“What did your MBA give you?”

XIME turned 20 and the celebrations were big! A kind, unsuspecting alumnus asked me to write a nostalgia-driven article for a magazine that was to be published for the occasion. Here's what I managed to cough up.

As a member of the minority race in my first company – I was the rare MBA graduate in a sea of Chartered Accountants – I often got asked questions on my MBA experience.

“Why MBA?”

“What made you decide you wanted to do MBA?”

“What did your MBA give you?”

While I have been dishing out adulatory hokum that seemed to serve as appropriate answers, the anniversary celebrations at XIME did get me wondering - what did my MBA really give me? 

Now, I couldn't conjure up the perfect answer, but please indulge me as I attempt to put it down here.

From my two years at XIME, dotted with several hundred precious, some painful and many nerdy memories, one in particular overwhelms me the most – one made during our batch’s twelve day educational tour of China / Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia. (That trip faced ridiculously high expectations set by 180 eager students but boy, did it deliver!)

As a part of our tour, we had the blessed opportunity to visit The Great Wall of China. Everyone was obviously kicked to the hilt all through the journey..only to reach the destination and find the mighty place dressed with fog and rain drops. But before I could complete my whine about how a sunny Great Wall would have made for a better experience, the boys from the batch (and some girls too!) made their way up the steps leading to The Wall in speeds that could make Usain Bolt proud.

Juyong pass, the part of The Wall that we visited, had six watch towers (or levels, as we called them) along the way to the summit. Considering we weren’t the fittest of the lot, my friend Shinu Simon and I decided we could loiter around a couple of levels before hitting the tour bus. We enthusiastically covered two levels and clicked enough snaps for Facebook glory along the way. As the rain began coming down harder, our motivation to touch level three grew weak. It absolutely did not help that the steps got steeper and the path, narrower. But uh oh – there it was. Peer pressure! With nearly everyone wanting to cover as much ground as possible, we coaxed ourselves to go one level further. And we hit Level 3! 

But..could we possibly do more? Our Duracell-driven Mallu peers (who’d happily made their way up to the summit and were headed back down) threw incentives at us – Level 4 had a souvenir shop that handed out medals, they said. Before we knew it, Shinu and I were staring at our medals with so much pride, you’d have thought we held new-borns in our hands. But hey! Mission accomplished! 

Or was it?

At Level 4, the number of enthu-cutlets running about The Wall had trickled down to 1/5^th the number at the base. It was cold – SO cold, I remember feeling pain in my fingertips and toes. The stinging rain was no less harsh, slapping us in our faces every time we attempted to raise our heads. We were incredibly exhausted and our muscles seemed to have taken turns to submit their resignation letters. We looked up at the VERY steep steps leading up to Level 5, looked at each other, felt common sense leaving our bodies and hauled ourselves up, step after step. With every step I took, a voice in my head broke down, abusing my unnecessarily zealous ideas. When we finally did land at Level 5 though, the voice shut up. Shinu, my voice and I – we all knew we could go no further but we also knew we had gone an extra mile, pushed our limits like never before and accomplished something that would make us smile every single time we thought of it.

Yep, just how it makes us smile now!

I find myself comparing this experience to the two years of MBA itself.
Most of us started off with two things: a definitive goal (get a job?) and a hazy path that we hoped would lead us to said goal. We made our way through one year – learning, bonding, winning, fumbling and discovering our capacities, our friends and ourselves. As we approached the second year, having gotten a taste of all things Corporate during the summer internship, the ascent got steep and tense. We had to decide (if we didn't already know) our majors / career-streams, embrace them and work towards them. There was encouragement and advice from professors – some of whom we can (gratefully) still call on - just as much as there was pressure from peers.  We constantly fell out of our comfort zones (for instance, some of us had to befriend the enigma that called itself International Finance(!)) and were compelled to go a level further than we ever had before. And we finally made our way to the finish line hoping we'd given it all our best. Hoping, that we’d enhanced our skills and opened up avenues for a career that could keep us happy. Hoping, that we’d made a good number of friends for life in the process. And hoping, that we’d look back and smile. 

Now, three years since that hike, I can’t find reasons not to.   

If you haven’t already given up on my almost-failed attempt to give that question an honest answer, here goes:  What do I think my MBA gave me? It gave me what I worked for and what I longed for.

Simply put, my MBA gave me everything I really wanted to take away from it. 

STFU dear relative, you're out of your element

Hello there, dear reader. Been a while, innit? My writing is as rusty as my grey matter so you will excuse me while I rant my way through this article, won't you?

The emotional fuel required to get this post going came from a call my mother received some time last week. It was a relative calling in with what seemed to be terrible news.
Relative: *small talk in a bored, somber tone* Riight..so..there's umm..news. 
Mom: *silent prayers for every one's health* Ok? What is it?
Relative: X (my nephew) is getting engaged. As is Y (my niece) -  both in the next month..BUT don't worry!! Merin will eventually have this happen to her too!!!

My, my. A tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. *clenches fist* The last time I was this overcome with rage was when I wanted to tackle a Schumacher-deserves-that-coma preacher to the ground.

Relatives, relatives! There's incredible ones, of course..but there's also the species that serve as a perennial itch to your mental peace. They will check on your grades while you're young and certify your behavior based on the rainbows you vomit in response to anything they ask of you. They will also check on your height and your weight and the growing evidence of your lady-ness, all through your teenage years. They will work with their network of spies to unearth juicy details about your college life (and their efforts will have been in vain if your love life was as non-existent as mine). And exactly when you hit quarter-life crisis, an alarm goes off in their heads, compelling them to remind your already harrowed parents of your unmarried-ness. Their calls start off with a simple, "She's old enough, no?", proceed to "Isn't she getting too old?" over the next two months and before you know it, there's a repetitive chant haunting the walls of your home: "You'd better get your girl married off soon or else ...

There's more. Remember when your distant cousin's mother once pulled you aside during a function and asked you, one hand over your shoulder and creepy smile in place, "Is there somebody in your life already? Tell me, I promise I'll make it work. *wink and nudge* ".
Yeaaaah, why not? And while you're at it, scheming and forgetting promises faster than Kiran Bedi forgets her principles, please choke on the pandi curry.

From the lives of my (absolutely amazing) cousins, I also know of the alarm that goes off nine months into one's marriage. I find it unbelievable that people relentlessly walk up to a couple that's been married a while and asks them, "So..are you trying? How's it going?". Wait, what? Didn't the almost-random uncle just ask my sister how well she's planning and executing her sex life? Ugh. Take my word for it - once married, your husband and you simply must come up with replies our older generation of N-th order relatives wouldn't be able to cope with.

"No, uncle..it's been a bit tricky. How did you and aunty go about the whole 'trying' thing?"

Or better still, kill the problem for good:
"I've already had children, uncle. Triplets. Identical. Would you believe it?"
"Oh, it's been a roller-coaster, you know, having a son. The brat's barely 3 and I'm having to use a straight-jacket on him already."

I'm thinking I'll mostly go with, "I'm settling for a couple of adopted dogs, uncle. They're cuter than kids, I bet you'd agree! :)"

Them relatives also have a war chant I find hard to cope with - the extreme necessity to marry within one's own caste/ religion. HEY - Before you decide to torch my car, I'm all for finding a nice and intelligent (and funny? please?) Coorgi and conning him into marrying me, alright? What I don't get is the ridiculous hate that's spewed on inter-caste weddings. If you haven't come across an inter-caste wedding that was largely attended by people who behaved like they were at a funeral, you're a lucky child. I've often come across people passing remarks so snide, I've wanted to smack their vacuous heads together. I was once stopped in my tracks by the bride's father at one such a wedding and the drunk man, doing justice to what smelt like Mansion House brandy, told me, "No matter what you do, marry a Coorgi! It doesn't matter if he's dumb or retarded, if he's Coorgi, marry him!".
Sure. That's probably the advice his wife was given before she made that leap of faith.
It's hard enough to find love in this batshitcrazy world, ladies and gents. Be happy - be VERY happy - if your child got lucky.

Speaking of which, I realize I owe thanks to a few genuinely nice relatives who saw through my desperately-feminine conversations, discovered a girl who was born to be a wing-man and decided they just had to help me find an equally difficult man. Yep, they've tasked themselves with the challenge of arranging my wedding. I think the process behind initiating an arranged marriage is akin to a spoof of the average horror movie. You never know where a groom candidate is going to pop out from and how much these boy-meet-girl sessions are going to affect you but you always walk away having experienced Vadivelu-level comedy.
For instance, one seemingly smart NRI-chap I spoke to detailed his talents, achievements and extreme NRI-ness to a great extent - perhaps deservedly so! But then, half an hour into the conversation where I'm sure I managed to sound like I had a functioning brain, this happened:
"We're celebrating Thanksgiving next weekend so my schedu..Oh wait! Do you even know what Thanksgiving is?"
Facepalm, really. I wanted to chip in with, "I dunno, something about us Indians in America?". I didn't but I sure laughed over it. Until my dad gave me the you-are-beyond-hope stare.

I can never sufficiently rant about this (or anything, for that matter) but I've run out of steam already, so I'll shut it.

I'll leave you with one vaguely important piece of advice though. This isn't advice from inherent wisdom - but you must know that already, smart reader? The words wisdom and inherent were never destined to appear together in a sentence about me. This comes from experience.

Consider a scenario where you're as unfit as a goat prepped for sacrifice. Ok? Extend that thought and allow yourself to attempt some stand-up comedy. By that I mean - go on, play cricket for the first time ever, with utter disregard to the concept of inertia. Now here's the most important thing you need to remind yourself as you indulge in this interesting sport, young padawan: DON'T WHACK YOUR OWN STUMPS WHILE BATTING.
You won't get over it easily. I assure you.

I'm not really saying this happened to me while I fooled myself into thinking I could react intelligently to the stimulus of a moving ball, guys. *twiddles thumbs innocently* As The Dude might have put it, well, y'know, this is just my opinion, man.

What is wrong with you, human?

That is the chant the voice in my head repeats, in various tones of frustration and helplessness, as I drive to and from work every day. There is also the addition of expletives, the raising of the hand to point all fingers at the offender in question and the deadly eye-to-eye stare that you ensure you deliver with the look of a Bollywood mother-in-law.

The traffic’s gone bat-shit crazy, y’all. This is stating the obvious to everyone who lives in Bangalore but let me do my thing to let off ze steam, please? I often drive four hours a day, sometimes bumper to bumper and sometimes bumper to just-missed-that-human.

Let me clarify that this isn’t a solution manual, primarily because I have no solution to offer. Let me also state that I adore the Bangalore I grew up in and I love its people too, but we can all agree Bangalore of the 90s is no more. The immense road rage today’s Bangalore witnesses on a daily basis makes me want to move to Kenya and live with the Maasai and their lions.

“But why? Bangalore is so young and the weather is SOO .. ...” Shut up.  Let me repeat, shut up. And stop honking while you’re at it.

I don’t claim to be an expert driver or a skilled observer of every day occurrences but here’s what I understand of Bangalore’s traffic.

In Bangalore, peak hours have been acquired by Murphy’s laws. Because peak hours are on whenever YOU get about driving on the streets. Irrespective of the time, you will find yourself muttering under your breath while you steer the wheel with one hand and point to the hooligan driving alongside you, with the other.

Here, the buses think they’re cars, cars are make-believe bikes and bikes are humans on wheels, practicing aerobics. Of course, it is unfair to generalize, but to a great extent, drivers do not seem to understand the dimensions of their vehicles. That bus you saw in the distance in your rear-view mirror about 5 seconds back is going to stand ½ a foot away from your vehicle in the time you blinked. The driver will then proceed to look out his window and examine with pride, this artsy juxtaposition of vehicles. Of course, if he notices the woman at the wheel, he is going to stare longer and smirk the ‘so she thinks she can drive?’ smirk – but that’s a whole other debate and another unfair generalization.

The ladies and gents on two-wheelers seem to find pleasure in swaying around the center of the road like a dandelion in the wind. You will find them hovering about while talking on the phone/talking to the pillion rider/not talking to anyone but demonstrating his or her belief in ‘(ridiculously) slow and steady wins the race’. And if you’re stuck in a jig-saw-ish traffic jam, brace yourself for the cavalry of two-wheelers and rickshaws that will descend down on you from both sides, wriggle their way past your vehicle, put a scratch on it or deliver a KO to your side-mirror and occasionally turn around to get a glimpse of your tomato-red-rage face, complete with steam emanating from the ears.

Finally then, our pedestrians. They either believe they are from Krypton or they have trouble telling their backyard from a main road. You will not go by a single day where there is no human hopping across the path of your car as if to dare you. Even the cows know better – they stay stationary while you navigate around them! Yes, I am a Malleshwaram - hudugi but the number of people that loiter lazily, star-gaze and whisper stolen poetry into their lover’s ears BANG in the middle of the road they call 8^th Cross makes me wonder how there hasn’t been a petition to turn it into a park.

There are plenty other ingredients to this heady mix as well. Like smoke and dust (and whatever else renders you incapable of inhaling air) and bad roads, some so terrible, they could put the moon to shame.

At the end of every drive, one needs to calm the nerves and thank the Lord for not letting one’s vehicle get intimate with any other mobile or temporarily stationary object on the road. Else one risks busting ‘em nerves, busting one’s job or one’s personal life.

Yep, it sucks how road rage is hardly as fun as Road Rash promised it would be.

More motorsport!

So I got to write about Formula 1 and related things for Livemint, last month. (woohoo!)

Yes, yes, I remember shoving this in all your faces via other social media. I'm just plugging this in here..you know, for posterity. 

"After 13 years of bantering about Formula 1 on the internet (my status/ your status/ blog/ gmail/ twitter/ whatever), over phone and in person, I finally got to do the same for a newspaper. We can all agree I'm a happy soul at the moment. :) 

My three articles for Mint:
1. All about female motorsport fans -http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/HI9b27087bv7lvT62UwW5J/Formula-One--Beyond-the-fan-formula.html
2. About Turbo engines in F1 -http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/LebvzDqj0HikBaP6FBkq4H/Formula-One--Turbo-II-Here-to-stay.html
and 3. On the new racing series, Formula E -http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/5HAfWGa6szShQakPASYlcO/Formula-One--The-future-of-motorsport.html "

That's that, ladies and gents. 

About that MBA course I did

It has been terribly long since I wrote, so you nice people with incredible amounts of patience are going to excuse me if I'm not entertaining you enough. I intend to mock myself every once in a while, so you have something to look forward to. 

I'm not entirely sure of what I want to write in this post that's been titled with zero creativity. All I feel is an overwhelming want to tap away at my keyboard - and I'm feeling good while at it. 

When I was set to begin my MBA course, I was very apprehensive. It was to be my first time away from home. I wanted different things from my life - I didn't know what I wanted, really, but .. different. For several reasons good and bad though, MBA happened in 2011. 

Like with every important occasion in life, my relatives had a lot to say. 

"These places are full of fast girls and boys. Don't pick up bad habits ok?"

"You will not find friends here. Everyone will be very competitive. DON'T make friends."

..and the classic - "Why all this? Just get married no."

Damn you, you old menopausal lady - I'd get married if you could find me an unsuspecting fool. 

But my wise cousin who has been there, done that helped soothe my nerves. "Friends you make at your MBA college are ones you'll surely carry with you through the rest of your life", she said. And she couldn't have been more right. 

After six terms, a few hundred assignments and exams, twice as many episodes of falling asleep in the wrong places and 10635 times of my face meeting my palm in extreme slow motion.. it feels like it all began just yesterday. 

Balls. I'd laugh at anyone who says that because I feel like I aged 8 years! No, you little owl, I know you think I meant I've gotten bald-er and fatter and shorter. But while that might be true to a great extent, I managed to crash-test my head so many times that I came out of it all a tad wiser. 

See, there are these lessons you've always known because you studied them as a Kannada gaadhe or as proverbs in schools - or because your mother narrated them to you while she attempted to feed you dinner. You've always been told stories of how success is short-lived, as is failure. How you really can achieve seemingly impossible things if you wanted them real bad - if you just tried hard enough. How sometimes, you might not get what you desire despite wanting it desperately. And these lessons only seem to make sense to you when you've come across an event in life that helped you relate to them. For me, this entire MBA course seemed to be structured around helping me relate to these lessons that have surrounded me since I was little. 

I learned to love unconditionally - for someone who is an only child, I can now gloat about having learned to share my time, energy and most importantly - food, with my new-found siblings. I know now that it's hardly possible to constantly please everyone around you. I know that you can't sit happy on your previous little achievements and that you have to constantly better yourself - because you can prove yourself smart once, but folks will still wonder how you managed to bag yourself a good job, until you prove yourself smart again. I know that Formula1 will start making appearances in my dreams if I drop indications of quitting this sport - this sport and I are stuck for good. And thanks to the mirror and my receding hairline, I know that absolutely nothing is worth losing your mind over. *insert appropriate YOLO gif*

While I am entirely convinced that the writer of my fate was not sober when he decided that I'd successfully complete a course in finance, I don't despise him for his irresponsible drunkenness. My fate took me to all the nice people, a slew of incredible places and ohmygoodness, to top it all - it had me pay my way to a Formula 1 race. That's more than ten years of yearning for something with every cell of my being and then suddenly being lucky enough to get to it. So when I say I love what the last two years have placed in my hands, I mean it. For the most part. 

Sure, life could have panned out differently had I done something else instead. I could have even been happier as a database administrator or an F1 junkie, perhaps. But right now, I couldn't possibly care less. I'm taking away with me a truckload of experiences that I can narrate to my nieces and nephews when I'm forced to babysit them. I'm taking with me friends who'll stick with me until they produce more kids than they can handle. I'll carry with me some incredible professors who're the sort of friends that have your back and discuss your favorite singer's good looks with you. Heck, I'll even take with me a degree in Finance - whoever saw that coming?

Irrespective of what 'I'm taking with me' though, I know I can't prepare myself for what's in store. Be it work in the big, bad corporate world or just, you know..life. Thankfully though, I can stay confident of being ok despite being knocked down because I have the incredible ability to laugh at myself. And you - you can count on me to update my twitter account with my periodic facepalm and foot-in-mouth moments as well. And also slap me every five months that I don't churn out a blog post because *HOLY COW AND RED BULL* I feel so good right now! 

Alright then. Since I have sufficiently ranted, I'll put an end to this post. I will now look forward to that day, 20 years from now, when I'm going to be teaching your kids Geography, in my backyard.

Off to a better place, are we?

So I've been lucky to have a few amazing friends in my life. Some of whom have loved me far more than I could, in return. This one's about one such a soul - one that I forced into being my friend. And he turned out to be a bloody good one, that darned adorable thing. 

He turned out to be the kind of friend that you can talk to for hours without worrying if he's still listening - because you simply know he is. The kind of friend that you..or perhaps just me; that I'd declared was goofy and hyper enough to be my little brother. The kind that makes sure he shows you how happy he is to see you, even if it's only been five minutes since he last saw you. The kind that won't judge you when you eat chocolate at 3am or when you fall asleep sprawled across the floor. The kind that will make you giggle like a teenage girl irrespective of the shit the world throws at you all day. Importantly, the kind that will let you have the last piece of cake, the last slice of pizza and even the last lick of an ice cream and not hate you for it. Ok, not that I gave him a choice there.

The kind of retard who'd run into your arms despite having fractured legs, who'd stupidly and hopelessly try licking you in your face even after being sedated. The kind that would go to no end to churn out unbelievable amounts of energy just to show you how much he loved you, every waking minute of his life. You'd think it would be impossible for him to get anything wrong, but the bugger couldn't fight off some of 'em rotten viruses, I've been told.

RIP, love.

Now since I can't talk to him anymore, I'm going to disregard all kinds of logic and safely assume that he was smart enough to look this page up before making a permanent exit from here. 

For the crazy amounts of love and joy you induced into my life..and to our family's, here's a very mediocre, sappy and barely justifying message - We'll miss you more than you know it, you stupid dog.

On the Rocky Road to ..Hosur

Been forever, eh? It's almost if that budding li'l writer in me ordered a self-abortion. (No, you will not tell me I never really could write). But every once a while - twice a year, in my case - one comes across situations that make one want to vent. Vent so bad that one decides to write on her long forgotten blog. Wait, don't scurry away just yet. My traditional rant will follow right after a mild banter about the life of a 5ft-er in an MBA institution.

This entire post would be a miserable sink-hole, if I loathed my college. Yes, I am hinting that I like this college. (You didn't see this one coming, did you?) I actually have had a wonderful time in my four months here. That, despite feeling like I was being run over by a truck - in painful slow motion - every single day. But that's just the way post graduation rolls, they say. To cover the last four months in a single post is quite the task. Since day one, I've felt like I've been dropped onto an ice-rink with roller skates on. I'm still figuring out how the system works but dare I say, I don't despise the process.

There's several things I need to work on. For one, desensitization hasn't really happened. I still am praying, from the purest part of every living cell of my body, that somebody somewhere is working on a commode for public bathrooms that can be used without having to make any kind of physical contact with the device. Not that this place is unclean, but my bathroom-OCD still requires me to carry my army-kit of Dettol, et al and sanitize the damned place every single time. Another issue that needs a miracle-solution is my sinusoidal mood. Every other day, I wake up feeling like I fell from the sun and half expect 'Bad to The Bone' to play in the background as I enter class. But then, I wake up a couple of hours later feeling like Felipe Massa does after being ordered by Ferrari to sacrifice his ice cream for Alonso.

Oh, about the sleeping. Courtesy my randomly generated 'name', I've never really had a nickname. But if I do land one here, it will definitely be on the lines of 'sleepyhead'. The lecturers, the friends, 'em parents, the janitors and even me - I'm convinced I have a sleep disorder. I sleep through most of the day..and ..most of the night. I've managed to sleep through blood donation drives, exams, functions, speeches and conversations too. I'm not saying I'm proud of it but given how I can't seem to control my need to sleep at random times, a part of me is extremely curious to find out for how long I'll keep my first job. And the numerous that will follow. But I've got a backup plan in place - I've begun brushing up on Geography, I could teach. Yes yes, you can send your kids to me for tuition, once they've passed my 'How much of a bother is this brat?' test.

Plentiful assignments and the itch to conduct a case study on my sleep pattern aside, there's the regular song-dance-act functions that happen and I can confidently state that I've never enjoyed functions like these so much before. This one time, my friends and I were to sing a German-Christmas carol along with a few exchange students from Italy. That we did alright, but what we also did was recreate the song - Hitler style. And since I've gladly let the world laugh at me ever since I set foot on the internet, here it is: 

The actual song: http://youtu.be/6guVKTsmmBs

..and a part of what we made of it: http://soundcloud.com/merinduh/voice-0014

(This is also my official request for Hitler-meme enthusiasts to get in touch with me.)

Oh, have I mentioned I sound like a guy now? Laryngitis, I've been told. Four months into sounding like a horse, I've given each of my friends a solid reason to remind me that being born a female was a mistake. As if this wasn't enough, my hair - which has always had a mind of its own - has had a falling out with my scalp and doesn't wish to stay on it anymore. I have a strong feeling the water here in E-City has a huge role to play in this scuffle, but there's little I can do that won't go against my laws of laziness. In order to make up for these losses, the women-folk here insisted I watched chick-flicks. The results have been so intense, I'm going to scar my blog by admitting publicly that I liked them.

Which brings me to people. Everything that's wonderful about this place stems from folks here - and this comes from me, someone who's been allergic to people for most of her life. There are the roommates who're destined to become chefs specializing in dishes made from Cerelac, there's the pseudo roommates and the Brit-accented twin, the neighbour in class who already knows me better than I do myself, the obnoxious chap who reminds me of QuizCorp with every word that comes out of his mouth, the Dudes who drop references to everything 42 in Eco papers - assuring me that we as a team can bring down the world economy even before the EU can and there's my ball of sunshine who will dance with me - while smelling like a tube of mosquito repellent - in dimly lit corridors, to Bohemian Rhapsody and Beiber's Baby at 4am, instead of studying for an exam that would eventually mutilate us 5 hours later. There's the poet, there's the nerd : there's the unbelievably brilliant class, extremely talented, uber fun people outside of it and a set of amazing lecturers - I am NOT making this up and no, there is no gun being held to my head. Sometimes, even I get lucky.

Right, that's as nice and thankful as I can get in one blog post - now, I simply need to vent.
The Indian GP. For the last few weeks, I've been steaming so bad over this race, that I might as well change my name to resemble that of some Icelandic volcano. Talk to me about the Indian GP. Go on, I dare you.

Do you know that feeling when your best friend grabs the last slice of pizza while you'd been eyeing it for the last 7 odd minutes? Or that feeling when you just discovered that the girl you had been heavily crushing on declared she was a Manchester United fan, while you'd waited months for the opportune moment to walk up to her and tell her "you'll never walk alone"? Do you know that feeling when your heart sinks so low down an abyss that (if you failed your biology) you'd almost worry about having to excrete it?  THAT is how I feel when you ask me why I'm not going to the race. No, actually, that is how I feel when you mock me about how you're going to the race while I'm stuck in a town that's a skip, a hop and a jump away from Hosur.

As someone who's been excited about this sport and hence, the race track in her own country ever since the inception of the plan, it's immensely annoying when a 'newbie' F1 fan goes gaga about getting to see Narain Karthikeyan. You might want to know how to expand 'F1' and name a driver or two, before you walk up to me and get hormonal about India finally having a racetrack. Every sportsperson, every tech person, every movie star, every twitter-pun-master - heck, every nobody now talks of the Indian GP, despite not really giving a shit about it. And of course, they simply have to mention those passes they will be using to get into the track and cringe while 'em powerful F1 engines roar past them.

Initially, I thought the wannabe-aunties were #1 on my hit-list. You know, the kind that asked me "Why can't you go to the race? You call yourself an F1 fan?", with that repulsively disapproving look that could perhaps convince even me that I am no fan of the sport. But then our government decided it couldn't bear to not feature on any hate-list, so it's been out there feeding egos of the Lord knows how many people who obtain ridiculous pleasure in proudly chanting "F1 is not a sport". I sometimes wish I could give them all a break. Like a neat break bang in the middle of their backbone.

So in conclusion, flaunt your F1 ticket in my face only if you're prepared to deal with the consequences. Just so you know, I've been reading up on Voodoo and gathering material too.

Ever since my 'win a lottery' plan fell flat on its face, it hurts to see any sort of update about the race. The MBA schedule combined with MBA-driven-poverty have ensured I won't see the face of my childhood hero in Noida this month. Like Himesh Reshmiya would perhaps put it, no race no race - only mba only mba.

I'd decided to block every source of Formula 1 information and hide under a shell until the race was over, but then I chanced upon this. The video has Vettel taking us around the Buddh track and what can I say? For whatever reason, it was overwhelming. Have a look -
   

                                     

I love it how it sounds and how it looks. Like Vettel says, I can't wait for race weekend. I'm all set to lose my voice in the hostel mess(where the TV is) and be the sport's ambassador to E-City.