A Catty Affair

Even though I do not want to begin this post with this sentence, I'm still doing it 'coz I can't find anything better. Some things are meant to be. Yesterday when I woke up, I heard an animal/bird's cry from my window. When it didn't stop for some ten minutes, I stepped out to see what/who it really was. I followed the sound to an open manhole. Could not have been anything other than a cat. There was another cat standing beside it, and seemed to look at me with a lot of anticipation. I got a little worried, so came in, tried calling the dear old NDMC who were at fault this time, but could not get through. Then I tried calling one of the nearest animal shelters, Friendicoes, but no luck there either. Called my neighbours next, 'coz they're the ones always feeding all the cats around. They tried calling another NGO, but no luck again. Call it failure due to heavy rains, or just a general lack of emergency services around. After some more thinking and worrying came a suggestion from a friend- to catch hold of some DMRC labourers and get them to do the job. I ran to the construction site and found a man who was willing to help. But he wanted to wait for his friend so they took twenty minutes (which seemed like an eternity) to come. I kept checking for the cat's cries. At least they assured that it was still alive. The one outside was losing it by then. I could see it begging me for help, but I was helpless too. Then I saw a kitten next to the cat and figured it was a mother begging. It was another one of its kittens that had fallen in. By the time the Metro guys came, it stopped crying or even responding to its mother. And it wasn't visible either. They tried looking for it but couldn't find it. After some time, they gave up and left. Also closed the hole's cover because the other two family members were ready to jump in. That meant the end of the one inside.
After some time, it seemed other neighbours had also called NDMC, so they came this time and did a pseudo check to confirm that they can't find the kitten, and to say that it wasn't their mistake. Seemed like a final end to its life. I was sadder than I thought I could ever be over the death of a cat.
Its mother and sibling cried for the rest of the day, and night. I think I cried a little too. Maybe I should have woken up a little earlier. But it was meant to be.

It needs to be understood that I live around some very influential people. The house on the other side of the manhole is occupied by the family of a senior police official. They seemed to be having some trouble with their drain pipe, and they believed it was because of the same kitten. So today morning, while it was still pouring heavily, came two men who were ready to dismantle the entire pipe. After a few minutes, they figured that the kitten was stuck at the point where the pipe opened into the manhole. And it was still alive. I guess it had given up hope yesterday when it stopped crying. So after another few minutes, the absolutely tiny little chooza was taken out. Phew! What relief for its family, and all the spectators of the neighbourhood. I think now it should be slapped too because I am sure it must have been playing and acting stupid around the dangerous place. :) But I was unbelievably happy to see it come out. That poor little trembling thing. Survived an entire day in a hellhole. Guess it was after all meant to live longer.

It has been several hours, but they're all still crying. I guess it will take them some time to get over the happy ending! Or maybe they'll never want to get over it.

The DMRC Bubble

It's time for some DMRC bashing today. In the last five years, I have never heard anything negative about it. In fact, it's always been a lot of praise about their way of functioning. Now my opinion shall differ since I am seeing and experiencing things first hand. The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation is carrying out its construction work not more than 100 metres away from my home. Even though there have been quite a few inconveniences in the past year, I have been patient about them because they are all temporary. I need to walk ten extra minutes to reach the market that was literally two minutes away, I have to sleep on a bed that vibrates through the night (and nothing fun in this vibration, so hold that thought.), and in general, live with a lot of chaos and noise. But it's all fine. What is not fine is this - to carry out their work, they have blocked all drains leading out of this locality. In some parts, they still unblock them once a week/ten days, and let the system clean up. But on my side of the world, they don't believe in taking the trouble. It has been three months. Of course, first we thought that it is something wrong with the drains leading out of our house. So we contacted the concerned authority - CPWD in this case. Turned out that the drain for the entire lane is blocked. So it was now NDMC's work. NDMC is one government organisation that I LOVE. In the last 11 years, they have never given a reason to complain. And mind you, maintenance of houses that were built during the British times is not easy! So, people from NDMC visited the area every single day for about two weeks. Every day they tried their best to clean up the place. Finally they told us to directly get in touch with senior Metro officials. Well, the Metro people have to live by a certain image built over time, so they are polite every time you talk to them. But, they seem to be only talking. Officer 1, officer 2, officer 3 - they are all the same. When no. 3 was approached, no. 1 was sitting with him and recognised us as the ones who came with the same problem earlier too. Some guts I must say! To not do someone's work and still recognise them. Unique they are for sure.
My house has obviously become a shelter for mosquitoes. Air fresheners obviously do not work. Neither do requests. I hope, like a lot of my posts, this reaches the top of Google's results when someone comes looking for DMRC. And in case they come ego-surfing, I live near the under-construction INA station. Thank you very much! Bloody @#$%^&*!!

Five Days of Drama

Now that I am back home and have all the time in the world to write a detailed post, I shall get down to the experience called PUNE. I'm already warning you - this post might get super lengthy!

On the morning of the 23rd, I set out for the IGI Airport for my first ever flight. Nice and smooth check in, security check and boarding, and I was on DN 627 to Pune. A long queue for security check led to a delay of 30 minutes, but the pilot was extra smart (must have been on highways for a long time), he crossed the speed limit and made us reach Pune at the scheduled time, i.e., in 1.5 hours flat. Thankfully, I had a window seat. Looking inside the plane was making me sick. The take-off was not as noisy as I was told it would be. The moments when the plane was settling in the air were the most uncomfortable. Yes, the same old sickening joy ride/elevator feeling. But thankfully they were only a couple of seconds. The ears got blocked for some time, the sun's rays were very strong, but I was all right. The landing was also pretty smooth. I clicked a lot of pictures. Did take an hour to realise that I needed to reduce the exposure by two stops, so Picasa is now helping me with ALL the over-exposed pictures, but I still feel they're quite funky.

Now 23rd was the only day when I could go sight-seeing. I was not going to have any time after that. Tried finding out about the Sinhagarh Fort, but it was way too far. So this guy from the guest house offered to show us around in the nearby area. We first went to the Pataleshwar Caves. A small place, sort of a temple of Lord Shiv. But it looked more like a hangout place for students of the College of Engineering that was located close-by. So the environment was strange, and I was anyway not too keen on checking out a temple. Just spent five minutes there, and headed out.

Inside the caves

Our guide said that the next destination is also a walkable distance away, so we were on foot to Shaniwar Wada from there. This was built by the Peshwas in 1732. It is supposed to be a protected monument, but not quite protected. There was a wall inside which must have had paintings on marble, but there had been no attempt to preserve or redo those.

Inside Shaniwar Wada

View from the top

Then again he said we could walk more. I was getting tired, but he kept telling me about the place in an accent that was hard to understand, but the man was being real nice. We reached an area which I was starting to think looks like Chandni Chowk when he mentioned the same himself. We were around Laxmi Road and the surrounding area. He took us to the oldest Ganpati Temple there. I was not in a mood to go in and join the rush, so I looked around for water while mom went in to say a little prayer.

We walked MORE and mom shopped for some cotton sarees. And then I could walk no more, and we took an auto back to the guest house. The autos there have the meters that Delhi autos used to have long back. The ones for which you multiply, divide, calculate a percentage and do all of that to reach the fare figure. Thank god for the simple meters that we now have in Delhi!

Two things that were common on the streets were:
# Women tie a cloth all over their head and face. Initially I thought it must be something religious, but I think it was only because of the dust and pollution. All kinds of women....across various demographic were wearing those. And man, the dust and pollution are really crazy there!! INsane!

# Bal Thakeray's posters and images are all over the city. That's not anything surprising. The surprising/amusing thing was that his posters were being sold on the pavements. He was accompanied by ganpati, sai baba, and the likes. Really funny!

The next day started the Symbiosis story. The admission process was combined with their communication fest, FESTOCOM. A day dedicated to each of their specialisations - Public Relations, Advertising, and Journalism. Half a day of non-stop lectures/talks by industry stalwarts. It did not matter that there were a thousand other people from all over the country there. Guests were most important, and we were not on the guest list. So it was no big deal to harass us and our parents. Make us wait like crazy and call themselves a management/communication college. So we wait to get documents verified, and the admn office has breakfast. We wait for our interview with seniors, and other seniors interview us outside the rooms with a camera and a mic and make us say that we didn't choose MICA/Jamia over SIMC. Yes, my @#$! But the winner remains the director of this college. He was overwhelmed by the audience sitting in his auditorium, and students also on the stairs in the aisles. Maybe he forgot that the audience sat there out of compulsion. Also, to say that he was a creep would be an understatement. My recent past won't make me call myself lucky, but I think I am. He was distributing free hugs and pecks on the cheeks (to women of course). I am so glad I did not get one. Now the reason could be that he didn't think I was pretty enough, my assignments weren't pretty enough, or that he'd hugged the woman who'd gone in just before me. Whatever it may be, after waiting for three hours on one day, and another three (in a queue of course) to see him, I did not want him to touch me. And his language!! It could have been thanks to the region, but I am not giving him any benefit of doubt. I did interact with a few locals and they did not talk the way he did. I was not in a cafe with him for him to say, "aaja, baith ja; kaisa laga tere ko campus?" DUDE! God made english for such days and occasions!

And he would spend half a minute on the assignment that every applicant spent day & night for a week to make, and that carried 30% weightage in the total evaluation. It did not matter that people had been waiting forever. 2 to 3 hour delay on the first day, half a day's delay on the second, and an entire day's delay on the third. You don't even want to know the situation that there was on the last day. I stood in a line from 4:30 p.m. till 7:00 p.m. on day 2, got snapped at and then obviously got into a tiff with the creep's chapdasi on the next day, and then stood in line from 6:00 p.m. till 8:30 p.m. for my turn to see the man! Wow!

The people who interviewed me! They looked like anything but teachers of a communication college. They didn't know what to ask me, they didn't know what consulting firms around the world do (even after being explained about it), and they just didn't have the personalities to be sitting in an interviewer's seat.

My group discussion, which actually had a different format, went much better than expected. I did fairly well. But I don't think it matters.

Inside the campus

End of day outside the college building

Coming back to the fest and the lectures and interactive sessions. I mentioned some of the people that came in my last post, and they really were amazing. The common thing was that they were all incredible speakers and presenters.
The guy from the ITC group, Arup Ghosh, spoke about corporate social responsibility. I knew that they have done a lot of work in rural India, but they have done A LOT of work in the remotest of areas.
Bhaskar Das from TOI spoke for a VERY long time, but the man's intellect, experience, creativity, all came across in that hour. It was a delight listening to him.
The next day was dedicated to journo. Sumeet Awasthi from IBN 7 publicly apologised for all the crap Hindi news channels, including his have shown in the recent past.
Right after him was Vidya Shankar Aiyar from CNN-IBN, and man was he articulate or what! He had such smoothness and subtlety in his speech, that I don't think anybody realised that he spoke for over 45 minutes.
The third day started with Pushpinder Singh, who has apparently won the most number of Abbys. He talked about the Amul Macho, ye to bada toing hai campain in detail. It did not change my view that it was a highly disgusting ad, but it did give me a better perspective. His wit was terrific too. And being the special audience, we got to view the next ad of the campaign which is still not on air. It is much better than the first one, and quite funny too.
The fest ended with Alyque Padamsee. I had always heard that he's a very eccentric man, and yes, he is! He rattled on for 90 minutes, but I have to say that he kept his audience engrossed the whole time.
In between came two guys who recently started an ad agency of their own. The agency is called Happy, and the men are Praveen Das and Kartik Iyer who were creative directors for O&M earlier. Kartik spoke, and did he leave an impression on every mind there or what! They bagged the Lee account within the first two months, and their work is just so cool!!!

Life outside of campus was dull. There was nothing to do at the guest house. I did click a few pictures on the last day though.

Yours truly

On the way back, I saw the Pune Jail in Yerawada. One beautiful structure it was! The flight back home got delayed a little too, and I didn't have the super-pilot of the previous journey, so it took two hours only. Actually, it was the turbulent weather that caused the delay. And I was moving above the clouds. Saw the Mumbai-Pune expressway and the Arabian Sea (I'm guessing) from the plane, but could not see a spot of Rajasthan because of the clouds. It was all white outside.

It felt so cool keeping the focus of my camera at infinity

Also saw the Select City Walk mall, Saket from up there. The moment I got off the plane, the wind hit me and welcomed me back home. It felt sooo nice to be greeted like that, but now I wish that I was in Pune (only for the weather). It's frikkin' cold here! But it's good to be back home.

XLRI n all that jazz!

As most of you know, I am in my second consecutive season of writing MBA entrances. So there has been a series of out-of-the-way exam venues that I have been to in the last two years, but nothing could beat where XLRI sent me today. I live in south Delhi, and I have been to places like Nimri Colony, Ashok Vihar, Keshav Puram, Prasad Nagar and so forth without really complaining too much because I accept the fact that no institute takes into consideration where you live. But today XLRI beat everybody! They sent me to a school called Kamal Model Senior Secondary School in Mohun Garden. This place is anyway quite far from my place, but when I reached there, I could not even allow myself to compare it to a village. It was worse. I know Delhi is huge, and not all areas are as nice as the south, but that does not allow an institute like XLRI to save costs in this manner. Cars could barely manage to go in to the galis that led to the school. And I will really not blame any of the people who reached there half an hour after the commencement of the exam. It took the expertise of my father who's lived here for 40 years AND Google Maps for me to locate that school. And it didn't end there. I think the school has been designed for the ideal stampede, if there is any such thing that exists. Apparently there was only one staircase (OR I think they were saving more costs by not deploying another person at some other entrance to guide people) which would have hardly been one metre wide.
So whatever nice things I was saying about them yesterday because they SMSd, emailed, AND called me to inform me of the last minute change in the test centre (unlike what I heard Symbiosis did last year) got negated because of this beautiful experience I had.
And mine was not an isolated one. I really think they saved money by under-staffing all venues, because Army Public School (which was a fairly decent experience last year for the same exam) was in quite a pathetic state too. Apparently, there were hardly any directions given, and people were running all over the school looking for their seats. One might pass off my centre as a small under-equipped school, but APS is supposed to be a good public school, and there is no reason why such things should happen there.

XLRI is supposed to be one of the best B-Schools of our country, one really does not expect such sub-standard stuff from it!