Through the Inferno

There are those who could, at this point, quote with justifiable pride the words from the banner borne through Caesar's triumph. But, as a friend commented to me, "we conquered" can be, for some people, a rather inappropriate description of IIMA's first year. A better one - although he was politer about it - would be "we cowered on the sidelines until Vercingetorix had his hands full with Julius, and then snuck quietly past while his back was turned".

Good or bad though, it is over. And unless the glory days of Rome return, complete with the slaves on the rowing decks of the triremes, there is very little that could prove more stressful. The greatest "learning" you get from first year is the knowledge that your limits are a lot farther out than you thought they were; when you've sat up till half-past five in the morning to finish an assignment, run into your classroom at five seconds to nine, and stayed up till three the next night - all this two days before your end-of-term exams and in the certain knowledge that you weren't going to get a good grade on the assignment anyway - you're unlikely to be fazed by stress on the job.

All I can feel right now is relief. Forget placements and grades and social pressure, the biggest incentive to study in fachcha year is that if you don't, you'll have to go through it a second time. No more waiting with bated breath in front of the Quiz Notice Board, no more running through the underpass with the brown envelope on Saturday afternoons...

Congratulations to everyone who has slain, tamed or crept stealthily past the dragon. This will be a day to remember.

In the Year of Grace 1564

Maybe, a few months earlier, Mary Arden had seen the shadow of Venus on the snow. Maybe, on that April morning, the sun shone benevolently from a cloudless sky on the sparkling waters of the Avon. Maybe, just maybe, every lark in England alit by a country church in a small village and burst into joyous paean.

And maybe, as is far less poetic but far more likely, it was a muggy day with the rain pouring in sheets and turning Stratford's picturesque lanes into strips of unpleasantly squelchy mud, and those larks who were not going about their business in other parts of Elizabeth's realm were cowering beneath eaves and rafters waiting for the showers to stop.

Whether or not the birds and the sun and the clouds marked that day, the Muses did. The year was one of abundance for them; they had, exactly two months previously, stood over the cradle of the one person since Euripides who could, had he not been rudely interrupted by a rooming-house brawl at the age of 29, have equalled if not exceeded Shakespeare's mastery.

In the years since he lived, volumes have been written about the Bard and his work. He has been reviled, extolled, equated with God and Satan and a host of entities in between, accused of being Bacon/Marlowe/both, and had his work dissected with a 0.001-micrometer scalpel under a 200X microscope. That he manages, despite the weight of his reputation, to enthrall his audience today as surely as he did when that audience consisted of sixteenth-century Londoners, is testimony to his mastery.

By now I daresay I would have been, mentally at least, relegated to the ranks of those who should be marooned on a desert island in the Pacific with only a palm tree for company. Before some civic-minded citizens decide to suit the action to the word, let me only say that performances for the Elizabethan court and gravely intellectual pedagogues who had read more words than they had heard spoken were not the reason for Shakespeare's popularity in his day, and are not the reason for his enduring appeal.

Enough mystery still surrounds him to keep historians occupied for years. In 1612 he wrote Henry VIII, the disputed The Two Noble Kinsmen and the now-lost Cardenio; there, to the best of our knowledge at least, his writings end. It was, perhaps, natural for the playwright to choose to leave London and return to Stratford as his fiftieth year neared; why he chose also to stop writing remains open to speculation. Maybe it was a sudden distaste for the stage. Maybe he wanted a break from writing. Or maybe Shakespeare did write, and the greatest literary find of the century is waiting for some venturesome tourist to fall through a solid wall into a priest hole.

He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.

Oompa-Loompas in Large Numbers

I have my Strategy Formulation and Implementation exam tomorrow. I have Finance as well, but I’ve given up on getting a respectable grade for Fin, so it’s only SFI I’m going to worry about.

Due no doubt to a regrettable lack of application on my part, I have failed, in the past month and a half, to become a brilliant formulator of strategy for multibillion dollar international firms.

Take, for instance, a company called – to avoid copyright violation and keep myself from getting sued right, left and centre – XYZ. A couple of hundred billion worth of assets, retail outlets in 47 countries across four continents, fifty billion sales in the past quarter… OK, so I tacked on a few zeroes here and there. It makes it all sound so much more impressive.

I start by identifying the problem or potential for improvement or whatever it is. Step One is to go to the Google advanced search option and see if some philanthropic person has posted the solution to the case as an Adobe document on the Internet. If Step One results in success, the job is done there. If – as is more common – it fails, you curse a bit, close the browser, and define a problem.

So XYZ has massive profits, its CEO owns two yachts and an island in the Caribbean, and it had higher earnings last year than several countries. What could possibly be wrong? Nothing. Nope, it’s perfect, nothing to do, just be careful not to rock the boat.

Do not rock the boat, one types. And then one realizes that may be a little too short for a graded submission, and makes liberal use of the backspace key.

There isn’t a problem I can see, so let me assume a problem. An underground party of Oompa-Loompas is planning to take over XYZ because they don’t like the CEO’s twelve-storey island home. It spoils the view of the palm trees.

OK, now I have a problem. To repel the Oompa-Loompa takeover bid and emerge a better, stronger firm. But that is a very nebulous objective; to be scientific and disciplined and logical and deserving of a good grade, I should introduce some quantifiable aims. God demands Numbers.

I could just add another zero to the profit margin and advise the CEO to gun for that, so that earning enough money to buy XYZ would require the entire Oompa-Loompa population to engage in pillaging ancient treasures for the next six decades. But no, five hundred billion is an obscene figure, and I doubt it’s achievable in any case.

I haven’t any other numbers, so let’s find some quantifiable parameter and give it a Number. The state of the CEO’s relations with the Oompa-Loompa chief, that’s one. When all is peace and light and friendship, the Number is one, and when the Oompa-Loompa chief is busily handing out the Violet Beauregarde treatment, the Number is zero. The way things are at the moment, the Number is roughly 0.05.

Objective: The Number should be above 0.95. (An argument about whether daffodils are prettier than lilies is acceptable.) (A full description of how the Number is calculated is provided in footnote 4(a) to Exhibit 25.)

Strategy: Offer the Oompa-Loompa chief $25,000,000,000 to tell the people back home that the twelve-storey house is just a mirage. Back it up with the theory of relativity, and fund research on bending the space-time continuum to solve the problem. There may be some legal issues involved in the bribery though – no, wait, there is no group in the entire universe that has authority over human beings and Oompa-Loompas. No trouble there, then… Now we just fork another hundred million or so out to a mad scientist to come up with the physics of the explanation, and we’re all set.

Time Horizon: An hour to call the Oompa-Loompa chief and explain the proposition, another two hours to arrange for the money transfer, thirty seconds to make a trans-Atlantic call and three minutes to tell the Head of Research to stop playing with his toys and expound some reasoning. Totally, 183 minutes 30 seconds. Allowing some cushion for the telephone lines being busy, 184 minutes 14 seconds.

Positive Outcomes: The Oompa-Loompa chief keeps his sceptre, the CEO keeps his yachts and mansion, and XYZ will shortly be able to finance a submarine or so.

Negative Fallouts: Well, it just may happen that the Oompa-Loompas throw their chief in the chocolate river and go at the CEO’s mansion with a truckload of dynamite and a match, but then again it may not. And anyway it’s worth the risk.

As was writing this.

Methods? Or Madness?

You know that dull, sinking feeling you get when you're on a ship that's going down in the middle of the Pacific Ocean a thousand miles from the nearest dry land and you suddenly realize that the sole lifeboat has sprung a leak? It's a feeling not many people would know first hand, so if you don't know it, imagine it. Then square it and then multiply it by a randomly chosen number greater then twenty. That'll give you some idea of what it felt like to sit in the exam room on Saturday afternoon and skim the QM paper. And that was before one read the instructions at the beginning and saw all the double-whammies.

And then there's the issue of selling ice cream in Moscow. The importance of marketing is all very well, but if I were selling ice cream in a city where it was an occasion if the temperature touched twenty-five on the Centigrade scale at the height of summer, and if people were actually willing to buy enough of it that I was not run out of business in the first week... I would be at least marginally less worried than I would have been had I been vending Popsicles in the Gobi Desert and still not had people out on the streets clamouring for my product.

I have endterms next week too. It's an odd sort of limbo here, where you're perpetually either convalescing from one lot of exams or just getting ready to face the next set. To cap everything, it never seems to make a difference how much you prepare. I spent most of Thursday and Friday either studying in the library or studying in my room, and I will still have to rely on a healthy combination of divine grace and a lenient evaluator to get a passing grade on the exam.

As for what's coming next Monday... all I can do is take a few deep breaths, make sure I have the cyanide capsules handy, and go to the tumbrils.

One a Penny, Two a Penny

A week since course bidding, but somehow I don't feel as though I am much more focused or aware of what I am doing and where I am going as a result of knowing what I will be studying in fourth term. Let me qualify that. What I will allegedly be studying in fourth term. I will not commit the sacrilege of suggesting that second year is actually meant for work.

For the same reason I will not say that there was learning from the bidding process, but it was fun. I did give a small start of horror when I logged in to the bidding server and realized that it was nine minutes ahead of my computer clock - my computer being four minutes ahead of the classroom clock so that there is absolutely no chance of my running into class in time to receive the what-kind-of-manager-do-you-think-you'll-make look from an irate professor. But then I figured it didn't really matter. An hour and forty-five minutes, I mean, honestly, who would take an hour and forty-five minutes to allocate points for courses? Especially when, like me, you're more worried about getting out of the institute unscathed than about getting out of the institute with FORM and IPM and MACR under your belt.

The most agonizing part - and therefore, with the benefit and objectivity of hindsight, the funniest - was the tantalizing random number X.

One hour and forty-five minutes after bidding starts, the timer frame will go blank. Thereafter, bidding will continue for X minutes, X being a randomly generated number between 1 and 15.

It was rather like playing Hot Potato as a six-year-old, when the thought being the one holding the ball at the end of the game inspires such dread you would think it really does burn your fingers. Points on MN, you think. MN is climbing, I have to have - oh my God, IDF is running away. Wait, wait - no, please don't stop now, please don't stop... Reallocate points, one eye on the clock, your finger practically trembling on the mouse. And then try to watch all six courses at once while doing a mental analysis of how much risk is acceptable on each.

For once I was actually happy to see the error message on the screen when X was reached and the server disconnected.

Chaos

It's funny how the word was originally used. I don't mean the version in Genesis; that makes perfect sense, not only etymologically, but also, as Hercule Poirot would say, psychologically. But when Hesiod talks about the primeval emptiness of the Universe, and ends that void with, not Gaia and Uranus, but Erebus and Nyx, you really have to wonder. Even given Boeotia's admittedly difficult weather - at least, difficult weather compared to the Isles - it remains undisputedly Greek; the Mediterranean sun over the Gulf of Corinth should have made up for the cruel winters and hard summers.

The downward spiral that ends in the inevitable Dusk of the Gods is something you can understand in Scandinavian myth; the land of the Norsemen would have told Hesiod a thing or two about the cruelty of winter. When snow covered everything for miles around, falling endlessly through a seemingly endless night, with no sound save the wind in the trees and the wolves in the distance, old women who spun tales for children clustered around them before the fire could have been forgiven for thinking up Ragnarok. The paths of glory must lead somewhere.

Admittedly, the children of Hellas were, as a rule, far more cheerful. Their tragedies spoke of grief, but not of despair. One sympathizes with Niobe, but one is not overtaken by a sense of the hopelessness of life and an overwhelming urge to end it all.

This is the point where I realize I'm rambling and wonder how on earth to end this without it being painfully obvious that I am doing it to put myself out of my misery. Having said it, though, it is obvious... and thus I say Audaces fortuna iuvat. And bid farewell, in the end, to the Latin poet.

UFO

No, seriously. I may be a little nutty, but I'm nowhere near completely mad. I am not suggesting that a flying saucer landed on LKP and offloaded its full complement of little green men armed with laser blasters and poised to take over the world.

I'm just saying it passed overhead on a reconaissance trip.

I saw it on Saturday night, when a friend and I were walking back to our dorm from dinner at Curries. I grant that we were high on chocolate, and possibly not entirely cogent, but both of us saw five orange lights hovering in a straight line, too low to be stars and too high to be street lights. And I mean, come on, how likely is it that two people, however questionable their normalcy, have the same hallucination?

There, in a nutshell, are the facts of the case. Five orange lights.

In our defence, we did consider all possible explanations before we arrived at our conclusion. They could have been weather balloons. They could have been lights strung between two reasonably tall buildings. They could have been a college physics project. They could have been bits of a meteorite. They could have been stealth fighters from Never-Never Land. Or they could have been strobes on an alien spaceship.

As to the first option... Who ever heard of such a simple answer to such a complicated question? It's absurd. It's laughable. Nope. Not weather balloons.

Lights strung between two buildings... We really had to think to figure out why that was impossible. Given wind velocity, drag, and friction due to the earth's rotation, and taking into account the speed of light in air and the relativistic effect of acceleration due to gravity on the space-time continuum, the lights could not exist.

A college physics project? But both of us did physics in college, and neither of us ever considered it necessary to have weird orange lights hovering on the horizon to puzzle, worry and bewilder innocent passers-by. That just about ruled out that idea.

Meteorites we rejected out of hand. Shooting stars do not hover. They shoot.

That left us with Captain Hook's minions and spies from E.T. When you have two options equal in all respects (the chief criterion here being viability) you can trust your fate to the fall of a coin, or you can choose the more interesting explanation. We did the latter.

And thus it became our bounden duty to warn the world that the Martians are coming.

Liberte! Egalite! Fraternite!

The title is an exaggeration. Let me say that right at the outset. It is true that fever pitch (excuse the truly dreadful pun, but it was too much to resist) has been reached, with all the candidates for the SAC elections campaigning with everyone in sight. It is true that at any time, day or night, you might be pounced on and your vote canvassed in the name of dorm loyalty/section loyalty/forget-loyalty-and-read-my-manifesto-because-I-am-the best. But nobody has yet sworn to storm the Bastille.

Having established that - and a reputation for frivolity along with it - let me move on to other things. Important things. Things that are going to shape human thought in ways beyond our wildest imaginings.

Or, in other words, I simply put in the title and started typing without the faintest idea what I was going to say.

It's rather odd; in the end there isn't that much of a difference between the Bourbon lily and Napoleon's bee. You rather get the feeling that if you took one of them and let the ink run a bit, you'd end up with the other. There should be Orwellian philosophy somewhere in that. Or at the very least a hint that Lear should have kept his head and not put so much faith in the filial devotion of Goneril and Regan.

The question of whether they really were to blame is not something I shall torture myself by attempting to answer. There was fault on both sides; serpent's teeth grow in serpents and serpents come from serpent eggs.

All I need to do now is find an excuse to mention Caligula and equine parliamentarians. There is the excuse, there the mention; now I may put myself out of my misery. What can the rest be but silence?

Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds

That's the beauty of a title. It doesn't have to mean anything. Take the one above, for instance. It has nothing whatsoever to do with what I have written so far and what I am going to write in the rest of this post. But still, in the extremely unlikely event of these chronicles surviving for a century or two, some historian may well read into them deep and profound meaning and into the blog a commentary on the metaphysical state of the world at large.

The human mind is kind of strange that way. Right now, for instance, I am sleepy enough that I could write, "Bertie Wooster married Cleopatra and Hitler was their great-grandson" and not realize that anything was amiss. On Wednesday night, on the other hand, no matter how little sleep I have between now and then, I will be all set to sit up watching TV while reading a book and sending SMSes to friends in the intervals of prolonged chats on the cell phone... and all this juggling without dropping a single ball. (If this seems improbable, let me specify that right now refers to an instant of time when I am supposed to be studying Economics, and Wednesday night refers to an instant when I will, for good or ill, be done with ISLM graphs and long-run aggregate supply curves.)

Exam-time resolves are right up there with New Year's Day resolutions as things that aren't meant to last beyond the first week. In college every time I realized that I was eight hours away from my Number Theory paper, not entirely certain which textbook we were following, and in grave danger of being awarded zero marks, I decided that it was positively the last time I would find myself in such straitened circumstances. Every time.

Circumstances apart, it really is rather nice weather now. It's just cold enough to make snuggling into the blankets with a book a whole new kind of nirvana, but not cold enough to make you quiver like an aspen in a strong wind if you happen to forget your sweater in your desperate haste to reach wherever you're supposed to be going before the clock strikes whatever hour it shouldn't strike before you get there.

Is there anything else to say about the blackbirds? Nothing... except, to those who can afford time to enjoy it, Joyeux Noel. 'Tis the season to be jolly... But I daren't sing, even on paper. 'Tis hardly the season to offend the ears of all around. The first day, the partridge in the pear tree. By the time it is joined by the five golden rings I shall be home free.

EEP!

Twenty-Four Hours to Go

I just got back from class. I am tired. I am in no frame of mind to worry about the effect of an increase in US Government spending on the Forex reserves of Guatemala. And I have the entire afternoon, evening and night ahead of me in any case. There's no need to panic and fall over myself memorizing the textbook. I think I'll do the crossword.

Twenty-Two Hours to Go

I have done three sudokus and four crosswords. There's no getting away from it now. I have to open the textbook. Such a nice textbook, too... It seems a pity to spoil it by underlining and writing notes in the margins. But no, it has to be done - Wait a minute. It's time for tea. I can't be expected to study on an empty stomach. It's bad for the kidneys, or the liver, or... whatever. I'm sure it's bad for something. And while I'm at it I might as well shower too, and start afresh.

Twenty-One Hours to Go

Now is the time to get to work. I am warm, full, and refreshed. I am also... sleepy? No. Something wrong there. Time out. I can't be sleepy. I have to study. I have - where's the syllabus sheet? - yeah, I have... er... let me count... Five, is it? No... six... seven... uh-oh. I have a terrifying number of chapters to finish. I can't be sleepy... I can't be...

Twenty Hours to Go

The blankets are so comfortable. Do I need to get up? Damn, there goes the alarm clock. Hit it... It hasn't stopped. Oh, no wonder, it's the cell phone alarm. It won't stop unless I push the right button. I'll have to wake up properly.

Eighteen Hours to Go

Finally I have done something productive! I have finished a grand total of... umm... three and a half pages. Inspiring, really inspiring. But don't worry, it's still not time to panic. It's just eight o'clock. There'll be plenty of time after dinner.

Sixteen Hours to Go

Right. Now it's time to panic. I have done... ah... never mind. And how much do I have left? One, two... flip a whole bunch of pages... OK, never mind that either. Keep calm. Keep absolutely calm. There's only one remedy for a situation like this - candy bars. Call CT and ask for some... [Several expletives deleted.] He doesn't have any. How do I survive the night without chocolate?

Thirteen Hours to Go

I have done four chapters. That's decent. On number five now... I have consumed enough tea to keep the Darjeeling planters laughing all the way to the bank. But it's a losing battle against sleep. No. I must read.

"You will recall from the previous chapter."

I don't recall from the previous chapter. I don't even recall the name of the previous chapter. I am in so much trouble...

Nine Hours to Go

The wretched alarm again. Going on... and on... and making the pillow vibrate. I have to get up. I have to avoid an F. Poke one finger out of the blankets. This is patently not the weather to get up before the crack of dawn and study economics.

Six Hours to Go

Ethical dilemma: Do I go to class and not study Economics and feel guilty, or do I stay in my room, not go to class, not study Economics and feel guilty? On the whole I think I'll go for Option Number One. Not that it's going to make any difference at this late hour.

One Hour to Go

A morning spent surreptitiously leafing through the textbook during classes, and feverishly turning pages between them. Lunch has been aborted. I have to learn all about economic policy formulation in sixty minutes. It doesn't matter how. Somehow. This is when those Matrix-style information downloads would come in handy.

And then... the inevitable!

Perfect Peace

A commodity, I do not doubt, that is only slightly more common than fields of amaranth on this side of the grave. But if anything comes close to it, it is the feeling you get when you realize that there is now no need to step from the shower into a blazer and shoes that were never meant to be walked in.

I learnt one thing from the process though: the number of howlers you think you can perpetrate in the space of an hour is nothing to the number you actually can perpetrate if you put your mind to it. And I don't mean the kind that involve not knowing how many yuan traded to the dollar when the markets opened last Monday. I mean the kind that resemble wearing an "I love Rasputin" badge to an interview for the position of personal bodyguard to Nicholas II.

"So, tell me why you think you're the best person for the job."

That's a question that ought to be easy to answer. Exaggeration is required, yes; you will sound narcissistic, possibly; but it shouldn't be difficult. Unless, of course, you are thoroughly disorientated, dead tired, unbelievably hungry, and you aren't really sure which company the interviewer represents and what position he is offering.

I pitched myself as a financial analyst to a marketing firm that was looking to hire me for an IT position. I think that sums it up to a nicety. There was the interviewer, clearly wondering why understanding finance should qualify me to work with a systems design team, and there was I, wondering if his complete lack of reaction boded good or ill.

Some of the bloopers - not all mine - were more memorable, though...

Interviewer: I was at IIMA myself.
Student: Really? So am I!

Student: I'm in Section C.
Interviewer: Oh, really? So was I.
Student: Did you win T-Nite?
Interviewer: No.
Student: We did.

Interviewer: So, is there anything you'd like to ask me?
Student: Do you have those T-shirts in the Large size?

Interviewer: You want to apply to position X?
Student: Yes.
Interviewer: But you've filled in the form for position Y.
Student: Oh.

It just can't happen at any other time.

How Not to Get Shortlisted

What steps did you follow in deciding which XXXXXXXXXX firms to apply to?

I opened the list of companies visiting campus for summer placement and related my CV to all of them. But that’s just twenty words and I have to stretch this to ninety somehow, so let’s pretend there was deep thought and profound logic involved. I analyzed my strengths and weaknesses – nope, sorry, I’m not supposed to mention my weaknesses here – my strengths and skills relevant to the XXXXXXXXXX industry to arrive at this vital decision. That’s seventy-five words, and this sentence brings it to ninety, so here ends the story.

Why would you like to intern with AAAAA?

Let’s get one thing straight. I would not like to intern with anybody. I would like to spend next summer lounging on a sunny beach with a book, preferably in Majorca. But that would mean a long and arduous fight with the PGP office – not something a girl in her right mind would undertake.
So that’s why I want AAAAA; I have no information about whether AAAAA wants me. If they do I hope they will tell me so immediately; I can then stop distorting the truth six times daily.

What made you choose the BBBBBB position in the firm?

Does it matter? It’s just two months; nothing you do to me could possibly be more taxing than the first term at IIMA. Since you’re asking, though, it was eighth on the list and eight was listed as my lucky number today. Don’t ask me where. I’m sure it was somewhere.
Being of sound body and allegedly sound mind, I can guarantee that I will not set the building on fire. There’s no other damage I can do in eight weeks, so it’s not such a dusty proposition. I hope.

Discuss your Extra-Curricular Activities and Interests.

I doubt cursing myself for not keeping every certificate I ever won (I should have hyphenated that to save words) counts, so let’s stick with the usual… books literature drama poetry math. It would have been maths but for Microsoft Word. I have wasted enough time clicking “Ignore” to be willing to concede the point.
Something missing? Oh, yeah, proof that I’m not lying through my teeth because I think it matters to recruiters that I won a prize for reciting “Jack and Jill” at the age of three.
Er.

Not the best way to get a job offer, I concede, unless there are points for originality.

My Kingdom for a Verse

I haven't a kingdom, though. It's as easy to offer endless expanses of gold-bearing soil as it is to offer a square foot of barren and parched earth on the other side of nowhere if you have neither.

I'd very much like to say I would give anything, even unto half my kingdom, to anyone who can tell me the rest of this or even put a name to the "Anonymous" that I ought to stick in at the end of it:

A single word, a single page,
The remnants of a distant age;
Fair breezes touch a greener lea,
A brighter sun, a bluer sea –
Naught left to us but poetry.

But that wouldn't be fair when I possess as many kingdoms as I do kings to go with them.

Excuse the rambling. It's been a hectic week so far... Again with the CVs, the Statements of Purpose (beyond, "not flunking out of the course"), the assignments, the sundry other things that seem too minor to mention but somehow fill every free second of your day.

Need I even mention that there are now less than three weeks to midterms? It's become a fact of my life that there are eternally less than three weeks to something. Deadlines... you just have to love them. Or at least tolerate them, since whether or not you like it they're here to stay.

Because if the young Lord Paris goes before you, you really have no option but to follow.

How to Travel

With a salmon.

Umberto Eco should have written a book on how to spend a Sunday. I'm surprised that there have not been any particularly famous polls on the subject. They would probably turn up enough unexpected results to merit an inch or so on the front page of the Times of India.

I can guess what some of them would be... Lie in bed with a book... Loll on a sandy beach under a tropical/Mediterranean sun... Watch TV... Watch a movie... Play online chess against somebody in Honolulu...

OK, that last one is stretching it a bit. You get my point, though... The things that would feature high on the list would definitely not include, for instance, writing a paper about how reading four lines from Pygmalion filled one with the knowledge of how to be a better and more effective manager. A very edifying way to spend the holiday, no doubt, but not a particularly entertaining one.

With due apologies to HH Munro and Clovis Sangrail, what is needed at this moment is an Unrest Cure. I am now legally old enough to stand for a by-election in some out-of-the-way constituency, but somehow I do not believe that is quite the answer.

And whatever quiz there is tomorrow will certainly prove unrestful enough for anybody, up to and including Frederick Altamont Cornwallis Twistleton, Fifth Earl of Ickenham, so I guess that's taken care of.

She Walks in Beauty

Three handsome aristocrats at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and that was the end of any stereotype that ever existed of a poet as a tiny, sorry-looking specimen of humanity who used vicarious verse (which has an odd sound to it despite the alliteration, I know, but bear with me) to make up for the total lack of romanticism in his life. Nobody can accuse Byron of being boring any more than they can accuse him of wasting too much time polishing his poetry.

I tried to pick my personal favourite of his poems, but it was rather difficult. I can only name the ones that wouldn't figure: All is Vanity, Farewell! If Ever Fondest Prayer and When We Two Parted. It is not that I love Caesar less, but that I love Rome more... and I am now lost somewhere on the cobbled streets, and the day I can make up my mind where to go will be the day Wile E. Coyote turns vegan.

Well, it might happen.

On a slightly less illogical note, I think it would be a toss-up between Maid of Athens, The Isles of Greece and By the Rivers of Babylon, with The Destruction of the Sennacherib coming much higher on the list of Honourable Mentions than, I dare guess, most people would place it. Technically, I suppose, it is simply an exalted example of the misuse of metre, but it's the kind of thing that gives the impression that Byron himself had a very good time writing it.

One day, as I keep telling myself, I will know which I like best, whether the refrigerator light really goes off when you shut the door, the name of the person who commissioned the assassination of Philip of Macedon, and the exact value of pi. Until that day comes... There is, however little I like admitting it to myself, work to be done.

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.

Gnothi se Auton

Know thyself.

Transliteration aside (for which I trust Apollo will forgive me; I'm not quite ready for the inside of a padded cell yet, and it would make my life very complicated if people thought I was) it's a very useful thing to keep in mind when you're hoping for ESP. There are people who, knowing what is to come, will arm themselves beforehand. There are people who won't. And then there are people (like me) who will convince themselves that nobody can really interpret what the Oracle says until after the event, so it doesn't matter in any case.

I hope the previous paragraph hasn't been taken as confirmation that some concerned person should start looking for a good psychiatrist. It's just the effect of a very crazy week. Gnothi se Auton.

The campus is going to be rather on the empty side next week, with half the students off on term break. That doesn't mean we won't have quizzes, though. If anything, since we've not been burdened with too many of them this week, next week is going to be an occasion for all the professors to revenge themselves for all the lack of preparation during T-Nite and after.

I think it's the "after" part that really bugs them. The trouble is that once you've got through T-Nite, devoting, at the very most, an hour a day to mugging, it's very difficult to get back into the pre-midterm routine. The profs look at it differently; they probably think that with T-Nite out of the way, you should attack your books with twice the enthusiasm. The policy of the Delphic Council doesn't quite work here.

Having said that, I suppose they knew it was coming. Some of them, at least, told us so in the first week. That makes me feel slightly better about myself and my present disinclination to spend hours with cases... That may change as endterms approach. I certainly hope it does.

But it's the Pierian spring I'm after as far as that's concerned.