similar to what other B-Schoolers have to say about their own colleges. It is the students that make the school... and not the faculty or the number of amphitheatre classrooms or wi-fi classrooms. Thankfully, there are a handful of students here who at the end of two years would have done something to build MICA.

The 3 quizzes we'd planned were really close to my heart. We invited QMs who are amazing quizzers. We'd publicised them in the places that mattered. Still, I wish I'd done a better job with planning. It just felt bad that after 6 months of detailing, I couldn't predict the obvious.

Relieved that it's over. But now there's a void.

Here's to some people who made MICANVAS special for me.

Vinay Narayan - who means the world (plus delta x) to me. He kept his sanity when people all around were losing their's.
Mrinu - who in his second MICANVAS did superbly. And put up with all my mood swings.
Chinmay - For being so darn efficient :-)
Minu - for bringing the press all the way to a remote Gujju village
Shruti - for being amazing with response.
And Gaurav Lulla - for slowing down my comp all the time ;-)
Devika... for max creativity with minimum resources.
Anjali... my baybeh... for agreeing to be "at my service" whenever, wherever.

One of the best things about MICANVAS was meeting the QMs... Samanth Subraniam, J Ramanand & J Krishnamurthi - it was like a who's who list of Indian Quizzing. And they're some of the nicest people I've met.

I'll be back for MICANVAS 2006 for sure :-)