On the lack of Suitability of Certain Unmarried Folk

I recently read " The (In)eligible Bachelors" by Ruchita Misra. This book falls into several automatic categories - Indian English Literature, Popular Culture, MBA Authors, Chick Lit, etc. This is my review of the book...

Ever since Chetan Bhagat and his "Five Point Someone" there's been an endless stream of MBA alumni from premier B-schools in this Country rushing to Publishing houses with their half thought through but fully completed manuscripts, and publishing like there is no tomorrow. Personally, I thought  "Five Point Someone" was a strictly okay sort of a book, gave an insight into the life of somewhat below average blokes at above average engineering colleges - I've done more risque, brilliant, story worthy and interesting things during my engineering college days than the protagonists in 5.someone did- not to mention my stint in B-school.
Therefore, when I hear of the latest IIM/IIT grad whose book is out I tend to skip it ( Except the Meluha trilogy which is on my read wish list, simply because the plot seems engaging to me). However, i simply could not do that with this book because (a) I know Ruchita personally , plus (b) she was one of the stars of my junior batch at IIFT and, as it mentions in the blurb a triple gold medalist (no mean feat that,trust me!) as also (c) with the exception of Vikram Chandra's "Sacred Games" & the Meluha trilogy mentioned above, which are next on my reading list there really wasn't much floating around in the market.

So, when flipkart delivered the book to me (at a hefty discount for pre-ordering the book prior to its release) I though I'd give it a try. It turned out to be a surprisingly good read. 

Surprising because at the end of the day it is, and will always remain Chick Lit - A genre I abhor, and ( not that I am a chauvinist) as far as Chick Lit goes only three books ever in this genre have ever made an impact on me, ( "Daddy Long Legs" by Jean Webster ; "Little Women" by Louisa May Alcott and "The Touch-me-not Girl " by Rajlukshme Debee) and let's face it, as things stand (today at least), Ruchita is just not in the same class as these three writers. But interestingly, this book has strange parrallels to all three books I've mentiones not sure if she's drawn some inspiration from any/all of these especially "Daddy Long Legs" which of the three books I've mentioned is my clear favourite.

At the end of the day, here's a book from a hated genre of literature and a hated class of authors (for me) which at the end of the day I still enjoyed. 

A lot.

So clearly, this is one of the best Chick Lits around and one of the best works I've read from IIT/IIM alum class of chump writers.

In fact, it's the first book I've read in one straight uninterrupted sitting in a long long time  ( the last time that happened was way back in IIFT before I got busy on the student council there, almost 4 odd years ago, but you know how you have loads of free in College that work life never confers on you!)

This post is a work in progress will update a few thinking points that I really liked about the book and a few suggestions to Ruchita  to ensure her next few offerings are in the quality league that she clearly has the potential to deliver ( on the rather presumptuous assumption that my blog rants are read by a famous published author)

Keep watching this space !

On the day I made it through to Olam

[Aside]Have been wearingly busy  these last few days trying to cap a crucial month close, and what with a planned fly-by-wire trip to India to perform my Mom's (peace be upon her) Shraadh ceremony[/Aside]

Today,at lunchtime, I  got a call from a junior at IIFT, Archit Tiwari - absolutely ecstatic at having made it through to Olam in the lateral placements and , boy, did that take me right back to the same moment almost three years back !!

I remember that:

• I'd joined IIFT with Olam as one of the companies in sight as far as placements were concerned
• The idea was to focus on academics, rank among the toppers of the batch. Do a lot of club activities on the side( I enrolled for every club bar Koshish and that coz there was a cap on number of clubs we could join in our times), and spend two years gearing up for Olam !!
• That idea went for a toss so early into my IIFT stint that it wasn't even funny.I remember that in the run up for the IMF elections,when I finally decided to file my nomination for post of President, my wife (then Fiancee) specifically asking me why I wanted to stand for elections when that wasn't what how I'd planned my two years [ though heart of hearts I could sense she wasn't too upset with my change of plans  :D ]. 
• I ended trimester one  ranked 93 out 93  students on Delhi ( oh the reasons for that are hilarious, and embarassing!). NO topper by any stretch of imagination that!!
• After I got elected President, a fantastic story in its own right - one that I can and have only shared in its entirety with my wife and of course my fellow IMFers, I'd most given up any hope of coralling any good placement, but then the philosopher in me took over and I warrior-ed on..
• During finals, I made it through  Olam, and a weird feeling subsumed me. One that really wondered how two paths entire worlds apart culminated in the same thing (a path I imagined that lead me to Olam, and an entirely real life track that again ended up with me making it to Olam )

Three years post that day, I think , again that life hasn't exactly panned out as I'd planned these three years but it's been so much more learning, so much more fun , and so much more rewarding than I'd imagined.

To Peter Sayal, Gaurav Patil  & Archit Tiwari :

Welcome to Olam, guys.

You've just taken the red pill, now watch how deep the rabbit hole goes !!! 

Yennjoy !!

The Great IIFTian Hostel Room Makeover

This is the room that Ayush and I share...



...and quite frankly as you can see, it needed a makeover.




so we started and pretty quickly into our effort we were rewarded by locating lost stash like this swimming goggles that its been over two weeks since i'd seen them...



and a huge bundle of clothes that was there, somewhere...



after hauling furniture here and there...



we were almost there...



and this is how our room looks now....






let's see how long it remains this way...

On Why Architects Refraining from Ganja is a good idea...

Well, one of my favourite artists of all times is Maurits C. Escher. Now he was known for capturing finer points of Riemannian, Lobachevskian and other more mathematically complex topologies through his art. His works span some of the more subtle concepts of relativity, dimensional bending,etc. apart from other stuff. The picture above is a print by him called "Relativity" (c.1953)

So what does this print have to do with architects ?
Just this: take a look at our hostel (the pic on top)...this maze of ladders and corridors leaves us feeling like snakes in one big game of "snakes and ladders" in the new hostel that we at IIFT call our home for now. Either the architect of this crazy maze was a fan of Escher like me, or he overdid his daily dose of ganja prior to designing our hostel, which brings me full circle back to the title of this blog as my parting thought....

Alright so you're a hot shot architect and the only way you can prove it to the world is by designing something that's way out of the ordinariness sweepstakes, but is it essential that you source your inspirations from dreams inspired by particularly potent variants of cannabis smoked by you and your buddies??



P.S. On second thoughts the Escher-esque topography of our hostel does seem to grow on one as the academic year progresses...but till then..:(

Deja Vu ??

We are extremely glad for the overwhelming participation in the preliminary round of "QUEST - A Business Quiz for the B-Schools" held on January 10, 2007, wherein a total of 198 teams participated across the 12 B-Schools.

It gives us immense pleasure to announce the results of the preliminary round. The first list consists of the various institute toppers from the respective institute, while the second list consists of the top 8 teams from the 12 institute toppers, who have qualified for the final round of QUEST.

INSTITUTE TOPPERS

Sl. No.	Institute	Team Name	Reg. No.	Participant 1	Participant 2
1	FMS, Delhi	Forty-Two	22027274	Suvagata Roy	Satish T
2	IIM-A	Phlegm Fatale	22067574	Dushyant Mullur	Keerthi Raghavan
3	IIM-B	Flaming	22069793	Vishnu Nandan	Atulya Bharadwaj
4	IIM-C	Da D Team	22092103	D V S Bharath	Dhritiman B
5	IIM-I	The Gunners	22087022	Wayne Fernandes	Kasturi Rangan
6	IIM-K	Janus	22056586	Vishal Bondwal	Malavika Narayan
7	IIM-L	Verve	22070745	Rritu Saurabha	Suraj Krishnaswami
8	IIFT, Delhi	Veni Vidi	22053333	Arka Bhattacharya	Nishant singh
9	JBIMS, Mumbai	Mavericks	22050065	Aditya Shende	Tejas Nadkar
10	MDI, Gurgaon	Funny Bunnies	22021336	Ramesh	Gurudatt Bhobe
11	XIM-B	The Last of Mochians	22006363	Anurag Mohanty	Dharamteja Mansingh
12	XLRI	Waldo	22032777	Raghu M Reddy	Shrikanth N

* The above 12 teams will receive a certificate from the Bank for topping the respective institute.

THE 8 TEAMS QUALIFYING FOR THE FINAL ROUND

1.	FMS, Delhi	Suvagata Roy, Satish T
2.	IIM Ahmedabad	Dushyant Mullur, Keerthi Raghavan
3	IIM Bangalore	Vishnu Nandan, Atulya Bharadwaj
4	IIM Calcutta	D V S Bharath, Dhritiman B
5	IIM Kozhikode	Vishal Bondwal, Malavika Narayan
6	IIFT, Delhi	Arka Bhattacharya, Nishant Singh
7	MDI, Gurgaon	Ramesh, Gurudatt Bhobe
8	XLRI, Jamshedpur	Raghu M Reddy, Shrikanth N

We congratulate the winners of the preliminary round, and appreciate the time taken by all the participants to appear for the test. We look forward to similar participation in future as well.



The Deja Vu-ing part of course comes in with the quiz meister "Harsha Bhogle" whom i shall be seeing again. If you recollect , he was also the quizmaster and Moderator at the National finals of the BT-Acumen Quiz and Debate finals (which IIFT won).
Here's hoping Nishant and me can pull off an encore for IIFT here too....

BT Acumen 2006

The North Zone Champs at ITC Grand Central Sheraton & Towers, Mumbai ( joy! :D)

The Debate Finals versus Sydenham

National Champs with host Harsha Bhogle

Winners All (l to r):Alumni Quiz Winners(South);Quiz Winners (IIM Bangalore);Debate Winners (IIFT)Swarnim and Me back at our room

(All Pics courtesy Manali)

On Workloads and Lack Of Sleep...

This last week has capped one of the most strenuous and rigorous times I've ever been forced to deal with. The workload here at IIFT as I'm sure with any of the top B-schools in India must be comparable. But, here at IIFT, in addition to all the coursework related assignments , projects and term papers, you are also expected to sit through 8 hours of classes on average.
Here's a snapshot of a typical day ( and yes like the cartoon , we don't have any weekends, in fact the only holiday we've had in our first trimester was 15th August, Independence day...which leads to pretty perverted reasons for us to be thankful to our freedom fighters)

6.45 a.m: Fight off the cobwebs of a slumber that has just about started , and get ready for a yoga session

7.00 a.m - 8.00 a.m. : Yoga

9.00 a.m. - 6.45 p.m. : Classes with 15 mins break between classes and plenty of surprise assessment elements including quizzes thrown in ( usually spent catching up on sleep),and a 45 min break for lunch ( usually spent on working on backlog asignments). every class usually results in assignments and projects due in no time flat.

7.30 p.m. - 9.30 p.m. : Work on asssignments

9.30 p.m.: grab dinner in a hurry

10.00 p.m- 11.00/11.30 p.m.: Club meetings . Trust me to make the cardinal error of joining 5 clubs.Which means I've a club meeting on almost every alternate day. Now club membership at IIFT is a solely voluntary, but an extremely serious affair. Lack of attendance at club meeting can get you barred from the club and also result in disciplinary action.

12.00 midnight.: Someone reminds you there's plenty of work left to be done on atleast 2-3 projects/assignments/papers that are due in class the next day

12.01 a.m.: You curse like haddock, but get down to work. Really, working hard here is not about the marks , but about the fact that every Proffesor here expects you to live up to and justify your being here at IIFT. Most of us come from top under grad schools ( includin the iconic IITs) and we've done pretty well there and later on in our work life, but the magnitude of work here is truly daunting. It absolutely forces you to become an efficient time manager. These last two months have definitely managed to ensur that I'll survive in absolutely any high pressure senario.

4.00 a.m : you finally call it quits. Hastily latch on the last few slides to your PPT, or frenziedly finish typing the report your working on and... SLEEEP!!!!!

6.45 a.m : Wake up again!!!

The last week was even worse, as we'd absolutely a plethora of asssignments and submissiondue on a continuous rolling basis almost every 3 hours or so. Deadlines here are precisely that, you meet them or you are dead. And so, we coped.

That's not to say we don'tget time to do other stuff.. we do, some of us more than the others, but all of that comes with an academic price tag attached. So when I spend hours on orkut, my blog , or talking to manali, what I'm basically doing is maintaining my sanity in this hell hole that I've vountarily consigned myself to for the next two years.

Love this hell hole though!!

GO! IIFT! GO!

P.S: Today is a lot more relaxed. For a couple of days now we have no classes. So we can finally hit the books, or the movie theaters as we prefer prior to our end terms which start from this thurday.

P.P.S: my next blog will deal with some of the more entertaining Profs and their styles of teaching.

On One Trimester Later...

You would'nt believe it, but time flies, shit happens, and sometimes even before you know it started, its over...I guess that's the best way to describe the first trimester at IIFT that just whizzed past..five days hence, we begin with our end terms...yesterday things came to a head with some really hectic assignment deadlines converging as big wave converges on big wave to form a mean tsunami, but we survived that too!...The pic above is us yesterday night, fighting to meet deadlines...I suppose it's only fair to admit here that my room has pretty much looked like this throughout the trime. But with exams round the corner, the stickler in me was aroused and anyways, I usually go out of my way to find some excuse, any excuse, to stay away from my books...even if it is for that one second extra..so i decided to clean my room... And.....


Voila!!!!...Clean Room :)

The First 100 Days

This mini-elective is one of the most popular courses taught at France's INSEAD. Since 2004 the course has had students taking the reins of a simulated company during its first 100 days in business. Before they can even sign up for the class, students have to form a team of four, with one student serving as chief executive, another as chief financial officer, and the other two heading operations and marketing and sales. There is a limit of 10 teams per session, and you can't drop out of the course once you have won a seat in the competitive bidding process.

But the class is not your usual B-school simulation, where students input information to a computer that spits out results that show whether they did things correctly. Professor Patrick Turner relies instead on friends—real accountants, journalists, and lawyers—and his own acting abilities to give students a taste of what acquiring a new business is like. Turner serves as chairman of the board for each team's company, and when students send e-mails to employees in various departments of their company—such as Lucy in accounting—they're actually corresponding with their professor. And Turner at times brings in actual lawyers, for instance when students have to make legal decisions about their business.

"The First 100 Days" is probably one of the only classes that requires that students bring in their cell phones—and always have them turned on. Lisa Long, who graduated from INSEAD in July, recalls a 4 a.m. phone call to say production at her fake company was offline. It was her job to wake up and make a decision about how to proceed. Grades are determined by the chairman of the board (Turner), your teammates, and the real people you encounter along the way. "It was like The Apprentice and Big Brother wrapped in one," says Brendan Collins, who also graduated from INSEAD in July. But students won't tell you too much more than that. They sign a nondisclosure agreement at the start of the session so that Turner can keep surprising future participants.

Head here for some more courses that are off the beaten path...

On my mind

This song is constantly on a loop in our hostel room....

One fine song!!!

This one's for you baby

Click HERE to play

TiE Mentoring Session

Attended a mentoring session organised by TiE this evening. The speaker was Mr. Sridar Iyengar who is the president of TiE global. For those of you who don't know much about this iconic organisation, head to the link on the post title. Mr. Sridar Iyengar was previously the Partner-in-Charge of KPMG's Emerging Business Practice. He has had a number of leadership roles within KPMG's global organization particularly in setting up and growing new practices. He has the unique distinction of having worked as a partner in all three of KPMG's regions - Europe, America and Asia Pacific as well as in all four of KPMG's functional disciplines: assurance, tax, consulting and financial advisory services. From 1997 to 2000 Sridar was Chairman and CEO of KPMG's India operations and a member of the Executive committee of KPMG, Asia Pacific Board. He also currently is on the board of ICICI, Rediff.com, Infosys and Progeon.

I am going to run you through the gist of his talk (as i remember it - with my comments in parentheses) in bullet points:

• Don't be afraid of change, when faced with a fork in the road: Take it!
• Out of a hundred people he mentors and interacts with, only maybe 2 or 3 start up firms. This doesn't mean the rest are'nt entrepreneurs. Be entrepreneurial wherever you work.
• When he joined KPMG in 1968, he decided that he would quit KPMG the day they offered him a partnership and go his own way. So have focus, know where you want to go
• Ages 35-55 are the most productive wealth creation years. Use your time to acquire all the weapons and expertise needed to hit 35 with the stuff to go on your own if you are serious about being an entrepreneur
• CEOs are not specialists they have to be Generals( generalists)
• In the old days the concept of internship and rotation across functions ensured that by the time you reached the top you knew absolutely everything about very function in the company.
• Make sure you spread your radar and learn across depts ( I remember my Dad giving me the same advice one day before I was starting off for my first job at ESAB) make sure you can see the big picture. 
• Also ensure that there is atleast ONE specific skill where you are the best, the "Go to" guy
• Key areas of learning / expertise absolutely essential for CEOs / entrepreneurs: Product knowledge (R&D); Marketing and selling (very crucial);Finance ( for obvious reasons, especially if company is in trouble)
• Don't get stuck in a rut/ vertical dead end. If need be, take a demotion across departments , and then move upwards again
• An Entrepreneur/CEO needs to have dashboard in front him. he needs to be clued into absolutely every small change that occurs and respond as things play out
• Don't try to get from pt A to point B in your career via a straight line it may be the shortest path, but prefer a weaving path if it provides more learning and challenge.
• Learn that in life you can't always do what you, but you MUST like what you do!!
• Let's say you're trying to build a 1000 storey building on a 200 storey foundation, you know it will collapse. What if you have a 200 storey bldg and you spot the opportunity to build 5 more storeys should you do it? Let's say you know that building these 5 storeys would keep the building intact for a year and then the entire edifice would collapse , what then? - Business is about striking at such opportunities as and when they arise, and then back filling - Go ahead, build those extra 5 storeys, but make sure you have the foundation sorted before the year is out. If you wait to solidify your foundation first someone else may have already beaten you to building those 5 storeys!
• Leaders have a tendency to feed off successes and walk away from failures, Great leaders tend to walk away from successes and flock to failures.
• Work experience in a large organisation ( generally) can be useful to help you curb both over enthusiasm and frustration, when you are experimenting with ideas in your venture.
• Try to spot "white spaces" - new ideas , new business avenues that people find promising and are willing to bet on for the future- in an organisation and move into them, if you want retain your entrepreneurial spirit within an organization - especially large ones.
• In a large organization, a leader must protect his people from the organisation itself.
• When delegating make sure you brief properly. If your subordinate doesn't do a job well enough, make sure it's not because you did a bad job of briefing them
• Pursue ideas, but know your limitations and build an excellent team; get people better than you to cover your bases on areas where you're not that great
• It's usually the case that VCs (and I'm sure PE firms as well) prefer a great team with a decent idea than a decent team with a great idea. That's how important the quality of people is to any business venture.
• It takes a lot of persistence, staying power (both monetary as well as personal) and tremendous self-confidence to succeed in an entrepreneurial venture. Most businesses fail because the founders call it quits too early

Plenty of things to consider there...
TiE is also planning some sort of Angel investor interaction at IIFT over the next week.
I am hoping we can chalk out some formal tie-up between TiE and our ECell ( Entrepreneurship club at IIFT)
Do post your comments below....

Blog Hopping

Is my favourite activity on the net nowadays when I'm not blogging or wasting time on Orkut. It's amazing what a rich and wide variety of views exist on any given topic, and it only helps to increase the depth and stregth of your perspectives. Sometimes it can be humbling to see what you consider an untenable position, argued into not merely plausibility, but positions of strength by flawless logic and brilliant analogies.

Stumble upon a whole host of blogs by my batchmates at IIFT and blogrolled them.

Here are a few interesting reads at Partha's Blog includin a post on lingo at IIFT

And a repeat blogcast of a previous post by me on lingo at my alma mater , COEP

Have linked to this blog before on a previous post but what the hey, have look at Niladri's blog

And there are plenty of others notably : Peggy, Ravi , Swati, and...... ( they wil all be tracked down and mercilessly blogrolled)

On Entrepreneurship at IIFT

Entrepreneurship Management is now a full blown course module at IIFT. As part of this program we will be interacting with many Entrepreneurs during our CRCs. In the next trimester we would have a compulsary paper on entrepreneurship management, and in the third of fourth trimester we will undertake a live entrepreneurship project or case study from the large pool available at the IIFT SME Centre


As a person who was always very keen on entrepreneurship, this bit of information from our Program Director, Pinaki Dasgupta came as an icing to top an already rather excellent cake!
Our PD ran us through the vision of this program as he was introducing our first speaker in this series Mr. Jagjot Singh.

Mr. Jagjot Singh is an IIFT alumni( Batch of 93) . He worked in the textile space for several years, starting with Arvind Mills and was the Secretary of the All India Terry Towels Association ( the only non promoter/owner to be honoured thus) and also the CEO of a large Terry towel making unit beore he decided that opportunities existed that were to good to pass up and plunged into his entrepreneurial venture. Today he runs "Confidence Buying" a buying house for large retailers across the globe , and has an annual shadow turnover of about 110 Cr.
His talk was an absolute pleasure , right from the easy going start where he joked about how in his time students at IIFT were" dumbs" and todays students, i.e We, are a lot smarter bunch and hence his nervousness to address us. But he quickly launched into one of the best talks I've been privileged to hear at IIFT -basically addressing issues like:

+ What the focus of an entrepreneur should be when he starts up
+ The process of becoming an entrepreneur, and the attitude
+ The challenges generally faced, with personal examples from his life
+ The road ahead

It was a personally extremely rewarding talk, and was followd up by another brilliant CRC by Mr C.K Sharma who spoke on sales distribution and trade marketing.I will be posting on our CRC lecture series separately, to keep a record of all the speakrs whom we've interacted with here at IIFT on my blog ...

On the 22nd of August ( that's about a week back) I'd attended a TiE mentoring session organised by Anurakt Jain and Ruchi Durlabhji. The speaker was Sanjeev Bikhchandani(SB) the founder of Naukri.com.

He ran us through his story, and how they were among the last few dot coms to get venture funding ( to the tune of 7.3 crores from ICICI ventures) before the IT bubble burst in 2001. The synergies between the talks given by Mr. Bikhchandani , and Mr. Jagjot Singh were alarming. Both of them stressed the tremendous advantage they leveraged from working in a big organization for several years before taking the entrepreneurial jump. SB also addressed the extremely delicate scenario of what you should do when you have a company growing at phenomenal rates, and you have a friend who with you has started the frim and nurtured it through the initial days, but is unable to sustain his learning curve past a particular size or scale of operatons. What do you do? - Not easy that!

These sessions are such a huge value add...truly mind expanding... On the third of september there is another TiE mentoring session..will be attending it too, and will keep you posted...

On body Aches and Freshers Parties...

Here at IIFT, we finally celebrated our freshers party on 18th evening.It's been a tad over a month to the date that we ( the 2008 batch) have been in campus, the session began on 17th July, and it's been a roller coaster ride...

Well on pretty much our very first interaction, the seniors made it clear that the dress code would be formal at ALL hours, which was a sign of problems to come...and then, the schedule had been( and continues to be) a killer, and even those of us fresh from harrowing experiences of overload at work were (un)pleasantly taught that there IS SUCH A THING AS A 24 HOUR WORKING DAY {Well, alright , a 22 hr day, PDPs included (more on the PDPs at a more appropriate juncture)}......So I doff my hats off to all the freshers who coped!!!

Anyways, just as we were getting used to the rigour,the seniors pulled off a bomb on us { a wet one i might add!!..more on this again at that same appropriate juncture mentioned above}

And then, there was BT Acumen 2006, and IIFT played host to the north zone finals...

We'd more or less resigned ourselves to two years of plenty of drudgery and very little fun at IIFT...
thats when we received a small mail from our seniors:

Dear Juniors ,
The Fresher's Party will be held tomorrow i.e 18th August,2006 from 8.30 P.M onwards.
All of you are cordially invited !!
Venue :- The Atrium
Dress Code :- Strictly Casuals :)
Mood :- Party Animal .
Hope to see you all there!!!
Regards,

IMF 2007

and thus, we finally had our FRESHERS!!!!

Well we danced like there would be no tommorrow...and the booze flowed like Mata Ganges...and the bodyaches next day, were bandied with pride... Now we know there'll be plenty of drudgery AND plenty of fun over the next two years...

Just wishing Manali was here , too...

even more pics....

A few good pegs...
happy, happy...joy, joy!
Count Vlad Swapnila(in orange)
DJ..no more songs please!!!

More pics...

The Gang
The God (and his devotees)
Seniors
Juniors

Pics from the freshers...

Gunjit and amalan @ IIFT entrance
Just getting started...
Warming up (with icecream?!)
Naval Goel Himself!!

ZZZZZZZing with Elan

This is how junta at IIFT makes do with almost no sleep...the man who pulls off this caper is none other than Peggy himself...the director of this masterpiece is my LOOMIE Prateek ...


WATCH THE VIDEO!


EnnnnJoyyy !!!

11000 words and then some on IIFT

The Eye
Arka ( go figure why)
The way ( entrance /exit from new acad block)
Shoi and Sun
Seat of Power
Golf greens?
The Criss
The hexagon
The throne
The Building
Temple of knowledge

They say a picture is worth a thousand words...i rest my case ...the dude in pic 4 is my batchmate, Saikat Sarkar - the creative genius of our batch , to whom i owe these amazing snaps....and most of the captions...