An illusion called sleep was the status message of one of my friends on Gtalk recently. This is exactly how we at SCMHRD felt on the 4th of June itself.
1st June: Announcement, announcement, we have a good news and a bad news, which one do you want to hear first.
Does this line ring a bell? A very common line heard day in and day out. A good news has to be followed by a bad news. So here it goes.
Good News: We are going for an Outbound Learning.
Bad News -Danger, Alert: We have to leave at 6 in the morning.
OBL was the saviour from academic rigor but also acted as our first sleep spoiler (Don’t worry there are many more to come.). After a bit of groaning and moaning, all of us were excited about the fact that we were going to have fun. We got into the bus and reached a place called Shantivan. There we saw a few scary people (What else would you call a lieutenant and a colonel?..:P). After giving us a few dos and donts (by now everyone had gotten tired of the dos and donts), our batch was divided into teams of 11 each.
Now the hell, fun and everything starts. My group was supposed to go trekking on the first day itself to Sinhagad fort. Was it as simple as a trek with a bunch of aimless and jobless friends? Certainly not. The twist was that it was supposed to be competition among teams. And that was not it, all the team members would have to reach, only after which the team would get their points. Initially, there was no problem in climbing, but after sometime I could only wonder and ask myself why the hell was I even trying. How often have you thanked the person at the nimbu paani stall? If you have not yet done it, then start trekking, you will definitely thank her.:P. I should also really be thanking Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy and other music directors who made awesome music apt for the climb (remember Lakshya). Oh, not to forget my teammate who played all these songs while climbing the seemingly never ending terrain.
Thanks to my team members and my self-determination I somehow managed to complete the trek (Also let me blow my little trumpet and say the time taken by us wasn’t bad by any stretch of imagination.) Now after reaching to the top, we were given some Glucose biscuits. Poor me, I hate glucose biscuits but I felt at that time anything thrown at me to eat was honey. Climbing down was a much simpler task, the weather supported us and also since the competition factor got eliminated we started walking as if we were the kings and queens of the place, clicking photographs, posing at all possible points. (I must tell you that in MBA even all those who have absolutely no craze for photographs start becoming Dabboo Ratnani’s)
Our second task for the day was to present a small skit or any other such thing which could entertain everyone. So everyone put on their thinking caps and the Bachchans, Deepikas, Madhuris woke up in each of them. After that we were told that the next day events would start by 7. So we decided to sleep, but some angel had said forget the word SLEEP. Fire, fire ! Run and reach the open area. A hoax call.(Reminded me of the good old days at Lehman Brothers). The whistle was blown, all of us in our night suits, half pants, out of the lodges and reached the garden. (There were people having their bath at night. Just imagine their plight!) . After assembling, we were told to make tents and a competition once again. So we had half broken tents, wrongly placed tents and the good ones made the good, ready to lie down tents( Ours was the 3rd option, Perfect team that we were..:P). Now hopefully after this they will not trouble us, but then rumour was rife that there would be another one soon (One piece of advice: never to listen to rumours in colleges )
Next day we were supposed to play games. Some of them were physically challenging: imagine carrying a heavy girl on your hand and having to do something like a relay. Some were mentally challenging: Chinese Knot, never try this game, those who succeeded surely have cheated..:P:P. The remaining were teaching us the importance of team work and decision making. We climbed on every possible thing, be it the drums, ropes, tyres, planks, you just mention it and we had climbed on it and done our tasks. We were blindfolded, made to crawl in mud, make caricatures and do everything that on normal days you definitely would not do or should I say want to do.
But at the end it was so much fun and we did not even realise how the 2 days flew. We bade goodbye to all of them and shantivan and returned back to the hostel with memories still lingering in our minds.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Thursday, August 20, 2009
What's in the name?
Just imagine this conversation: Hi Neha, please Tell C division Neha to tell A div Neha to give the book to B div Neha. Oh god, what a mess!! That is precisely how it is here. We have not 1 , 2 or 3 but 5 Nehas in our batch. Thanks to a “Just Neha”, at least she got differentiated.
This is much later... Lets go back 2 months. I reached the Symbiosis Campus on the 31st of May 2009 and we were greeted by a college bag and a rose. Anxiety and curiosity were the 2 emotions running down my spine. How else would you describe the action of taking the room keys and rushing straight to the room? I saw my roommate ,Shifa(Confused it with Shikha for a long time), had already come with her bag and baggage and her poor mom was helping her sort out the humongous mess of clothes and other stuff that she had got along with her. After meeting and exchanging assurances and re-assurances that I had a good roommate, I proceeded with my family to have lunch. On my way, I met almost 10/15 students and their parents each of them enquiring name and background( Did I ever tell you that till date I do not remember who is an engineer and who is a commerce graduate?..:P). When I went back to the room, I met my second roommate, Deepa( Phew, an easy name..).
Enter into the day when we would get to know our classmates. Has anyone heard of learning groups in a Bschool. Yes, and surely there was one here too. One of my group members spelled his name as “Rahoul". He was initially referred to as “the Rahul with an O”..:P:P and I wonder if the other 2 Rahuls in our batch felt left out at not having something as absurd as this.:)
Following the IIM tradition, we had names written on our seats and we had to be seated that way. (Poor things on the 1st bench). Now before the orientation started, we tried to search for people with whom we used to chat online before joining, all those who were famous/infamous on orkut and also those we met in the Bombay meet. But alas, that was not all that simple, because all of us were divided into 3 sections and people known from orkut weren’t all that recognisable, thanks to the tiny, long distant profile pictures. So the wait continued till the OBL, thats Outbound Learning.
Come 4th May, The OBL day, and we were in high spirits because we were to trek, walk blind folded on rods and do all sorts of adventurous activities. The name game followed us there too. We were paired in groups of 10/11 and expected to do these tasks and guess what, the first game itself had name remembering antics. You had to call out a person’s name from the group and throw the ball to her/him .Clever that we are, we remembered one person’s name and kept throwing the ball to the same person..:P:P.. Anyway the coordinators outsmarted us after realising what we were doing and made a rule that you cannot repeat names.:(. So by the end we forcibly added 11 more names in our list. Still over a 100 names to go, wonder how that is going to happen.
There we got to know that we had Ruchis, Ruchas, Richas as well as Ruchikas. Now tell me how do I remember who is who!!!. Oh, I forgot to mention the most important names of our batch, Sheetal and Shaleen. Lets take a wild guess if it was a girls name or a boys name. If all of you reading this long never ending article guessed it as a girl you are all wrong, there are guys by that name in our batch and I am not kidding. So isn’t the name game a fun filled event.?.:P
This is much later... Lets go back 2 months. I reached the Symbiosis Campus on the 31st of May 2009 and we were greeted by a college bag and a rose. Anxiety and curiosity were the 2 emotions running down my spine. How else would you describe the action of taking the room keys and rushing straight to the room? I saw my roommate ,Shifa(Confused it with Shikha for a long time), had already come with her bag and baggage and her poor mom was helping her sort out the humongous mess of clothes and other stuff that she had got along with her. After meeting and exchanging assurances and re-assurances that I had a good roommate, I proceeded with my family to have lunch. On my way, I met almost 10/15 students and their parents each of them enquiring name and background( Did I ever tell you that till date I do not remember who is an engineer and who is a commerce graduate?..:P). When I went back to the room, I met my second roommate, Deepa( Phew, an easy name..).
Enter into the day when we would get to know our classmates. Has anyone heard of learning groups in a Bschool. Yes, and surely there was one here too. One of my group members spelled his name as “Rahoul". He was initially referred to as “the Rahul with an O”..:P:P and I wonder if the other 2 Rahuls in our batch felt left out at not having something as absurd as this.:)
Following the IIM tradition, we had names written on our seats and we had to be seated that way. (Poor things on the 1st bench). Now before the orientation started, we tried to search for people with whom we used to chat online before joining, all those who were famous/infamous on orkut and also those we met in the Bombay meet. But alas, that was not all that simple, because all of us were divided into 3 sections and people known from orkut weren’t all that recognisable, thanks to the tiny, long distant profile pictures. So the wait continued till the OBL, thats Outbound Learning.
Come 4th May, The OBL day, and we were in high spirits because we were to trek, walk blind folded on rods and do all sorts of adventurous activities. The name game followed us there too. We were paired in groups of 10/11 and expected to do these tasks and guess what, the first game itself had name remembering antics. You had to call out a person’s name from the group and throw the ball to her/him .Clever that we are, we remembered one person’s name and kept throwing the ball to the same person..:P:P.. Anyway the coordinators outsmarted us after realising what we were doing and made a rule that you cannot repeat names.:(. So by the end we forcibly added 11 more names in our list. Still over a 100 names to go, wonder how that is going to happen.
There we got to know that we had Ruchis, Ruchas, Richas as well as Ruchikas. Now tell me how do I remember who is who!!!. Oh, I forgot to mention the most important names of our batch, Sheetal and Shaleen. Lets take a wild guess if it was a girls name or a boys name. If all of you reading this long never ending article guessed it as a girl you are all wrong, there are guys by that name in our batch and I am not kidding. So isn’t the name game a fun filled event.?.:P
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
The March Past
March 1st 2009, my alarm rings in the morning and I reach out to switch it off and sleep for some more time but grrrrrr.... a message from SCMHRD smiling merrily at me. I knew this had to be something to do with the results, maybe a message saying please check your scores on site? Oh no! Wake up , rush to the computer , pray that net connection is on, connect to a site which would have been overloaded and then get impatient , dance up and down, pray and then pray harder till the site opens and finally and luckily you manage to check your result???
No , that was exactly not how it was! SCMHRD always surprised me and this time was no exception. The SMS clearly stated that I had got through SCMHRD..Wopiee!. Called up my friends and relatives and boasted how the SMS concept of SCM left an impression in my mind.
After a few days I received a letter from SCMHRD. I read that letter and my jaws dropped. I had probably never ever read such a letter in my life and hopefully will never ever again. It was the director blatantly telling us that this college was not for weak hearted and you better know what you are in for! But after the few initial jittery moments, for some reason (Let me warn you I am a bit crazy), I loved that message and I must have read it at least thrice as if I was thinking of writing a similar message sometime later in my life..:P:P. I went to Pune, paid my fees and confirmed my admission into SCMHRD.
Then came another surprise (This is when I learnt SCM will keep throwing surprises to you) , the E-learning module, a credit course..At this time you should really be a part of the orkut community. People were crazy. How much have you studied, which all subjects are you starting with, Did you understand this and that.. the questions never seemed to end. Oh , has anyone heard of this equation: SENIORS = SAVIOURS, SAVIOURS = GOD, Hence SENIORS = GOD? If no, you will hear it during your pre- joining days.
Students were throwing so many random questions at them and the seniors managed to catch each one of them very well. The questions ranged from laundry to bank to room arrangement, name it and the question was asked to the seniors. There even was a Ladies Special here (Everywhere Girls get their special quota..:P), which obviously was read by most of the guys too. Some were even giving us suggestions on how to spend the last few days before joining campus.
We managed to set up a small meet at Mumbai in May sometime with our seniors. Thanks to someone deciding on a place that never existed , we managed to spend almost an hour (or was it 2), searching for each other. Anyone who we felt was seemingly lost or dazed in the mall had to be an SCMHRDian, so we went ahead and asked them and most of the times our guesswork worked..Finally after meeting, we went to barista. And who told ragging started only after joining the campus, our 1st ragging session started there itself. We all were made to sing a song at Barista. Oh god , a night mare.. I am sure crowd started dispersing after hearing our braying (Did I hear someone say singing?). We got to know each other a bit, enjoyed and left the place waiting to meet each other back in college.
No , that was exactly not how it was! SCMHRD always surprised me and this time was no exception. The SMS clearly stated that I had got through SCMHRD..Wopiee!. Called up my friends and relatives and boasted how the SMS concept of SCM left an impression in my mind.
After a few days I received a letter from SCMHRD. I read that letter and my jaws dropped. I had probably never ever read such a letter in my life and hopefully will never ever again. It was the director blatantly telling us that this college was not for weak hearted and you better know what you are in for! But after the few initial jittery moments, for some reason (Let me warn you I am a bit crazy), I loved that message and I must have read it at least thrice as if I was thinking of writing a similar message sometime later in my life..:P:P. I went to Pune, paid my fees and confirmed my admission into SCMHRD.
Then came another surprise (This is when I learnt SCM will keep throwing surprises to you) , the E-learning module, a credit course..At this time you should really be a part of the orkut community. People were crazy. How much have you studied, which all subjects are you starting with, Did you understand this and that.. the questions never seemed to end. Oh , has anyone heard of this equation: SENIORS = SAVIOURS, SAVIOURS = GOD, Hence SENIORS = GOD? If no, you will hear it during your pre- joining days.
Students were throwing so many random questions at them and the seniors managed to catch each one of them very well. The questions ranged from laundry to bank to room arrangement, name it and the question was asked to the seniors. There even was a Ladies Special here (Everywhere Girls get their special quota..:P), which obviously was read by most of the guys too. Some were even giving us suggestions on how to spend the last few days before joining campus.
We managed to set up a small meet at Mumbai in May sometime with our seniors. Thanks to someone deciding on a place that never existed , we managed to spend almost an hour (or was it 2), searching for each other. Anyone who we felt was seemingly lost or dazed in the mall had to be an SCMHRDian, so we went ahead and asked them and most of the times our guesswork worked..Finally after meeting, we went to barista. And who told ragging started only after joining the campus, our 1st ragging session started there itself. We all were made to sing a song at Barista. Oh god , a night mare.. I am sure crowd started dispersing after hearing our braying (Did I hear someone say singing?). We got to know each other a bit, enjoyed and left the place waiting to meet each other back in college.
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