Day two was fun. Except, we couldn’t take part in half the events because we were a wee bit late. Yes, Yes, we understand you’ve come all the way from Bangalore, but you see we turned away 20 teams already. Tough luck! Goodbye. Oh come on! What fests run on time anyway, we fumed.
There was a bit of the customary song-dance happening near the foodcourt. You know, one of those dos with annoyingly squeaky emcees, with plastic accents and such. Every college fest has to have one of these, perhaps to balance long established equations of Fest mathematics. The workshop on that day, to make up for bad starts, was an excellent talk on Creative Writing. It was held by none other than funnyman Sidin Vadukut, whose Travails of Single South Indian Men (If you haven’t read it, do it now!) made waves in blogland a few years ago. Sidin is an alumnus of NIT Trichy, and went on to do an MBA at IIMA only to give it all up to turn into a full time writer-journalist. He is now a features writer at Mint.
Sidin, we discovered, is as funny in real life as his wonderful blogs. He had very kind words for aspiring writers. He related to us how he got down to writing full time and told us all about his ‘Moment of Epiphany’. He articulated on everything from Dave Barry’s writing to his inability to read James Joyce to learning from The New Yorker and The Granta Magazines, all this while intermittently peppering his talk with glorious jokes on single south Indian men. Top notch, it was.
The Sports and Entertainment quiz, held that day, was imaginatively titled SpEnt. Another good quiz with many hits and misses. One of our teams missed out on qualifying for the finals by a measly ‘one’ answer. That to a quizzer is the closest thing to Chinese Torture. We however did not stay back for the late-night extravaganza- the pro-night- the highlight of any large-scale college fest. Percussionist Sivamani was one of the performers, but we realized we needed more to get away from the crowd and noise than anything else. We therefore directed some creative energy into continuing insipid jokes, one of which was something about remaking The Dark Knight in Kannada with a well known Kannada film actor known for his caustic dialogues to star as Bruce Wayne. I’m laughing as I type this. No really. Let us be! If you’re scoffing at us right now, how many inane jokes have you cracked at office meetings and laughed, clutching your sides anyway? Yea, I thought so.
An entertaining session of playing cards later (played under cellphone and Ipod backlights to make for the sudden power cut), we settled for dinner at a seedy dhaba on the highway called Azzez’s. It’s amazing how your inhibitions w.r.t eating at shady joints and being a safety-healthy food-wuss changes when on your own. It was liberating to eat without looking I will say, while hoping my mother doesn’t read this!
We got done with next day’s India quiz, the questions of which spanned from Roadies to Balamurali Krishna to Nathuram Godse to Amir Khan’s blog (to their credit, some very nice questions). There seemed to be many other events and workshops on Pottery and styling and such running on an aside. They even had Tamil elocution events which were a hit with the local colleges. ⊕