Such Stuff as Dreams are Made of

Our little lives really ought to be rounded with a sleep. Will said so, and to suggest that Will was wrong about it is like saying Einstein never really understood Physics - not something the normal person would do.

I've clocked in very few hours for the past couple of days. People said the second term at IIMA was lighter than the first, and I'm starting to think it was just to make the fall harder. Free time, they said. Plenty of time to wander around the campus, they said. What I have to say to that is... but, in the interests of propriety, I'll censor it.

I've spent several hours trying to make my CV. It's not that it's a time-consuming process; how long does it take to calculate a few percentages? It just seems extremely absurd, when I haven't the faintest clue how to run my own life, to try to persuade HR managers that I know how to run projects for them. I mean, it's just been a year since people stopped commenting, "Teenagers!" with an accompanying shake of the head when I did something particularly foolish, and now I'm sitting in an air-conditioned classroom in a swivel chair passing judgement on Microsoft's accounting policy.

Does it make any sense at all?

My point exactly.

But I have work to do... a CV to write... another ridiculous attempt to prove that I actually know what I'm doing here...

Inferno

After a week of freedom, a week dedicated exclusively to pretending that I never heard the word "B-School" in my life, being back on campus is rather like descending, one by one, through the circles of Hell. The countdown, which touched zero just seven days ago, is now excrutiatingly close to the three-digit-number. The last page of the previous term's schedule just went the way of the dodo, but tomorrow there's going to be a brand new schedule for a brand new term full of working Saturdays.

I don't want to say lasciate ogne speranza, I really don't. It would not be very optimistic; furthermore, it would not be strictly true. There is some hope, and not just that the six days in December will ultimately come. If rumour is to be believed - and nobody ever accused the Hydra of lying, after all - the circle of ice is behind us, from the Caina to the Judecca. One could say Malebolge is behind us as well.

For that matter, one could say all the circles are behind us; the next two terms are Purgatorio more than Inferno. And once we have suffered for all the pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony and lust of our lives... Well, what comes next ought to be worth all the trouble.

Sometimes Dante's logic is slightly bewildering. Poor Virgil is left in Limbo because he did not follow a religion that did not even exist during his lifetime, but Dante himself, having set his allegorical stage with such pagan props as the Styx, and populated it with Minos, Cerberus and Antaeus, among others, is raised not just to the highest sphere of Paradiso, but to the Empyrean beyond.

I suppose he knew what he was about. And I will be satisfied if even the Sphere of the Moon is at the end of the terraces.

O, Courage, Courage, Princes!

There are two things I've always wished I'd seen. One is Alexander standing... well, suppliant is hardly the right word under the circumstances, so I'll just say standing... before the Oracle. Alexander's reputation for being remarkably easy on the eye has nothing to do with it - or so I claim. What I really want to see is the expression on her face, the most powerful person, without exception, in all Hellas, the voice of Apollo, at whose word kings were wont to tremble...

Yeah. Right.

The other thing is Achilles riding out after the fiasco with Patroclus. The Iliad builds to that, in the end; all the grandeur and savage beauty of twenty-four books lead up to that one passage. The fall of Ilion may have dropped the curtain on the Greek mythic pantheon, but Troy fell when Hector fell.

That's the trouble with the Iliad - with all books and plays about the Trojan War, for that matter. You don't know, at the end, whose side you were supposed to have been on.

At some point in the past four paragraphs I should possibly have mentioned that I have end-of-term exams from Monday. That is easily remedied; I'll mention it now: I have end-of-term exams from Monday. Last night my situation was dire, but it has now become so bad that it's actually funny... And I have no choice but to put all my faith in my guiding star.

And that's enough about exams. There's no reason to devote these fifteen minutes to them as well.

It's at times like this that I wish my knowledge of Greek extended beyond, "Phobos kai Deimos," which, incidentally, is what I'm feeling now. They're a nice pair to be the constant companions of the warlord. You don't even need a battle; the briefest hint of a skirmish is enough to make them pop up unpleasantly.

I know what Plum would have said. He would have said I should go through the next six days brandishing my pen like it's a banner with the strange device Excelsior. The only problem is that, brandish I never so well, I will not have Longfellow to write my epitaph.

But then... I will hopefully be alive and kicking on Thursday afternoon, all set to board that flight to freedom.

The Mome Raths Outgrabe

I've forgotten exactly how Humpty-Dumpty defined the words mome, raths and outgrabe, if indeed he did. But I do know that, had Lewis Carroll been a part of our week so far, he would have compared the experience to being bitten by the frumious Bandersnatch and clawed by the Jubjub bird, before falling afoul of the Jabberwock.

The week began with a Monday; need I say more? And this was a Monday that followed a weekend that was, for all practical purposes, nonexistent; furthermore, it ended with an Operations Management quiz. The thing about OM quizzes is that you're never quite sure to do with the preparation time. You think you know things. Two minutes before the TA starts handing out the paper, you stop thinking and start hoping you know things.

Then, of course, all illusions end.

Our HR project presentation was scheduled for Wednesday, which naturally put paid to all thoughts of sleep on Tuesday. And then there was the fact that we had been under the impression that the presentation would be next week... Anyway, we sat up till the wee hours of Wednesday morning, reducing twenty-page articles to twenty words to go on a powerpoint slide, and not preparing for the quiz we knew we would have.

I would feel slightly less aggrieved about that, and about the grade that I know will be on that quiz paper, if we had actually been called to present on Wednesday.

Wednesday's quiz... I'm not going to pretend I would have aced it under other circumstances, but I might have done marginally better - written in at least one correct entry - if our professor had not kept us in twenty minutes past time, giving us a recap of revenue recognition. (To add insult to inury, I thought that meant the quiz would have at least one question on revenue recognition, which it did not, and spent precious pre-quiz preparation time revising it.)

Today, though, was the icing on the cake. At 1240 hours, we were sure we would have an IC quiz at 2:30 pm. At 1325 hours, one of the TAs told us we had a quiz in Individual Dynamics at 2:00 pm. Since it was the first ID quiz (with ten days to go for the term), and since "Quizzes and Assignments" are worth 20% of our grade for the course, we were understandably alarmed, and we bolted.

At 1330 hours, we came to a screeching halt in front of a Quiz Notice Board that was... empty. There we were, ready to glower hatefully at the slip of paper announcing our doom, and there was the Notice Board, smug, omniscient, and irrefutably vacant.

"Nope," said we. "That can't be. We know we have a quiz. Ergo, the Notice Board must be wrong."

Never believe that. The Notice Board is always right, and we didn't have a quiz. But it was still five minutes of unnecessary tension followed by ten minutes of agonizing uncertainty. People who skipped lunch and ran straight to their rooms to mug might take a sterner view of the situation, but now I think it was all a bit funny. And I ask myself, what does the PGP system gain - other than seeing a classroom empty itself out in fifteen seconds, which is hardly an event worthy of the Olympic games - by making us think there's going to be a quiz when there isn't?

Will would put it down to Ariel - or possibly Puck. But to add Puck to the mix is not comforting.