Konnecting priorities

So many things have been happening that I have completely lost track of my priorities. Somehow I feel that I am fast going on the track that I was on during my college days. With so many inter institute festivals coming up and myself trying to participate in as many of them as possible, things on the academic front have taken a backseat. With Dr. Chowdhury's Class Participation marks being based strictly on attendance, I am likely to miss out on quite a lot on the grades front. I am not even reading up anything on Fin and Ops either. With the term end coming closer, the load is only going to increase and if I carry on like this, it is certainly going to be a tough, tough time for me. In fact, even the supposedly comfortable subjects like Org Theory and Macro have started changing their faces, what with all the presentations, assignments, and projects lined up. BTW, the presentations in OB were good fun, with some nice stories in the mockingly smiling JC style as well as some draggingly non-stop folded handed montone from Pavithra, in addition to many others.

In the midst of all this guilt that I have been heaping over myself, I have also become a party to the team that has gone ahead with this initiative called Konnect. Last night witnessed the first of the events at Konnect and as Sandipan said later, I got an idea of what to expect in future. A decent gathering of about 60-odd people did make sure that Konnect has a decent chance to be sustainable in future but all the same, the kind of format that we have thought of for Konnect, actually (and even expectedly) resulted in a minor skirmish.

It all happened when Mustu and Ramesh's team at dumb charades depicted the figure of the alphabet A while trying to guess "A Suitable Boy". As I had already mentioned at the beginning of the event, any codes for alphabets were not allowed. When I tried to disqualify the team from this round, Hostel D residents, with Sandipan and Vinay shouting the most :-), started creating a ruckus. Things were going fine and I was trying to explain my logic on top of allegations that similar behavior had been excused earlier in the event. I was trying to tell them that earlier, I did not see it myself but now that I had seen it happening, I could not swallow the same. I thought that this would sink in but it was then that some more people got in the act and with Rohit, Sandipan, and Ravi (Konnect's bouncer???) going in for the pushing matches, the situation went from bad to worse.

Vikhyat says that I was wrong in finally ruling to disqualify the D Hostel team because after all, it was all meant for fun and the this was the bigger picture. Rules were minor issues that could be modified in view of the bigger picture. Though I did not tell this to him last night when I just heard him out and was rather weary of people not understanding the idea behind it, I do think otherwise. As far as my understanding goes, when we (Vikhyat included) thought of Konnect as an idea, the big picture was not just fun, but establishing a tradition of fun. I know that it sounds like a lot of crap and heavy stuff but it remains a fact that you can not really expect people to take something seriously if that some thing has no structure. This was also why I did not want too much flexibility in the events that we were organizing...why I did not want the event to be declared without making sure of the prizes, venue, clashes with other events...why I did not want to send a mail retracting the team size from 3 to 2...

Whatever happened, it actually resulted in something good for Konnect beacuse this is what we were looking for...a feeling of belonging for your own hostel and a sense of rivalry with others (the tone of the rivalry could have been kept down a bit ideally but then again, chalta hai).

Amongst other things, after the not-so-successful stint at BT Acumen in Bangalore, I am all set to go for the debate at ISB, for which we already have the topic and the information that there are about 20 odd teams registered and more expected. Gaurav is a good speaker and I just hope that I can do enough to match up to him and give the IIMK team some character (and not take away from it :-))

The campus seems to be full of ITC Business Plan banners and despite what Gagan says about it all being a compromise to reach a position where we don't have to compromise, I am still sceptical as to whether we are heading for a habit of compromising. At times, such a strategy, instead of adding to your image, actually erodes whatever there is of it, but then again, as Abhijit says, this thing might as well be happening in IIMA, for all I know. Whatever be the case, here's wishing all the teams who have qualified for the contest the very best of luck...Kolkata shall be ours.