Telephone behind a glass partition

Saarang - Day IV - The Rest

January 30th, 2008 Roshan

Aadi and Bikram were staying with me on Sunday, the last day of Saarang and those lazy bums would never get up so we were rather late. They also take ages to eat, my god, I swear it reminded me of We sit together, the mountain and I, until only the mountain remains. Anyway, we finally managed to get there.

Dramatics

There was some simply amazing stuff there, I’m told. I don’t know, I missed most of it. I was just in time to watch the end of IITM’s show whose name I cannot remember but which I’m told was really good. I recognised this chap from Sathyamurthi coaching classes - Unni, but I forgot to go meet him later. Priyanshu Mishra, who also studied with me in those classes, was in the IITM play and was pretty damn good.

The only one I did see for sure was the last one by MIT who did Yes Minister. It was brilliantly hilarious, mostly due to the excellent performance of the guy playing Humphrey — the deadpan expression he had while saying his lines so very well. Amazing really, it was perfect.

JAM

This went rather up-and-downy for us, both Sandhya and James were doing pretty well till the final few rounds when a few objections weren’t upheld, consequently making them lose points. It was unfortunate really, that most of their successful objections were in the first few rounds when the format was +5 for upheld objections and -5 for overruled objections. That was later changed to -10 for objections that were overruled. The JAM itself was pretty funny, and quite enjoyable, even if only because James slept off in the middle and accidentally hit the buzzer without intending to. The JAM moderator was pretty funny and had everyone laughing most of the time. Unfortunate really, we could’ve come away with one place at the least, and possibly two.

One thing that’s really funny about Saarang is the amount of host participation there is. 4 of the 8 finalists were from IIT itself. That’s pretty funny and I wonder how host participants usually do really well (in every college, JIPMER, CMC, IIT,…) - is it because they’re used to the place or the people and so are less nervous, or are they just really good at the stuff, choosing to leave all the other competitions to the lesser mortals. Ah, we may never know.

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Saarang - Day IV - Rock Show

January 29th, 2008 Roshan

I’m posting in reverse chronological order because that’s the way my memory works.

Prestorika

These guys were awesome, I loved their music … and the name - a play on ‘perestroika’ perhaps. Since then I’ve been looking through the Internet trying to find their music, and managed to get to Prestorika’s downloads page, and to my surprise they had 4 tracks listed there under a Creative Commons licence, fascinatingly evolved idea. I’m pretty sure they played Not My Way at the concert, I recognise the music but I’m a bigger fan of their other songs - Hoist My Soul and Shameless Pride. Near the end of the concert this guy from the audience jumped the barriers onto the stage and hugged the vocalist and disappeared the drummer ended the show with one flashy act - jumping from the top of his drum-set and smashing the high hat on the ground. As soon as the lights and microphones were off some 100 guys near the stage started jumping up and down calling for an encore performance and in a few minutes the whole crowd was back to listen to one hell of a neat cover of Maiden’s Fear Of The Dark. Damn good show.

Firebrands

Firebrands opened for Prestorika — they played a lot more covers among which there was one very interesting version of Another brick in the wall which sent Suren into conniptions. Their music wasn’t something I’m a great fan of, but the rest of the guys there seemed to enjoy it like mad because the audience was jumping up and down like it was a revolution or something. They had a DJ dude who was wearing this hood through out the show (in the damn heat) and who Suren likened to a stock broker. As a matter of fact, Suren had this conspiracy theory that the whole act was a cover up for a raid on NASDAQ (don’t ask). I missed the beginning of the show since I was watching JAM where two of my comrades were valiantly attempting to fight the IIT jabber machine. By the time I was there Marc was already referring to the band’s frontman as Cartman and Suren was comparing his (admittedly superb) guitar skills with the lead guitarist. These guys had the crowd really going, but not my kind of music frankly, or at least not the way it was done. They had a flashy end though where the drummer jumped from the top of his drum-set and smashed the high hat on the ground. Flashy.

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Saarang

January 29th, 2008 Roshan

I went for IIT’s Saarang last week, and participated in a couple of events - Quiz, Ex Tempore, What’s The Good Word,… The whole thing seemed rather well managed, and I had lots of fun over the 4 days that it went on. They’ve got a nice campus and the frequent buses up and down are pleasant enough even when they’re packed because the ride isn’t too long. In any case, I’ve heard that IIT students have this bit of a reputation as elitist buggers who don’t like being nice to other people, a reputation that seems rather unfounded given my experiences.

A free bus ride:

The bus tickets cost one rupee normally, and seven rupees both ways on a Saarang-labelled bus. The problem is that 1 rupee is a very small denomination and it’s rare that I’m holding on to a one-rupee coin. The conductor insisted that I give him change despite me having only 10 rupees, so I bought five tickets and gave 4 of them to the next guy in the line. Just before the bus started, this guy came up to me and handed me 5 bucks despite me protesting, effectively buying me my ticket. Nice buggers.

A shared auto ride:

On the night when they had Decibels, my dad was due to come on TV to talk about the kidney trade and I wanted to see what he was going to say so I was in a hurry to get home. At the bus stop, there were lots of people and it was rather crowded. As soon as an auto arrived, these two fellows went up to the auto guy and negotiated a price to the gate. Seeing as I was in a hurry, I asked them if I could share the ride and they said okay. I was 50p short of my share of the fare, but they waived it :)

That’s about it for out of the ordinary events, but even normally, the IITians were incredibly normal fellows - even if unbelievably obsessed with sex.

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Tabula Rasa

January 19th, 2008 Roshan

I grew tired of having to write some crap out just because I had to fill in some place. Updating because it was necessary. Not here, this time I’ll do it in peace.

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