<-life goes on->

The saying 'time flies' is just too true when you are enjoying yourselves. And that is exactly what I have been doing these 3 months!! Enjoy, enjoy and when i have sometime - enjoy! It is already the best 3 months of my lifetime!

Well, where to start... I left you just after the admission procedures, right? Thereafter, I learnt that there were quite a few guys from kerala whose rooms were near me. These guy - Jerin and Joseph (who incidentally are almost always together) - knew a second year from before. And another - Saneesh - got a room near some keralite M.Techs. Hence we got in touch with the group - Tech Keralites. But all that was in the social scenario.
The dean (or dosa as we so 'lovingly' call him) made us a week full of orientation programmes to get us acquainted with the system. It was quite interesting to learn all the facilities available to us. But I learnt soon that it was almost a waste of time 'cause we could have learnt all that they said ourselves better. The only good thing out of that was the contacts we got which we could have got from a brochure!

Then came the classes. I had high expectations for the professors and their methods of teaching. I don't remember what my first class was but I soon learnt that the fame the teachers got outside IIT was only because of a few professors like my mechanics sir : Prof. B. Maiti and pds sir : Prof. Rajib Mall. My physics and math professors couldn't have made the two most interesting subjects in the world more boring than they have done now. Staying awake in class was a dream that even hard core maggus find it difficult to make real.

In between all the classes, we had selection procedures, workshops, interviews, etc. from all the societies in iitkgp. There was dance, drama, singing, literature, robotics, entrepreneurship, sports, interviews for representing iitkgp in certain fests and for volunteering... I went for the dance workshop. I was quite a beginner in dancing. I hadn't really danced since 2nd grade!! But i liked the concept.. So the seniors were impressed.. but they settled for selecting those who already knew a bit of dance... Since drama workshops were going on along with the dance, i couldn't try them out too! Of course, i didn't go for the singing. I don't even know one full song!

The most popular society was without doubt the Robotics Society and mainly KRAIG (which was its technical division). After all, we came here to become engineers. Its but natural that we are attracted to robotics. But I didn't get selected into either the Robotics team or the KRAIG team.. For KRAIG, there actually was a written test and it had to be conducted in 4 classes with a strength of 200 each!! I didn't listen to many of the robotics lectures anyway. So it wasn't much of a shock...

Then the next best thing was the selections for Kshitij and Springfest, the two big fests - the former technical and the latter social and cultural.. We heard a lot about it from our seniors as to how much fun they are.. They were both in January and the promotions and preparations were starting soon.

But before that there were the midsems... They were, in short, a nightmare.. With all the happenings going on, I never did do much studying except for the beginning of the sem. I would put a lot of blame on dc++ though. DC++ was THE best thing to happen in iitkgp. In iitkgp, we have the largest lan network in asia connecting all the laptops and computers of the students from every room. I have not yet found something that cannot be found in dc. Movies, tv shows, stand up comedies, e-books, softwares, music, bhajan (u know what i mean and if u don't, i ain't gonna explain), video lectures, comics... the list goes on forever..! So who in the right mind would not check it out and thus waste hours on it?? I must have watched atleast 30 movies after reaching kharagpur apart from the ones the show every saturday at the Netaji Auditorium (which anyway has poor sound quality)!
Well anyway, I did do some mugging towards the end. My habit of understanding the subject while in class itself paid off in the end and i just passed in physics. Got a respectable grade in math and did well in comp. Our mech prof still hasnt told us how bad we did in his subj. I presume it would have to be VERY bad for him not to reveal it to us. or VERY good. Who cares??

Then came the Durga Puja Holidays. We got abt 10 days of holz. And so i decided to go to kerala. I don't remember well but i think mom did call me to go meet her instead.. Oh by the way, i call my parents everyday. Most guys think that's not necessary or its childish.. but i love them so and mom would freak out if i didn't anyway! ;)
So i had a good time in kerala being nice to my relatives and vice-versa.. But i was craving to spend more time in kgp..

Ok, after that came the selections to become advertise SpringFest in various colleges.. I think I did well to the point that they heard that i wasn't going to kerala for my winter holz. They weren't very interested to publicise in colleges of UAE!! The same thing happened in an interview to publicise GES - 2009 (Global Entrepreneurship Summit) except that this one was almost a sure selection till that point. Oh then there was this interview for selection into Space Society which was in collaboration with ISRO.. I really wanted this one to work out.. I donno why i didn't get selected.. I think i lacked self-confidence then. Anyway my friend Kelin got selected by bragging about himself (or so he told me). He told he had skills he didn't have and is in quite a fix now!!

Backing to the social scenario again, I still have keralites to be one of my best friends yet. Saneesh, the gr8 sleeper, Govinda, the lazy, and Jerin, the super lazy were in my section and we often go to class together... Oh, except for Jerin who starts bathing when the class is supposed to start..! Then there's the bookworm Joseph, the funny-n-witty Abhinav, the pj-cracker Kelin, the hot(he's muscular - just to clarify that i ain't gay - yet) Atul, the serious Jerrin Joy (ya we have two jerins - one with a double r though), the super-duper serious Jijin and rival-to-Kelin-in-pj-cracking Anirudh. That's basically the ones i am usually around with when it comes to keralites. Then there's Rishabh (got to meet him cuz he was Joseph's roomie but he's a member of HTDS - one of the cool societies), Abhishek (the pervert roomie of Abhinav), Saurabh (the less pervert football freak living opposite to Joseph) and Vishnu (who knows malayalam, telugu, marathi, hindi and english - jack of everything, king of none - so he's the butt of a lot of jokes). That's a small list of those who i know but these are the ones i see most often..
One of the greatest traditions in iitkgp is GPL -> Gaand Pe Laath. If you have had the unfortunate luck of revealing your b'day to anyone in kgp, u r in for a series of nightmares in the nights preceding your b'day. But one of the funniest incidents happened during my b'day... The group came to gimme my share and Joseph was talking abt him being a black belt which incidentally i am too and so is Govinda, and on his first kick, i clenched and he goes "OOOWWWWWW!!!!" :D I mean, what the hell???? He kicks ME and HE goes "OW"??!! He's still the butt of certain jokes regarding that... Anyway, the most recent one we gave was to Joseph itself. He had not told us that his b'day was on 7th Oct and we decided to celebrate it on 7th Nov with more macho. We roused him from his sleep, gave him a gud GPL, got some water (in the meantime he started running), i chased him, splashed him on his butt (after all it needed cooling!) and ya it was all my idea! ;)

Our hostel is a 10 minute cycling from the class. We have classes mainly in Vikramshila (V4)(with A/c) and some tutorial classes (taken by PhDs or MTechs) in the main building(without A/c - damn). So if you woke up late some day, it is quite difficult to summon your butt from your bed, to the showers and then take a cycle till class. So we do proxying. Easy and simple. Though some have found it to their chagrin that it isn't SOO easy that you can put a completely different sign! Akshay (a friend of a friend from abudhabi) was a victim to mech sir once.. When i think of punishment in iitkgp, it is inevitable to think of disco (Disciplinary Committee before you spit out your coffee). Abhishek got caught for writing 'If you are the Abhinav i know, you are pissing me off!' in the IIT site meant for "study purposes only!" His parents got called and he had to do some work in the library.. but I gotta appreciate his nerve.