The term that was…..

It all began on a fine Saturday morning, June the 13th, 2009. People started ‘checking-in’, some looked intimidated while others were still in disbelief to have made it to XLRI!!!

Even before preparatory lectures had begun, the TFEMR mess gave some ‘food’ for thought. The mess stuck to its ‘quality’ throughout the term, so much so that most of the lunch and dinner time was spent thinking rather than eating.

The introductory session was on Monday morning. I along with couple of others, acting as detectives had already visited Tata auditorium on Sunday, to find the best suitable place which will allow to doze off without getting caught.
The first day came and went; preparatory lectures showed the trailer of what was in store for next two and a half months.

The GBMs, and subsequent ‘rituals’ were completed amid much furore. But in the end, Nash equilibrium was attained within the society. I, being an asocial person, was indifferent to all that was happening around and couldn’t understand what the fuss was all about.

By now, classes had begun in full flow. Quizzes started hovering around and disrupted the ‘feel good’ factor. Gango quiz was a matter of life and death (or should I say, only death?) for Bummers and was a topic of amusement and laughter for IR people.Speaking of IR people, they never let an opportunity of making fun of Bummers go begging. But ‘Every XLer has his term’ and IR guys will soon realize this. The payback time beacons!!

BM-A was at its usual best. A conglomeration of DCPers, FRAXers and GRAXers, the class participation level attained the heights never reached before. Each ‘participant’ had his unique style and was looking to maximize his payoff. Due to budget-time constraint, it won’t be possible to describe each one in detail here. (A separate report will soon be published for the same). There was also a weird guy in class who occasionally used to come out of hibernation and talk about Ayn Rand and philosophy and used to ask ‘supposedly’ incomprehensible and too long questions. But we will ignore him for time being for society’s sake.

Seniors, keeping with the XL culture, gave valuable tips to new batch, gave lot of gyan on CV preparation and other stuff and helped a lot in general.

Keeping with the tradition, the project reports were usually completed (including start and finish) on last day. The punctuated equilibrium model didn’t hold true in this case and all the burst used to come on the deadline day which was usually accompanied with postponement of deadline time by few hours!!!

The final project presentations were completed by sitting for 8-9 hrs at stretch with everybody doing a backward induction for ‘nap-time’ calculation, depending on the group’s turn.

And then….End term!!!....Which came and went without giving time for shock absorption. But the ‘shock of the term’ came from immensely popular Prof. Sengo.
The shock induced the much needed fire in creative minds at XL and songs like ‘Gango na kare Sengo ne wo kaam kiya hai’ were doing rounds around the hostel.
And finally the day came!!! September the 6th, 2009. The exams were over. In retrospective, it was difficult to visualize how the time flied by. Everybody was a free bird (for 2 weeks atleast). Everyone had plans for the holiday in place since ages.

On a personal note, the author didn’t have a good term ‘academically’, but for a die-hard Manchester United fan, slow start to a season is nothing new, and things can only improve as the ‘season’ progresses.

Wishing everyone a happy holiday!!!