Jairam's Jives

As usual, Pasha, as Prashant Shah is known up here on the hill, showed his professionalism to the core. The quiz although started a few minutes late due to non-availability of participants, was conducted extremely professionally.

The fact that he didn’t have any of those messy audio or visual rounds added to the quiz finishing off in two hours flat. All the questions were eminently guessable. None of them were so vague that people wouldn’t have even have imagined of the answers.

The questions covered a broad gamut of business affairs, personalities, stock markets, brands, ad-lines, etc. All in all, a good quizzing experience.

Yours truly couldn’t make it beyond the preliminaries, but then kept scores for the finals.

Well, like the title sez it’s quite literally raining quizzes up here at the lone hill of IIM Indore. Ever since Ashwin has taken over as the Quiz Club secretary, his one-point agenda has been to conduct as many quizzes as is operationally possible. And further, he’s made sure that it is operationally possible to conduct a good number of quizzes.

What is it about money that makes people go mad? Regular people like you and me suddenly get their priorities all skewed just for the sake of making a few bucks. People who are alright the rest of the time just seem to do these weird things when the stakes are a few thousand rupees.

People who go out of their way to help their friends, who talk about making a difference to the society and the lives of the people they are friends with, go awry when some money is waved in front of their noses.

Today an old enemy decided to confront me again. There I was sitting in class expecting a run-of-the-mill Operations Management session, but then the Research Associate (quite a cute one at that too) enters the class along with the Prof and announces that we’ll have a 12 minute quiz.

Most of us youngsters take so many things in our lives for granted, for eg, the freedom of speech, of expression, of movement, of assembling, of protesting whatever we dislike. But, have we stopped for a moment and wondered where all this freedom comes to us from.

Let me be honest, today was probably the first Republic Day that I gave it some serious thought myself. We were given a small card which contained the preamble of the Constitution and were asked to read it out aloud.

I really doubt it if any of us can truly say that we haven’t committed any mistakes in our lives at all. According to me, all of us have at some point or the other committed either silly errors or grave mistakes. But then, I believe that if a person owns up to his mistake, he should at least be granted some leeway in terms of responsibility.

Now don’t get me wrong.

Was just reading an old issue of Businessworld and came across this Country feature on Singapore. As per BW’s reports, this small island nation (man, can we even call that place a nation) is probably the next biggest thing in Asia as far as trade and services go.

There’s nothing quite like a good quizzing experience. Win or lose, just participating or even sitting in the audience of a well conducted quiz has always been a learning experience for me.

Today, after a long hiatus, for whatever reasons, the Quiz Club of IIM Indore conducted a Lone Wolf Quiz. One of those rare quizzes where only individuals can take part. Firstly I was lucky enough to make the small cut off of 5/30 to enter the finals. There I guess I was good/lucky enough to hit third place.

Although my sleep patterns at IIM Indore are well documented, here they go for the benefit of those who are unaware of the same:

1400 hrs to 1700 hrs – This gets changed to 1545 hrs to 1700 hrs in case there is a quiz in the afternoon.

0300 hrs to 0745 hrs – This happens irrespective of whatever submission I have, whatever end-terms I have.

The only reason that I put this in this post is to figure out where I went wrong yesterday.

The mood to party seems to have descended big time on the hillock of IIM Indore. Now that there’s hardly any time that we have to have the whole 193 sprawling acres of the entire campus entirely to ourselves, we kind of decided to make the PGP2 batch feel a little nostalgic. Therefore, we are throwing them a party the likes of which they probably wouldn’t have seen anytime in the recent past.

Preparations are on at full swing.