We are in the midst of the election season here at IIT Delhi. Had the internal (hostel) elections yesterday followed by the external elections for the Club Secretaries and Chief Editors. The all important G Sec elections will be held today. Like last year, these elections have also been a more-or-less one-sided affair in the institute level elections (at least so far, and I hope I haven't spoken too soon). There was just one surprise yesterday when the candidate of the weaker alliance became the Secy in one of the clubs. We had a more interesting time within the hostel.

This year, for the first time since I have been here, we had a serious three-way contest for the House Secretary's post. Anyone who has been with this blog for sometime might remember that I had given a rough description of the heirarchial structure here, and House Secretary is an important post in that heirarchy. Apart from being the seniormost post at the hostel level, since normally the House Secretary also gets involved in 'trading' on the hostel's behalf, and also is involved in a lot of decisions like room-allotment and stuff, the post is a highly desired one, and a sign of which group is strong within the hostel.
There are about 400 students in the hostel with about 250 UG students and the rest comprising of various PG students (MTech, MSc, PhD, MBA). Understandably, the PG students play a very important role in such a scenario as the candidates (at least in our hostel) would be UG students, with their respective set groups amongst the UG populace. So the election season sees frantic campaigning to get as many PG students (or matkas) on one's own side as possible. Everything from common department/state/language/caste/religion fundas to exploiting every single contact that you can is used to ensure these matka votes.

Coming back to this year's elections, we had three candidates in the fray. All three (as is the convention) were from he 3rd year. The first (A) was the outgoing Cultural Secretary who had done a lot of good work, not only as the cultural secretary but also as a club representative earlier, and being an Indoor Sports stud had also got more points for the hostel in cultural events than anyone else. His problem was that he was very close to the outgoing House Secretary who had ruffled several feathers in the hostel during the course of his election last year. Along with that, the fact that the external post that is coming to the hostel is coming to A's group did not help his popularity in his own year. Then another close friend of his had managed to pick up a fight with another prominent member of the year from another group. Finally, A was extremely confident of his popularity amongst the BTech students, especially the freshers, and so had become a bit complacent.

Then we had B who is one of the best actors/writers/directors in the institute at present. Our hostel hasn't been known traditionally to do well in dramatics, and he almost single-handedly managed to get us the first prize in a prestigious drama event. We hadn't done badly in other drama events either thanks to him. But apart from that he hadn't really been involved in other clubs after a brief stint in the first year. He had resigned as the representative of the Dance and Dramatics club in the second year as the work had got to him, and he ostensibly wanted to concentrate more on the creative aspects rather than the organisational ones. That was a strong issue against him. Apart from that he was known to be an extremely temperamental person with no past record of having worked hard at managing or organising things. And he has a really bad academic record, which is not a strong criterion but it helps if you are good at studies. He was also fairly popular amongst the BTechs as in the case of A, and didn't have much of a standing among the PG students.

Finally, we had C who had never been involved in any hostel activity in the last three years. He had been fielded by the outgoing Mess Secretary (C+) who despite having a substantial support among the matkas didn't want to contest himself as he hadn't done a great job with the Mess in the last one year. C+ also had a few bones to pick with the outgoing House Secretary, and some other seniors (me being one of them) who had tried to keep him from standing last year. Apart from the very obvious drawback of not being a known person, C also lacked the communication skills of A and B.

In IIT, for the House Secretary elections, in case of more than two candidates, a candidate needs to get more than 50% of the total votes cast to win that post. Since it is very likely that it won't happen, there's this feature called the 'second preference' votes. The voters have to mark their first as well as their second choice on the ballot paper. So in the present case if none of the candidates managed a simple majority, the person with the third highest votes would have to bow out and then the second preference votes on those ballot papers where he had the first preference would be ditributed to the remaining two respective candidates. If one of the two managed 50% he would be the winner, or there would be re-election between the top two the next day.

Till the results started coming in yesterday late evening, I (as did many others) expected B to finish third, A the leader and C second, with no one having a majority. I didn't want C to race ahead on the basis of second preference votes in such a situation. I would have been equally happy with either A or B winning, as both of them are really good chaps and would have made good House Secretaries. I have had good relations with both of them all through too. I have never really played any significant role in Hostel elections, and have curtailed even that now that I am in the 5th year. But being one of the more active members of the hostel (with too much time to spare) I am perceived (it's debatable if it's actually the case) to have some influence over various groups in the hostel. I have also developed good relations with a few PG students over time, and so candidates expect me to use that to get them votes. I wasn't vocal against or in favour of any candidate. I was helping both A and B (especially him because of his inexperience) with tips, and even pushed him to have this thing called the SOP (statement of purpose) Box (which we didn't have last year) because I knew it would help him (because of his impeccable oratorial skills). So I am sure people kept guessing till the very end (considering they didn't have better things to do) which side I was working for. No one knows for sure whom I voted for - A or B.

Coming to the results, after the first preference votes were counted C ended up far behind A and B. The latter two were very close but with A having a slight margin over B. Out of a total of 420-odd eligible voters, 364 turned up to vote. So the majority mark was 183. C got around 60 votes. A got a little over 150 and B got around 130-140. I am not very sure of the exact figures but the standings weren't very different from these. So the second preference votes mentioned in C's votes were counted. That was a really tense time, not for me as I was happy enough that C was the one who lost out, but for the respective supporters. As expected more second preference votes went to B than A and B's count began catching up with A's. At one point they were tied, but soon B moved past A and started inching towards the half-way mark. Since many voters had not marked second-preference votes there was a chance that no one would reach the magic figure of 183, which would mean another round of voting the next day which was not something anybody was looking forward to. Till the very last batch of votes B still needed 5-6 votes to get there and A wasn't very far behind. B did win finally. His final count was 184.

B had gone to his room as he wasn't really confident of winning and his friends rushed to him. After the inital round of bumps and cheering and celebrating (and he remembered to thank me too), I took him to the outgoing House Secretary, who was at the venue of the external elections, to convince him that despite being from a different group internally B was with him for the external elections. There had been allegations earlier that if he won, B would have gone out for trading himself and asked for a lesser post for a member of his group instead of continuing with the present situation where we are getting a more desirable post but for a member of A's group, and I had had to act as a mediator between the two groups (I have this enviable image of being impartial and honest, you see!). Anyway, things are back to normal internally now, and even as I write this negotiations are going on outside (with things having been slightly complicated by the surprise result in one of the clubs yesterday) to decide who gets what in today's elections. I hope we get what we are supposed to, and that would mean a long series of treats and parties. Will get back to you tomorrow.

This is in reply to Rohan Trivedi's query from the comments section of my last post. I have seen the following movies from the 100 Worst at IMDB:

Spice World (64)
Stop! Or My Mon Will Shoot (78)
Torque (83)
Speed 2: Cruise Control (100)

That's just 4! So I guess I don't have to feel embarassed or anything. There have been times when I have come perilously close to being subjected to the screening of some gems like Crossroads, FearDotCom, and of course, Gigli, but was saved at the last minute. There were some names from the list that sounded interesting, though, like - 2001: A Space Travesty, Teen Wolf Too, The Wild World of Batwoman, Plump Fiction and Santa With Muscles. But the title that, according to me, beats the competition hollow would be The Brain That Wouldn't Die!!! Raj Kumar Kohli (the maker of Jaani Dushman, for the uninitiated) has tough competition.
What would be the worst Hindi movies by the way?

One of my ambitions in life is to watch all the movies listed in IMDB's Top 100 before I die, or before I pass out from here, whichever happens first. Don't gawk, I have better ambitions too, I just said "one of my". I was going through the list to check how I am doing. Here are the ones I haven't seen yet.

12 Angry Men (21)
Lawrence of Arabia (26)
Sunset Boulevard (29)
It's A Wonderful Life (32)
Paths of Glory (35)
The Third Man (38)
Vertigo (40)
Double Indemnity (41)
Singin' In The Rain (42)
Das Boot (43)
M (44)
All About Eve (50)
Chinatown (61)
Some Like It Hot (62)
Mr Smith Goes To Washington (63)
The Treasure of The Sierra Madre (64)
The Manchurian Candidate (66)
The Sting (67)
Touch of Evil (72)
Metropolis (79)
High Noon (84)
Oldboy (92)
Yojimbo (94)
The Princess Bride (96)

That makes it 24! Damn! Most of these are from the 50s or earlier, and so not easy to find on the net (or in the local CD store).

Quizmasters are an integral part of quizzing. Of course. Who would ask the questions then? But even otherwise, it would be sad if some day a software replaces human quizmasters as the idiosyncracies, the mannerisms, and what we at QC-IITD very often call the psychology of the quizmaster, define the quiz in totality, and not just the questions themselves. I have been to quizzes with a variety of quizmasters, though my experience is not as extensive as most of my brethren from Delhi schools as opportunities to participate in a formal quiz were very rare where I spent most of my life. Nevertheless I would like to talk a bit on the issue based on the little experience that I do have.

I have a general theory about quizmasters that normally seems to fit everywhere. It's not very original, nor very profound. It just says that the more famous a quizmaster is (and of course in direct proportion the higher his charges) , the worse are his questions. Case in point being Siddharth Basu. The man has done a great deal to further the interests of quizzing, first through his initial DD days, and then through KBC. He made people realise that quizzing was not just about a few weirdos spouting useless trivia, but also something with a great potential to look smart and earn money (however scandalous these ideas might be to puritans!). Of course, he made a lot of money himself in the process. Today the man charges around 1.25 lakhs for a quiz. His quizzes have too much useless jazz, which are incorporated essentially to take the attention away from his pathetic questions and his balding pate. As the president of QC-IITD, who happens to be an ex-batchmate of his from St Stephens, is very fond of recalling time and again, Mr Basu wasn't an enthusiastic quizzer at college, and was more into theatre. That shows. The questions are made by a team of researchers employed by Synergy Communications (I worked for a short while in that capacity too), and are very often recycled. So with every Basu quiz you attend, the probability of doing well in the next Basu quiz increases. Anyway, his quizzes are more game-shows than quizzes in the true sense of the word. Of course some people swear by him. Needless to say, I don't think very highly of such people. The only reason why any sane organiser would want to have him is because he attracts sponsors. Interestingly, there's an increasing realisation that at times the man uses up more funds than what the sponsor provides.

Another equally famous quizmaster is Derek O'Brien. The O'Briens could be called the first family of quizzing in India. But Derek has unfortunately diluted the essence of serious quizzing because of his association with mass media. I haven't had the fortune (good or bad) to attend a quiz conducted by him, and my exposure to his talents has been solely through BQC on TV. I can only hope that he does a better job in live quizzes. Readers' opinions are welcome.

The third most famous quizmaster that I have encountered would probably be Joy Bhattacharjya. Despite his association with ESPN I think he has managed to strike some balance between playing to the gallery and asking a decent question at the same time. He organised an Open Quiz as part of Rendezvous a few years back, and I really liked the event. He was to conduct another one at Nihilanth this year, but Gautam Bhimani had to step in at the last moment because of some family problems that Joy had to attend to. I can't comment on the quality of questions in a Sports Quiz, but the people were fairly satisified, and Gautam did a nice job too. He was more controlled than he is on TV. I also came across a Lit Quiz by Joy in a men's magazine a couple of years back. I liked that too, and in fact bought two more subsequent issues of the monthly in the hope that it was a regular feature. It wasn't.

Then there are others who are fairly well known, in fact might even be termed celebrities in their own right, in the quizzing circles but aren't that well known otherwise. The first name that comes to mind is Pornob (Mukherjee?). I would rather spell his name without the 'b', as his quizzes are really obscene. I haven't met one single college-fest organiser who has a good word to say about him, and so remain competely baffled by his ability to get invited to so many college fests. Most of my impression was based on hearsay, until I finally encountered the great (and short) man himself at a DMS-IITD fest last year. Let me clarify that the Quizzing Club has absolutely no relation to the quizzes organised by DMS. The less said about that quiz the better. We somehow survived the prelims, and for the first and only time in my life I was thankful for not having qualified for the finals.

Then I would like to mention Gautam Ghosh and Arul Mani, both of whom did a couple of quizzes apiece at Nihilanth 2003. Mani, I believe, has a reverential following in Banaglore, and understandably so. He has amazing knowledge in a wide variety of fields. His questions were to the point and precise and his manner that of a strict school-teacher. I wouldn't say I enjoyed his quizzes all that much, and things weren't helped by the fact that they were SciTech and Sports quizzes, but they were still good quizzes and I would like to attend a general quiz conducted by him.
On the other hand, I did enjoy the quizzes conducted by Mr Gautam Ghosh, though for not the right reasons. He also seems to have a good command in a variety of subjects, but he is, for the want of a better word, outdated. In all fairness, some of his questions (on rare occasions) were very good, but most of the times they were straight rip-offs from Quiznet (probably the greatest crime that one can commit as a quizmaster) despite his proud claims exhorting their originality. Those questions might have been originally his, but most of them had done so many rounds through all sorts of quizzes (thanks to the internet) that calling them old chestnuts would be unfair to chestnuts. Coupled with that was his propensity to call infinite bounce an unfair and confusing method, and have innovative rounds where people had to guess erased lines from print ads of products, and he couldn't expect much adulation. The most valuable gem, of course, was his oft-repeated statement,"If you know the answer, you can work it out". That alone would provide him immortality in the annals of our quizzing club.

There was another lesser known quizmaster whom we got to know for the first time at Indore. We really loved his quiz, which was by far the best of the lot, and he was the first one to be invited when Nihilanth 2005 was planned. Apart from the fact that his questions are mostly workable and interesting, another reason why he is particularly liked by members of QC-IITD is that he concentrates a lot on entertainment (read movies) and literature - the staple diet of our club. His questions are exactly the way my questions are, and in fact I heard from more than one person during Nihilanth that they felt they were attending a quiz by yours truly. I'll be modest and honest. He's much much better, and knows a whole lot more than I do. But yes, my quizzes are a slightly easier version of his. And so, without doubt his quizzes have been the ones that I have enjoyed the most among all the inter-collegiate thingies that I have been to. His name's Satyajit Chetri.

I had thought of doing this in two parts, but since I have already made it this long, and because I don't know if I will get into the mood of continuing this later, I might as well finish this off. We had Mr Srinjoy Chowdhury this time around for two quizzes. His questions were more-or-less decent, with no rip-offs, but most of them weren't workable, which is how we like our questions to be. People did not take very kindly to his idea of a visual round though, where he just showed paintings of scientists and asked us to identify them, and continued doing this for four rounds! His General Quiz was slightly better. So he's a better bet any day compared to Basu. And he's pretty well-known too. Mr G Sreekanth did the Business Quiz at Nihilanth, and it was one of the few business quizzes that I really liked. He didn't veer off into jargons or photo-identfications and didn't turn it into another Brand Equity quiz either. Many of the questions were nice workable ones, or at least had some interesting fact related to it that made you go aaaahhh when you heard the answer. Unfortunately his quiz was scheduled for late in the evening the first day and there weren't too many to enjoy it, and most of those who were there were sleepy. I would like to attend some more quizzes by him too.

Then there is Avinash Mudaliar who did the Business Quiz for DMS this time around. He did a fairly competent job too, though he had far too many frills for quizzers with simple tastes like me. He was also a bit rude in his effort to be funny.
A few years back I also attended a quiz by Aditya Mobai (not sure of the spelling), who used to work at Synergy, but left them later. He was another rude man. His questions wren't exactly great either being a product of the S Basu school of quizzing.

Apart from these there have been many quizzes conducted by college students that I have attended. My best experiences have mostly been with quizmasters from my own college, and the worst with quizmasters (or quizmistresses) from girls' colleges in DU. I have never attended a quiz at DCE or NSIT, though I am told they are nice. I did attend a quiz that Rohan Murarka did at IITD and it was a nice quiz, though some people were of the opinion that there was too transparent an effort to appear cerebral by the quizmaster. I don't have an opinion on that, but I do remember the mispronunciation of 'Burghers of Calais'.

There is no particular reason why I chose to make a post on this topic right now. I had wanted for long, though, to do this. I enjoy conducting quizzes myself, and have done it a lot within my college (and twice in DU). It also irritates me a lot when I see bad quiz-masters getting paid too much, and that makes me think about trying it out as a part-time profession in the future. Of course I have my own frailties too, so I do not claim to be a 'good' quizmaster, whatever that is.

All my interviews are over. I don't have a good feeling about most of them. That could be fear, modesty or under-confidence, or a combination of all three. I'll be happy if I convert one of the top three, or I'll have to try for off-campus jobs (which is not an inviting idea).

Nihilanth Diary - Part II will come later. I was going through the comments of my last few posts and came across one made by a batchmate of mine about my 'readers' forming a bad perspective on IITD. He was right in a way. Anyone who is trying to get an idea of what kind of a place IIT Delhi is from my blog, though I hope there isn't anyone, would be getting very one-sided, and negative, ideas. In fact, I might also be putting up a very negative picture of my own self. Since I am in a good mood right now, bolstered by a Maharaja Mac, let me set the record straight. About IITD that is. I really don't give a damn about what people whose only interaction with me is through my blog think of me, no offence intended. Like the person who made the comment, and others that he was talking about, even I find IITD "extremely inspiring, exciting and fun". The only difference is that it's not the buildings and the faculty that make it that way, but the students (at least for me). And all the fun that I have had here has been because I have had the good fortune of interacting with some amazing men, and, in a much lesser number, women, who have spent time here. The unfortunate thing is that these people were either my seniors or my batchmates, most of whom have passed out now. There are very few people among the juniors whom I have interacted with as extensively, and still lesser with whom I have had a fun time. Completely my fault, I accept, but too late in the day now to make amendments. If I could hold time still, or go back to a time in my past, I would choose my 1st, 2nd and 3rd years here, which were probably some of the best years of my life. And I have had a fairly privileged life all through. It's just that all sources of inspiration for me have run dry now and it's high time I moved on.

I also don't have very high expectations from an IIM, or a job, or my future life, at least not unjustifiably high. Of course I look forward to getting out of this place and make good of whatever I have learnt all these years and attain some level of sucess (monetary, personal, careerwise), the incurable optimist that I am. Nothing wrong in that, I presume.

I am in a better mood now. Much better. Though I haven't slept yet and the signs are showing. I am going to make a post on Nihilanth, but just might miss a few things.

Let's begin at the beginning. Nihilanth 2005 was the second edition of this quiz initiated by the efforts of Suryakiran Tatineni and his batchmates at IIM Indore in 2003. It was a great event, very well-organised and involved a lot of fun, interaction and stuff. At the end it was somehow assumed, I don't know the reason, that IIT Madras would be organising the subsequent edition. Things didn't materialise though, probably owing to some administrative issues there. Then we heard IIM Kozhikode were interested for a while. No follow-ups there too. Till late November - early December last year there was no clue when/if we were going to have it in the current academic year.

Then one fine evening, after one of our events in the Quizzing Club, when a big group of the regulars were having dinner at the insti cafeteria, the secretary, Tanuj Bansal, vented this idea. Actually he might have talked about it earlier too, I don't remember, but that evening when all of us were together was the first time when a relatively substantial plan germinated. We realised that it was going to be big, bigger than anything any single club, leave alone QC, which is one of the smaller ones, had done before this. Everyone, and especially the committee, which comprises of the secy and nine reps, would have to work really hard. We thought of a rough period when we could have it, finalised the quizzes (which ended up being same as the last year), and did some nominal distribution of work. Then we had our Majors very soon, and roughly at the same time the powers-that-be tried their best to discourage by citing the popular excuse that we already had way too many cultural events in the calendar ("Bachche padhai nahin karte hain"). I was one of the wretched few who even asked Tanuj to back off as even if in the end we did manage to convince the authorities they would still keep on creating problems for us. Thankfully better sense prevailed and we got permission. Between our exams and several events jam-packed in the second semester there weren't too many dates available, and unfortunately we had to settle for a weekend when most of the IIMs would be busy.

We had identified some companies we could contact for sponsorship. The marketing work was initially to be handled by the committee members only, but thanks to very little work done in December we got hopelessly behind schedule, and eventually some other members had to join the team too. I keep using 'we' as I was officially a part of the team. I did almost no work though till the last couple of weeks. Except of course helping a little in planning, and attending meetings to remind Tanuj of things needed to be taken care of. By the by, things started falling in place, sponsors showed interest, most lost it and we finally managed to rope in two. Most institutes also showed a lot of enthu and that egged us on. Of course refusal from B and C dampened our spirits a bit too.

The last couple of weeks were really hectic, and involved among other things, heckling with the 'brand custodian' (whatever that is) of one of our sponsors over the shade of blue the logo showed (which resulted in us having to spend several thousands more on reprinting posters), trying out different options to provide food to the participants after it was made clear to us that hostel shit would be made available to us only at a premium, frantic totalling and retotalling the expenditure to ensure we were within budget (5.3 lakhs, if you are interested), keeping in touch with the quiz-masters (one of whom thought that the event had been cancelled as I hadn't contacted him after the first few mails), booking plane tickets and scouring South Delhi for nice, affordable accomodation for them, more heckling with the printers - for T-shirts, posters, banners, and pens - on advance payments, and of course some more heckling with the authorities who were hell-bent on making life difficult for us (so, what's new, did you say?). It was fun though. Of course not for Tanuj who had lost all hope for method in the madness. But thanks to the impeccable work done by him, and his reps, even the authorities gave their blessings finally (with one of them even conceding that it was better organised than Rendezvous) and things started falling into place faster.

The night before the event was extremely hectic as all of us had to decorate the venue, Convocation Hall, ourselves, which lasted till very late into the night, and then we had to delegate work for the next day. After that we sent Tanuj and the reps to sleep while three of us 'seniors' spent some more time going over the next day's schedule and preparing the speech for Tanuj. It's a different issue that all our efforts at preparing a good speech went down the drain when he just ploughed through it the next day with no care for the conventions of good public-speaking. But that comes in the next post.

It's been a while. I didn't stop writing here because I was busy with my interviews. I was busy with my interviews. But not much. I was also busy with my project. Not much again. I was also involved (not much though) in organising a fest for my club. But all that couldn't have kept me from writing here if I wanted to write. The reason I stopped writing is because I got bored. In fact I had got bored of the Internet itself and had even stopped checking my mails for over a week. Thankfully got over that, but just didn't feel like writing here, or reading other blogs. I have been keeping in touch with just two or three of the blogs on my blog-roll regularly. And then, a few minutes back I came across another blog by a student of my college completely by accident. I liked his posts, liked them enough to feel inspired to write a post on my own blog. I don't know if I would continue this on a regular basis. Maybe, changing the layout would help. Who cares?

I want to write about my experiences from Nihilanth, but not now. I have a minor early morning tomorrow (or today) for the only course I am doing this sem. It's a nice course on psychology, which would have been an interesting one only if the professor was better. Of course, that's the bane of most courses at IIT Delhi, and from what I hear most undergrad colleges. Anyway, I was loitering on the net because I couldn't sleep. I finished watching Hey Ram a short time back. I hadn't seen it earlier. I really liked the movie. I am so fed up with the general incompetence in our country's film industry that whenever I come across a decent piece of work I feel really elated. This movie was one such work. I'll refrain from an all-out review though for the moment.

I don't know what to write here now. I am feeling restless. Have been feeling that way for a few days. I keep getting ideas to write a book (or at least a short-story) on. I also keep having these thoughts of not knowing what I want to do once I move out of this place in the near future. I mean I am fairly sure that I want to do an MBA, and it's not a rash decision as engineering was. But I am not satisfied. I saw Aagantuk by Satyajit Ray a few years back. I heard a term called wanderlust in that movie for the first time. I read Motorcycle Diaries a few weeks back. I am reading On The Road right now. I have this uncontrollable urge to travel and experience things in a way that I won't be able to do for a long time once I move on to the next station in my life. But I know I can't afford to do that. Not monetarily of course, but because I have been unfortunate enough to be born in a culture where taking time off to think what you want to do is considered doing nothing at all. My parents wouldn't allow me to do that. My upbringing wouldn't allow me to do that either. That'll be too bold a step for a good, well-brought-up, middle-class boy (or man) like me. And I am to continue satisfying myself with unplanned but short, one-day, wanderings through the ruins of Delhi. How delightful it would be to hitch-hike, or maybe even drive, across the country (if not the world) with a friend! Just one of those unfulfilled desires. I am not sad. I just pity myself, and my generation. India is wasted upon us.

Come to think of it, I think I am a lot more fortunate than most guys from my generation, and I should be thankful for these small mercies. I have been lucky enough to be born in a family that has spent all its vacations moving around in our car with almost no fixed itinerary. Do that with your family, it's a lot of fun. Of course, even that seems unlikely to be repeated anymore with my sister, my parents and I living in three distant parts of the country. That's another thing that I feel these days. I was home last time in July 2004. I can't go home before June end, or maybe later. And I still don't feel a longing for home. When I talk to my mother on phone I can sense in her tone that she feels I am moving away from them, my parents. I would like to think that's not true, and I don't want to do that either, but I feel that happening too. I love my family as much as I did earlier, but I think I have crossed into that stage of my life now where my parents' need to be close to me is far greater than my need to be with them. It sickens me to the core.

I just finished reading The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto 'Che' Guevara. The book is surprisingly beautiful, or should I say surprising and beautiful.

It's 5 in the morning and I had been reading it for the last five hours. The book is very short with short chapters, but I took my own time savouring the writing. The way it's been written, or translated, is mesmerising. I didn't really expect Che Guevara to be what he comes across as in these memoirs, written while travelling across the length of South America, twice over, along with a friend. Of course, he was just a 23 year old medical student when he undertook this unbelieveably ardous journey and the more famous revolutionary was still a few years away. But the signs are there. And that is partly what makes it such an amazing work. You actually see a young adult mature into a thoughtful man during the course of the adventure. If the translation (by Ann Wright) is true to what Che wrote originally then he was every bit the great man he is hyped to be. The manner in which he writes about the workers in the copper mines of Chile, or the Indians in Peru, or lepers on different occasions for that matter, you can't miss the strength of his compassion for these people, and it's very inspiring. (Forgive me for sounding cliched)

It's also an amazing and very comprehensive description of the whole South American continent (or at least a major part of it). The people there are so similar to Indians in many ways and the apparent wonder of a middle-class college student from the city experiencing most of it for the first time strikes a chord and calls out to the wanderlust in the reader. I wished at several points through the book that I could get a chance to travel through India in a manner similar to Che. I have enjoyed the few occasions when I have had to travel in a slightly unplanned manner across rural or semi-urban India, changing the mode of conveyance at regular intervals, but I am not sure I'd survive a longer version of it. Or probably I would, if I do it with a friend. Would be worth a try.

Finally, what makes this whole account really enjoyable is that it's not dry and serious but has just the right dose of Che's sharp sense of humor. Two young men bungling their way through strange lands has to have its own share of crazy moments and Che takes great pleasure, at times at his own expense, in narrating these anecdotes.

Don't miss the book, it's well worth the time. Now I desperately want to get my hands on the movie. Coincidentally, I watched Easy Rider yesterday. Times describes the book as Das Kapital meets Easy Rider. But the latter, though a nice movie, left me feeling very sad with the ending, and I don't expect Das Kapital to be as good a read as Motorcycle Diaries either.

I saw a really weird dream today, even by my standards. I normally dream a lot while sleeping (and at times while awake too), usually remembering at least two dreams the following morning and the dreams begin within minutes of lying down. I am a very light sleeper (which is a nightmare in a hostel) and very often have dreams while I am half-alseep too, because I can recall what people outside my room were talking at the time I was having a particular dream. My dreams are normally very happy ones and mostly related to the plot of a book I have been reading or a movie I just finished watching. I also make movies in my dreams, and sometimes my dreams even continue after I have been awake in between for hours at a stretch as if it had been on pause.

Anyway, coming back to this particular dream I had early in the morning today just before I woke up to my alarm, it was not a very happy one. It involved a calamity in Delhi, but the Delhi in it was a very rural (or medieval) kind of a place with only very few landmarks from present times. The rest was open spaces with ruins scattered in patches. I don't remember how it began but I can recall the instant where there's an earthquake, which is followed soon after by steam coming out of the fissures created by it. This is followed by lava flowing out, and the few people who have survived the quake running from it. Finally everyone meets up at a particular place which is now surrounded by hot lava from almost all sides flowing towards the centre. And then suddenly there's quiet. There are very few people left in the city, I being one of them, and we are moving around looking for survivors. Everything's been burnt to the ground. I find myself alone at the top of a really high mound of mud that has a single house on it. I find right then that earth's gravity has lessened (I told you it was a weird dream) and I throw a stick at the door which floats away instead of striking the door. And then I notice that the mound is gradually falling away and I am facing a sheer drop several hundred feet below (That was the most horrifying part because I am really afraid of heights) which means certain death. Just then an old lady walks out of the house and then there's darkness. The next scene is a TV talk show which is supposed to be where you get to on reaching heaven. And there's Jay Leno, of all people, interviewing me and the old lady on how we felt while dying.

The alarm rang just then.

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The answers to the quiz on the 19th are given here.