A Day that Never Ends

The sound of alarm playing spoilsport brings you back to senses, you check the clock with half closed eyes and realize that waking up can’t be delayed any further as it is routine wake up time (20 minutes before class) irrespective of class timing(standard deviation being almost zero). After unwillingly getting out of your kingdom (bed, no one can challenge you there), you brush your teeth. Now you come across a tradeoff between bath and breakfast. As the deodorant has its own limitations (remember you hadn’t taken bath yesterday either), you sacrifice those mouth watering parathas and idlis for the benefit of your class-mates and move towards the bathroom only to find that those bathrooms are already running house full as it is peak time and you get a chance to enter into nearby ‘white house’. While you are busy there, you hear the voice of door opening and quickly finishing things, you get hold of the bathroom before it is hijacked by someone else (this can be termed as “bathroom management”). The shower of hot water opens your eyes fully and you kind of settle the score by ignoring all the calls from outside such as “Kamine kya kar raha hai, jaldi bahar aaja”. After getting ready, you start running towards the class and while running you come across a line on the T-shirt of a fellow Spartan, ”Three things to do, wake up, survive and go to bed” and a thought comes to your mind, is it the theme of the day?

You fill any vacant chair in the classroom without any fear as it is the lecture of a cool professor (cooler than the AC) who will give information on technology (Why the professors of informative subjects are so nice where as professors of particular ‘economical’ subjects are too strict, can be a subject of empirical study).The professor starts the lecture and sincerely ‘facing the books’ (text books) students build concentration. The Sense of humour of the professor grabs your attention and you come to know that there is something called as cloud (computing), which does not rain below certain temperature (Being non IT student, it is obvious). After an hour, someone asked about taking a break. After getting used to marathons (three hour sessions), it is like taking a break for a 500 meter race. But being a smart manager, you make full utilization of the opportunity and the break of 5 minutes  ends up into a 15 minute break.

In another lecture, professor randomly calls a group to present and you get to witness the law “Figures can lie” as the probability of 1/30 suddenly turns into one. Wasting no time, you quickly take the class through the presentation to the most fascinating slide for any presenter (saying ‘Thank you’) as if the microphone in your hand is a live bomb which could explode any time. A round of applause follows which turns your head high (as you carefully ignore the probability that those claps could have been for quickly finishing the presentation).Then, despite of that big ‘Thank you’ on the screen, you get bombarded with several questions from all corners. You retaliate along with your group members and the session turns into a wonderful discussion (& sometimes hiring of nurses turns into a 2 hour discussion).

You swim to another lake for the next class(names of our classroom begin with lake such as Lake Veeranam, Lake Ontario) and secure a safe place as the professor has threatened in the previous lecture that if you come to the class without doing the pre-reads, you will be shown the door (though you know exactly where it is).The thought of financial freedom (retiring at the age of 45) and the skills of the professor get you involved in the investment related discussion. As the lecture proceeds, you learn so much that your retirement age automatically comes down to 40. (With pre-reads, you may have second thoughts about appearing in campus interviews. Moral: Doing pre-reads is too risky).

You never realize when those three hours have passed. To hold the nerve of the audience, a Bollywood movie needs songs, action, emotion, love scenes (I will not go further) and here a professor with the help of PPTS without much power(as they contain few words),holds the attention of about 150 students. In the last few minutes, the centre of attraction shifts to the biometric machines as the next lecture is after half an hour away and you have to take lunch in between. You run like the best athlete in the world towards the biometric machine and end up joining a queue (which contains several Usain Bolts). Every passing minute in that queue appears like an hour and to add to your ado, the biometric machine requests you to try several times. Then you run to the canteen to join yet another queue (Akhir kyun yeh queue?).

While standing in the queue, you witness smart team work by a few Spartans (single plate carrying food for several people). Initially you ignore soup as you are running short of time, but it pulls you towards itself and that delicious ‘Gajar ka Halwa’ makes sure that you are left with few minutes before going to the class. While you are running towards the classroom, a new dish gets formed in your stomach with the combination of halwa and soup.

You successfully squeeze in through half closed door, your thumb says ‘hi’ to the biometrics machine (ab toh har jagah ungli karne ki aadat pad gayi hai). Your eyes start scanning the last row for a vacant place and you occupy the very last chair (one behind the last row) feeling like a victorious king. But the smart professor brings back you to reality by calling you to fill the vacant seat in the front row and you tag yourself there with a plate showing kaidi no...(oops FT no....).Now the combination of Halva and Soup start showing its side effect and everything around starts appearing blurred and sometimes you go out of coverage area. But the thought of missing physical attendance brings you back into coverage and the announcement of (not so) surprise quizzes acts as an eye opener.

For the next two hours, the professor takes you through market research as if doing a research in the class itself till comes the time for the ‘Big’ quiz. The quiz starts with that question paper smiling sarcastically at you and saying ‘Best of Luck’ at the end (Considering the nature of question paper, professor sensed the need of luck in advance). Felling tense you look around and feel a bit relaxed as you find the same question mark on most of the faces around (Though there is a hole in our boat, most of us are sailing in the same boat and we can ‘relatively mark’ the shore). And as always there will be outliers, for those below ”Folks, you make us proud” and for those above, Mr. Bill Gates has said something “I never topped a college but toppers from best of the universities work for my company”(Kidding folks, one day you will make our country proud). After the quiz, your neighbour discusses the problems he faced while solving the questions and you smile at yourself as you never faced any problems during exams instead those problems prefer to greet you only during the results as if conspiring against you. The professor discusses the solution and you realize that though you have not nailed it but still did a good job, just by paying attention in the class.

Then you rush to the canteen and as usual join another queue (After a year, one will be so used to standing in the queue that for a moment you will think about joining a queue even on your marriage day). You eat those snacks and if that snack is fried in oil then you need to issue few tissue papers to squeeze out the oil (are there any oil wells in those mango gardens behind the cafeteria?). Back to the room, you pay a small installment of sleep of about 15 minutes (everything is on fast track) and rush to the college gate for the weekly visit(As a part of experiential leadership development project called as karmyoga,we visit nearby village and target given to us is to turn those villagers into followers by creating positive impact on their lives).

Then you start an alien trip to a nearby village (as both the words ‘Yoga’ and ‘Karma’ were alien to you till a few months ago). While sitting in the bus, you set the binocular so as to search any potential follower as you are aware that a transformational leader makes a sheep lion realize that he is a lion without even knowing his language. After conducting an unsuccessful search operation for a follower in every corner of the village, you start feeling low and turn back with hope  that someone might be following you, instead you find that even your shadow is not following you. That’s when a bunch of children, with whom you interacted during the last visit greet you and start playing with your laptop with the kind of curiosity that only a child can display. After spreading educational awareness, you join the celebration of life and play a few games with them. You realize that while transforming others, you yourself are getting transformed into a better human being (strange situation of”being a leader and a follower at the same time”) and you leave your village high on enthusiasm.

Once back in college, being proactive you take a bath (tomorrow’s class is at 8 am), then the house-keeping guys come to make your life bearable by cleaning the room (can’t even imagine boys hostel without these guys). You get a solution for the assignment to be submitted the next day and in order to give it an original touch, you get involved and an outcome comes which can be saluted by any plagiarism software.

While having dinner, power supply goes out for a minute and you listen to several rock stars howling in their innate voices. After dinner comes the time to work with CEO’s-in-making (Group mates, very true in my case) and prepare a few ‘polythene coated PPT's’. In the Bistro, while sipping on cold coffee you listen to the words “Oh shit!” Followed by”you are the maan” and the man himself enlightens others with his knowledge with the use of flowery language (If mere use of the ‘F’ word would have increased population then he alone would have doubled the world population).Both of them exchange knowledge in their natural high tones (which helps keep the Bistro employees awake in those late hours). By the time your work gets done it is well beyond midnight and you again loose the opportunity of sleeping and waking on different days (Sometimes you join much acclaimed club of ‘free loaders’ so as to have a wholesale sleep).

Back to your kingdom (bed), your eyes find it hard to sleep (they are used to sleeping under close supervision of the professor with knowledge flowing all around) and all the events from morning runs as a flashback in your mind and it makes you realize that the theme of the day is “Wake up, get empowered and stay awake as much as you can”.

Next morning, again you find yourself lucky as you come out of the bathroom and after watching the clock, a chartbuster song starts playing at the back of your mind”Bhag bhag....bhag bhag...you know the rest”.

And you embark on an enriching journey of another day that never ends.

Cheers,

Mahesh Godse.