Gnosiomania. Is that a word? No! It's a celebration.

Gnosiomania. That's the biggest knowledge fest of Asia hosted by the Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology, Allahabad. In my four years of tryst with destiny as I would like to believe with Gnosio, never have I come across passions and emotions as wild as the ones witnessed during the latest edition of this big daddy of all quizzing fests anywhere on the planet. Already having registered itself in the Limca Book of Record for having the maximum number of questions asked during a single college fest of over 48 hours of non-stop quizzing extravaganza I might be permitted to assume that we achieved something great that is probably not going to be matched anytime soon. When I say we, it's a distinguished company of people with a desire and passion for quizzing and their never ending quest for achieving greatness.  


Ever since my 1st year days in college I dreamt of being the winner on that sacred stage, fighting it out with the very best that India had to offer, straining every neurotic muscle that traversed my brain looking for "that" bloody answer that would make me and my comrades immortal in the MNNIT folklore. Boy, it happened this time! Sick and tired of being so close and yet so far in the previous editions. Sick and tired of Zuhaib sticking his tongue out every single day of my life ridiculing me for my enforced absence from the sports quiz last year. Sick and tired of waiting for my moment under the sun. Sick and tired of waiting to see the dream come true. Come February 4th 2011, it was time to set the record straight. It was one last shot at glory. It was one last shot at immortality. 

This blog post is not about the quizzes we won or the manner in which we won as some might have believed looking at the previous lines. It's about everything that happened after the dust had settled down on three crazy days of mind-bending, nerve wracking search for answers that would lead me to reflect on my four years of romance with Gnosio. 


For a start, I would like to express my gratitude to Zuhaib for being my partner in crime for all these years. For sharing the highs and lows, for ridiculing me every single day of the last year, for making me hate him so much that if I was granted leniency for one crime that I could commit I would have fancied murdering him! Buddy, this college needs you to keep the passion going, you're the greatest quizzer I've met in my entire quizzing life! It was an absolute honour and delight to have quizzed with you. Sharing the classics and gudangs at daddu after every elims, going weak on our knees gazing at Remya Murleedharan, making Avinash Mudaliar the butt of all our jokes. I'm gonna miss all of this now that it's all over for me. 


Thank you Hemant and Dileep from the time of our first quiz together in 1st year to the last in final year. Thank you Shetty, Rathore (for your GPRS lifeline), Apurv, Karwa, Prady, Ojas and I might be missing some names here pardon me for my naiveness. The list would be incomplete without mentioning my awesome juniors and wingies Apurv, Gaurang and Siddhant. You guys are on the highway to hell! The biggest travesty would be if I forgot to mention Ali, Bhavani, DSingh and Mallu for the trips to Sher-e-Punjab in the aftermath of our homecoming :) 


Zuhaib with his time alone exemplified the rush of emotions brimming up a storm in the grey matter that the moment had brought us. The never ending hugs and high-fives that displayed the kind of desperateness of how badly we wanted this Gnosio to be ours. The feeling of emptiness on the following Monday when we slept our asses off not caring for a thing in this world knowing fully well that we had been through something great and no one could deny us our place in history of Gnosio. The commitments that I've since made to Zuhaib to come back next year to nail the holy grail of sports quiz that was so cruelly taken away from us in the shape of cricket quiz are yet to be fulfilled but as long as I have life and there's blood in my system no one can deny me the reunification chance with Zuhaib. 


P.S : Treats follow this blog post :)

Happy Homecoming :)

Thank You NIT Rourkela for making a fucked up Inter NIT fixture. Thank You for flicking my phone. Thank You for the utterly tasteless food. Rourkela!!! Yeah that’s what they call a place where you get ridiculous people make even more ridiculous faces when you ask for “Gudang Garam”!!! Rourkela!!! Yeah that’s the place where you’ll find no trains or buses at night cause of some shitheads who decide to blow up anything and everything that even remotely moves or appears to move. A rocking winter vacation was something that I badly needed after my Inter NIT misadventure. But I wasn’t done getting my ass busted yet!! Got the lamest train booked for the trip to Mumbai when I would have reached faster on foot. Lame food, lame train, lame co-passengers and no phone makes for a short trip to hell I know for sure after this experience.

 After four miserable days of sad train travel I reached home (read heaven!!!!), the state the world calls Goa, famous for it’s sun, sand, free booze, intoxicating music and beautiful women (With all due respect to Goan Women, it’s the foreigners I’m talking about over here ;) Mamma!!! It’s a special feeling being back home after getting my ass busted by jaundice, kidney stones, placement tension, fucked up pace of project work, sleepless nights spent worrying about passing grades in Instrumentation and last but not the least, the shattered dream of Inter NIT. Mom didn’t take long in deciding to double my weight by feeding me left, right and center. I was being stuffed with food when I was more interested in my other "commitments" . It didn’t take long for me to feel the homely vibes. 

Slowly but steadily things began to settle down. Mom decided to let me feed myself when for the first couple of days she made me believe that my hands were more of a vestigial body part. I was done "bird" watching, Vasco wasn’t all that interesting, Inox didn’t appeal to me and beaches were riddled with more CISF personnel than hot Russian beauties and the biggest letdown was the fact that no Sunburn passes this year!! Lick!! how exactly was I going to spend my vacations?

Just when it all seemed lost, enter reunion party plans!!! It’s been four long years since we said goodbye to some people whom we may never ever meet again, four years since we last played football on the blessed turf of NPS Goa, four years since we’d broken a few lights and fans of the activity hall at school and four years since we’d drank water from the taps of “Ganga”. Reunion plans had got me buzzing. It was decided that we meet at the school grounds, play a bit of kick ball and then we head for a night out and a late night beach ride.

Playing football for reunion wasn’t exactly some people’s idea of fun I guess. Huge bellies, floaters for footwear, jeans for the kit and a few shots of absolute vodka was what people came armed with for the reunion special fixture against the present school team. Boy!!! Didn’t we kick some major ass that day! For the record, the match was a tied game at 2-2 but my God, people were putting foot to ball for probably the first time after school and they were amazingly brilliant. Be it Vari in goal with his skewed sense of judgment or Abhyuday with a few vodka shots cursing every single person who passed the ball to him that day. Was an amazing performance by the “Legends” I must say. After this bullfight we headed straight to Rohit’s flat for a quick shower and boardroom meeting to decide upon the plans for the night. Sagarika and Pooja!! Yes, that was the ladies count for the reunion :( I mean come on man, it’s a darn reunion man you gotta make your presence felt. I can understand that getting your ass kicked at office is an art and activity some people specialize and relish in equal measure but you still gotta take time out for one bloody reunion!! Btw, thank you Sagarika and Pooja for turning up and a greater sense of gratitude for staying there inspite of feeling threatened by Abhyuday in more ways than one!

Screw you Rohit Rai for your idea of dinner at Gawin’s. It was awful man!!! Not the food but just the place, for Christ sake it was a god damn family place man! We sat there as if we had just finished a business meeting and wanted a quick dinner before we headed to our beds. It was sad!! But.... Cheap cheap cheap !!! That’s what I wanted to yell after every shot of BP that I had over there. Bloody hell!! 60ml shots of BP for just 40 bucks! That’s what I call cheap !! It’s heaven on earth in whichever way you look at it. So anyways, after the dinner we headed to Colva for some “sex on the beach”. It was fuck awesome man!! Whatever time we spent there was scintillating. Heading back to the flat most people had lost all sense and mind and either they dozed off in the car or were uttering shit loads of crap. I was in none of these categories :D 

Scenes at Rohit’s place-armpit lover(Abhishek Bhatnagar, chupa rustam!!) thank you Abhyuday for being our version of Wikileaks and Julian Assange!! Dancing and prowling on the mattresses was a bullshit idea but the crap coming out of people’s mouth was way more interesting and weighed in gold. One man to whom the party belonged-Abhyuday!! The Simha from Andhra, Kerala, Karnataka and also Honolulu!! Man you rocked the party!! Someone please tell Abhyuday how much I’m missing him after the party!! 

I missed most of the happenings at night courtesy of being farted out of my senses by Vari Pajji that I had an instantaneous blackout and brainwash and was induced into sleeping suffering from the after effects of standing upto Vari’s weapon of mass destruction and biological weaponry!! They were a wonderful few hours that we had, partied like there’s no tomorrow and slept like crazy dogs the following day. Thank you people for being there and making it an unforgettable day. 

For the people who missed out, we missed you guys and though we didn’t exactly realize that after being drunk but it goes without saying that it would have been so much more fun if the rest of the gang had joined in. Until the next edition of reunion party, it’s a goodbye from The Legend to his brethren!! Sayonara!! Ciao!!

P.S : Abhyuday, you’re one crazy son of a bitch man!!

As soon as I opened this page, my blog started screaming at me...why have you come now you mofo?

January 15!! I am still rubbing my eyes to digest the fact that my last post was more like at the beginning of the year and then this post comes at like what...the end of the year! By the looks of it, I've got some special talent for procrastination. 

If I start counting from Jan then I've like jumped into final year in college life, changed hostels(yes!!), got placed, got my ass kicked in more way than one, started writing blog posts during exam time, have reportedly got a chick interested in me which is causing me more embarrassment than joy and I've become the Big Daddy in college....wow!! All this seems so unreal when I come to think about it. 

They say life never remains the same and I'm only realizing the full meaning of this line said by someone who had no business other than passing philosophical gyan! The days, rather months I should say have just passed me by without me realizing the fact that times running out in Allahabad. May sound clichéd coming out of someone in final year in college but trust me the sinking feeling of moving on from my Alma Matter has started setting in. And the feeling does not bring any sort of joy with it.

One of the many booze nights that I've enjoyed in all these years in college, the one at KS stands out in more ways than one. Though all booze and binge nights are special...for the uninitiated, you are are missing out on some  major fun! Coming back to the night at KS...we didn't exactly have people throw up but fun was on display in some new found avatars. Guys didn't mind being insulted, leave out Zuheb here..he doesn't need to be drinking to be insulted :P There was bhaigiri stuff(tu mera bhai hai and all) practised brilliantly by Mallu but this time it was Bhavani doing the needful and that did surprise me at the start. Fags are enough to get Mallu high but then Bhavani was high too..may be the occasion got to him but whatever it was it did lead to some really funny scenes. After 26 toasts for Bhavani(you heard that right,26!) there were tears for friendship, tears for love, abuses for some people left heartbroken in love and for those who were still left out...they had single malt to worry about. Bartenders in Allahabad are called Captain it turns out...surprised? So was I and more startling is the fact that Zuheb had nothing better to do so he started calling them Captain Saab! Trust Zuheb to come up with such bullshit anytime. He specializes in the art of vomiting crap. 

Moving out for dinner,single malts continued pouring and bhai-chara reached it's crescendo. Choicest expletives were reserved for the fully deserving and poetic lines just flowed out like the single malts I just mentioned. And the bill made the night all the more special when we discovered that we had gulped down and torn into booze and chicken almost worth the salary of the executive of some big shot company. Special night indeed!

Hopefully many more such nights in store considering the fact the fun has just started :) I have an extra incentive for writing this because may be I'll be more regular with my blog visits so that the next time I open this page I do not have some shmuck shouting mofo at me.

P.S 1: Zuheb please don't mind buddy after all tu mera bhai hai :)

P.S 2: Mallu,dude stop drinking and smoking right away. Tu mera bhai hai issliye bol raha hu. 

P.S 3: @All...I'm not treating you people at KS for sure. Not even anywhere close to that.

P.S 4: Whose ordering pizza tonight? Not me.

New Year and...

Happy New Year to all my readers(I wonder how many of them actually exist!!). May all your troubles last as long as your resolutions!! Nobody keeps them anyways so why take pains about them..??

I am back to college and the holidays weren't that great to say the least. I hardly had time at home so the boring holidays can be put down to the lack of time on hand(what a lame excuse man!). Spending 10 days at home is not exactly my idea of a vacation after the last sem which was equivalent to being sent to Afghanistan to locate Osama! The Inter-NIT at NIT Hamirpur was easily the high point of the sem and the way it ended was the low point! Christmas was a low key affair for me as I was on the bed fighting for my life(relax! I am just hyping up things a bit!). I couldn't let the New Years eve go to the dogs and boy what a time we had at the Sunburn Music Festival in Goa, it was just mind blowing with booze, chicks, food and the best music all under one roof! This is what I call life! Goa is heaven! No sooner had I stepped into 2010 it was time for me to pack my bags for college and get ready for the chilling winters and I must say I am regretting my decision to have left home so early as we are all dying of the cold prevailing here.

The class has been loads of fun until now with RKT's "compensation techniques" and Devendra's "accha beta" comment on anything falling out of the profs mouth, I can hardly control my laughter! No wonder that I always believe that the time to be dumped out of class is not far! POM(why do they even keep such subjects for us? probably to improve our insulting skills!!), the teacher I am sure won't last long in our class, he's an absolute idiot(of the real kind that we all knew until Aamir decided to redefine that term). Much more fun awaits us...

I would prefer to keep the first post of the year very short, the longer ones can wait. I wish we had the short dresses culture in the college, just to keep everything short and revealing!! :P :P

Regards~

The Almighty!

Talking about exams, Anataragni and the winters.

I fail to understand as to what could have kept me away from my blog for so long and that is one thing that's really on my mind at the moment. 

There are plenty of things that I would like to talk about here and the fact that I was away for a some period of time makes that necessary. Talking about exams, they are probably the last thing on earth that I bother about in college, other "activities" never leave me any spare time if you could imagine them (hint: think gtalk!):D. The internals this time were just a passe and never really got the nerves breaking in my body. Diwali got the better of them and the outcome was an "outstanding" performance in the so called exams. This diwali is by far the most cherished diwali in my life where instead of the usual company of family and friends we sat through endless night outs and fighting with Transmission line parameters (thanks Asheesh for the syllabus!), Induction machines and Functional dependencies. The guys got together and had the time of our lives with no shortage of booze(never mind the exams!), sweets or crackers. 

Finishing with exams we were thrown straight into the battle field of Antaragni at IIT-Kanpur. Battling the best creative talents and not to mention the amazing beauty(!!) on show there has always attracted me there. Forget the competition, we had "bird watching" on our minds most of the time and coming back I suffer from what I call the "why didn't I take IIT-JEE more seriously syndrome"!!. The 1st day its fair share of accommodation problem and settling issues, but we were lucky as we got the best place there and the entire floor of the building was occupied by us. The infrastructure there drew collective awe from us all and we were like, where do these guys get the money from and isn't it enough just to have two tennis courts instead of a lavish six!! The rock band-"Jaded Sun" from Ireland(can you believe that!!) blew the crowd apart with its stunning performance and the guitaring was what left me speechless. The fest ended with an encore but not before I had made some "contacts" there(more on them later) and left the place with memories to cherish forever!!

The battle was won but the war continues with our trip to ISM Dhanbad this weekend for the Calcio Cup tournament and that is one thing that I've been looking forward for a while now. 

And I almost forgot the winters here. First day back from Antaragni, and I almost froze to death in my room with no cover(some FB quiz predicted that would die a cold death!), I've all reasons to fear the winters from now on. 

The Almighty will be back soon.

Regards ~

Dilli Bhraman...Nehru Cup and lots more!

Hi people!

Getting back after a long time here, the last post was on Aug 14th! Blame it on the exams and partly on my laziness!

The weekend couldn't have been any better than it actually was, infact I am very tempted to call it my best weekend in college ever! Delhi came out of the blue for me. It was thursday and the exams had just finished a couple of hours earlier and the feeling of emptiness was sinking in that life would be so blank without exams, LOL! Thanks to GOOGLE TALK that we all like to use and are infact so obsessed with it, GT pinged me and asked me if I wanted to join them to a trip to Delhi for the Nehru Cup. I was like WTF! Ofcourse I would love to do that. I started making enquiries about the possible train options that one could take to Delhi, we were anyways going to travel by general class with no reservation that such things could be considered as a privilege! The next day we started after the usual dose of boring lectures and mind bugging practicals at 2230 from Allahabad(I must tell you that I was so glad that I was getting out of this crappy place that even if it hadn't been Delhi but Cherrapunji then also I would have jumped at the idea!). The train journey turned out to be more painful than we had ever imagined with all our minds collectively put together! We were sleeping on the floor with newspapers as bedsheets and people staring at us as if we belonged to some other solar system!

Delhi in the morning looked as if it had been waiting for us all this while. To say that the weather was just fabulous would be an understatement! We had to put shop at Noida so after much asking and being pushed around we took a bus to BHEL township in Noida. I must tell you one thing that girls in Delhi are so hot that I never wanted to leave that place anytime soon(never actually!). Started out for the India-Syria last league match in the evening from there but before that we went to the Great India Places mall in Noida and we all fell for the same girl in "red ", as we called her. She was damn hot!

Cut to the Ambedkar Stadium in Delhi for the game and I couldn't help but wonder, why had the best seats in the stadium been priced the lowest? I gotta say that we bought the most expensive tickets(50 bucks!!!) and ended up watching the game all standing up! India was pathetic that day and saying that is an understatement, we all felt atleast once that our college team could beat them. Abhishek Yadav, the striker was in the Peter Crouch mould but Crouchy does use his legs sometimes even though it may be by mistake but this man had no sense of where his legs where!

On sunday we all woke up late just like the way we do in hostels and had a sumptuous breakfast at the mess with all hot chicks(trainee engineers) in BHEL surrounding us! How I wish that we had co-ed hostels here! Getting to Connaught Place for some purchasing would be a good idea and with this very wrong notion we ended up breaking our legs crooked with all the mindless and fruitless walking. We headed to Kashmere Gate to look for one proper shop in the entire city selling good jerseys. There's a place called Monastery there and that is the place to be in if you're looking for good quality jerseys at really low prices. We ended up making friendship with a good number of "chinki" girls in the shops.

The final was held in an electric atmosphere and the crowd was all behind India and Bhutia was the darling of the crowds. The 1st minute itself could have produced a dream start for India hadn't the Syrian goalie dived full length to avert a certain goal. India was attacking all the time and the Syrians were happy to sit back and soak up the pressure before mounting any attacks of their own. Chance after chance went abegging as neither team could put the damn ball in the nylons. Even after 90 mins of goalless action there wasn't any sign of either team finding a goal when up stepped Renedy Singh a La-Ronaldo style freekick was buried in the net from no less than 35 yards out. The crowd went berserk and clothing was flung onto the turf but one final twist was still remaining when Syria scored with last kick of the game in the 120th min. It was upto the penalty shootout and you never know what's lined up with next kick and there did India find its "Keeper of Faith" in Subrata to hand India a remarkable win that completes a hattrick of titles for India under Bob Houghton and the trust just got stronger!

Getting back to Allahabad was so painful that we all hoped that this dream would never end.

More to follow on the next post of The Almighty!

P.S: This post was written late at night with me under some serious hallucination so the mistakes should not to be taken seriously!

P.S: Pardon me for a such a boring post but I am completely out of my mind at the moment.

English Premier League...Season Preview!!

Finally the EPL season starts from tomorrow and trust me I have never ever waited so much for a season to begin. This season could be the season when Wayne Rooney finally emerges from Ronaldo's shadow, it could also be the season when Liverpool's two decade long wait for a league title ends, it could be the season when Chelsea win the title again(they wouldn't like to wait another half a century for another title!!) or this could turn out to be another season when Arsene Wenger says that "this Arsenal side has got character and we don't need to buy big names". God somebody help the "Professor"!! In between the circus of these "big four" somebody by the name of Manchester City could spring a surprise. You never know!

Let's get started!!

When the season came to end the Spanish Media led by the Madristas faithful Marca set the rumour mills rolling again with the story- "Ronaldo to Real Madrid??". In the end Ferguson finally relented and approved the signing of Ronaldo to Real Madrid- the same club whom he had branded as a "mob" the same time last season and declared "he wouldn't sell a virus to them!". Phew! But more was to come with the signing of Antonio Valencia and the shock of the transfer season Michael Owen(he must have been pleasantly shocked to!). United are still looking for a big name signing but it seems highly unlikely that the search is gonna end in this period. Real Madrid have shamefully gone after every player who can kick a ball. You name the player and they have the price ready! Not far behind them have been Manchester City,bankrolled by the seemingly bottomless pockets of Arab wealth. They signed Roque Santa Cruz, Emmanuel Adebayor, Gareth Barry, Kolo Toure and the Old Trafford boy Carlos Tevez with each of them going on record to make everyone feel it was not the money but their ambition which brought them here. Please!! We watch football too!! Liverpool had their own share of transfer circus with Xabi Alonso handing in a transfer request to move to Madrid(again!!). Benitez did all he could but in the end they had to sign Aquilani from Roma to replace Alonso. Now Benitez says that Aquilani has a better final ball than Alonso! This man is a joke!! Chelsea probabaly did the best thing that they are ever gonna do i.e. they brought Ancelotti to Stamford Bridge. The double UCL winner with AC Milan has gotta be playing at Santiago Bernabeau cometh the end of the season for us to see him at Stamford Bridge next season! Arsenal have their youths to be playing this season. Arsene should consider himself lucky if they qualify for UCL this season(all Arsenal fans are coming to kill me!!). In Kolo Toure they lost the last of the "Invincibles" of the remarkable 2003-2004. There are other clubs too such as Aston Villa out to prove that last season was not a flash in the pan(they've already begun the work though by winning the Peace Cup beating the likes of Real Madrid and Juventus). Tottenham always flatter to deceive, lets see if Harry can bring a turnaround.

Now for the predictions. Manchester United to be the Champions(I may be biased here!). Birmingham to be the bottom team(Wolves will provide them some competition though!).

With World Cup 2010 looming and English football being seemingly less attractive to a number of big players who don't get their throats hoarse singing the praises of La Furia Roja, this season is the most important one. Fasten your seat belts and get ready to soak in the fun because no matter who wins in the end but this season is gonna be one hell of a thriller!!