Will the real hell term please stand up?

This term, the ISB taught us a practical, hands-on lesson in reverse psychology, while also demonstrating the power of positioning. In a manner that would give Goliath an unpleasant déjà vu, you saw most students waltz into term 4 with a staggeringly large chip on their shoulders. The mood was something that would have reminded the celebrated Rabbit of his sorry past with respect to races. Following all the hype and the eventual half anti-climax of Term 3, Term 4 was supposed to be a breeze.

You see where I am going with this story, right?

Term 3 had, at best, one hell week (not including your personal hell weeks where the girl you were trying to hit on brought her boyfriend to campus and so on). Term 4, on the other hand, introduces the concept of ‘dynamic hell weeks’, where the hell week is different for different sets of students. PaEV chaps have a hell week, ELP guys have another, some blessed students find themselves having to make two presentations and give a mid-term in the same week, all of this while observing that the blasted boyfriend still hasn’t left campus.

Now, on to other news. Many years ago, John Nash discovered the optimal way for a set of guys to hit on a bunch of girls in bars, which got everyone so excited they gave him a Noble prize for it. Several years later, a set of ISB students were taught this particular way of thinking – called Game Theory – in class. Four months after that saw the largest bout of Game-Theory misuse in recent recorded history as these students made their acquaintance with the concept of ‘Elective Bidding’.

Bidding for electives took on something of a mad fervour, with even certified ‘Dean’s List aspirants’ giving up studies to spend long nights trying to figure out how to beat the system. Some especially intense cases saw students walking around campus using the famous ‘Rose Petal’ strategy to decide their bidding tactics – peeling off the rose petals one by one going ‘I should bid high’, ‘I should bid low’, as popularised in Hindi films.

It has all ended with a whole bunch of students not getting the courses they wanted in the first round, and taking to midnight, sticks-and-flaming-torches lit marches to identify those who bid high and haul them over the coals. Those who bid high, on the other hand, have gone underground.

I will have to log out now, for I am afraid there is no laptop-charging point in this little underground tunnel that I have currently relocated myself to...

Sreeram Ramachandran, Class of 2011