Indigo Blues

I don’t want the first line of this post to be a Heavens be blessed! I am back!!! type thingy, since that is what every blogger says when returning from a brief hiatus. So, Heavens be blessed! I am back!!! A lot of water has flown since my last post and some of it, tragically, in the form of a killer tsunami causing immense destruction and the loss of precious lives. I express regret and profound solidarity with the victims of that fateful day.

I had been to Bombay for a week, ostensibly for participating in the largely self-proclaimed Mother of all cul-fests –IIT Bombay’s Mood Indigo, though, I had a much better time outside the campus, than inside. The post is a critical deconstruction of the travails of Der Pfeifer (for the uninitiated, that’s me!) at MoodI.

Ok so this is how it all began… My hitherto modest wanderlust, sees the IP on the Narmad notice board calling for applications to MoodI and, without much effort convinces me to take the plunge (into Powai??!!(pardon the sad pun )). As Forrest Gump would say, ‘and just like that I decided to go to Bombay!!’. Now, I reached B a couple of days prior to MI for I wanted to roam around the city (a BIG one, as I was to discover.) and of course to watch the pigeons near the Gateway of India and elsewhere. There were just too many and they were all over the place. So a couple of days spent rewardingly, going around the BIG city seeing the sights and hearing the sounds and of course devouring those heavenly pav bhajis dripping with ghee. (all that and more in another post)

Soon enough, it was that Monday morning (yes, O holy lasagna lover! It was a Monday!) and it was that time of the year when some crazy bovine drank ink and belched, I mean moo(e)d indigo. So there I was, all set for the indigo! The blues however began to settle in incredibly soon. First things first. There was the assistance and registration desk and some helpful hospitality folk who dutifully gave us a room number and also informed that, besides the three of us, there would be two others, sharing the room. All this, of course was done in a jiffy- the whole thing taking just a little over forty-five minutes. We walked all the way to the room indicated, which happened to be in one of the farthest hostels in the whole campus, from the main indigo area. That did not help us stay away from the blues, though. Those roommates of ours whom I never got to see (phew!, thankfully!!), had for some reason chosen to lock the room, preferring to take some other room instead. Now then, the reader might be prompted to think that D.P and his friends were three stooges, incapable of even asking a thing as obvious and as simple as the duplicate room key to avoid the quandary that we had walked into so effortlessly. D.P. would just like to add here that those friendly hospitality folk had assured us that the room would be open anyway – hail or high tide! Mercifully, we were not sans sanity and the sane man (that was me, of course :-P) in our midst figured out a solution that was thirty-eight million times smarter than 42! That was to leave our bags safely chained to the window grill in the next room, and go in search of our absconding roomies get a duplicate key from those friendly folk sitting at the you-know-where. Eventually, my friends managed to locate those a.r. and get the key from them at midnight, when they came for mattresses. I have to tell you here that the accommodation at the Mother of all cul-fests was nothing that my mother would feel pleased about. We were put in a room barely 10’by 6’ with only three mattresses and no blankets for the five of us and… actually the less said about it the better for in an attempt to give you the actual details, I might get to speak like one of those Now See This! episodes that I fervently despise.

The pro-shows were a free for all, provided one was ready to get the passes at three p.m.and again stand in a loooooooooooong queue for another couple of hours and go through a quick frisking procedure to get into that crowded open-air-half-theatre for the shows that were invariably ninety minutes late. The concert by Pt.VishwaMohanBhatt was special. There were of course shows by the likes of the Colonial Cousins and Remo, none of which were very engaging. There was supposed to be a rock-show, which got cancelled owing to the sad demise of Shri.P.V.Narasimha Rao.

Vogue is an annual fashion show conducted by IITB during MI. The finals were held at the open-air-half-theatre, and needless to say, the whole place was bursting at the seams. A lot of freebies were distributed then. I, of course held out my hand for a T-shirt or something and all I got was a handshake from one of the judges.

The quizzes at MI had questions like Hashan Tillekeratne holds two milestones in test cricket. What are they? The answer was that he was Kapil’s 432nd wicket and Warne’s 500th wicket! They were milestones, alright, but definitely not Hashan Tillekeratne’s! The audience quiz was another apology, despite being organized in an air-conditioned Audi. The entertainment quiz was the lone silver streak in the indigo lit-clouds.
The art and crafts events though, were very good and there were some displays that were too good to be classified in the amateur category. There were some good workshops and lec-dems by professionals and there were those like the Archeology lec-dem that had three people (not all cords!) other than the speaker in the Audi that could seat about 200 people.

Overall, the mood was bluer, with shades of grey rather than the anticipated indigo!