Category: 2019

It’s getting tougher and tougher to ignore the calling of Greek Yoghurt every day.

This is the fascinating thing about my college mess. Rather, the fascinating thing about the people who sell additional commodities at the mess in my University.

For some context, the way that meals work in my mess is that you pay a fee at the start of the academic year which takes care of all your food needs (4 meals a day) for the entire year. The quality of said mess food is disputed. I used to be super enthusiastic about it, then stopped caring, then hated it as it became lacklustre, and now I’m back to treating it indifferently and celebrating the days where it is excellent.

This disputed status of mess food means that students search for supplements. And while the healthiest option is to stock up on breakfast in your room and fruits, the commoners who are unwilling to control their desires (such as myself) succumb to the mess and the MPS to cater to our desires, including Cup Noodles and Chips and Chocolate of different varieties.

But the craziest part about both these stores is how they manufacture demand by stocking up on a new product. Nobody shows desire for these products before they arrive, but once they come, they’re sold out, and never to be seen.

I call this the Epigamia Phenomenon.

If foreign readers are reading this, Epigamia is a brand of flavoured Greek yoghurt that is incredibly delicious and very addicting. Basically, the University procured this for sale at our mess last semester sometime. And it was sold out within a day. Like half a fridge of Greek yoghurt was consumed by us. I don’t think this was particularly because everyone wanted Greek yoghurt specifically. Rather, I think we just needed distraction from yellow dal. And it worked.

Since that day, we’ve had an entire fridge dedicated to Greek Yoghurt and allied products.

This is true of several other commodities at the mess too. An example is Nutties.

Those things sell quicker than dosas on Sunday mornings.

And it’s the randomest flavours that sell. Like honey-banana. Which tastes terrible. But sells. Because it’s better than mess food.

And they make more money off us!

I need to learn how to resist Epigamia. Tomorrow shall be the first of many Greek yoghurt free days.

 

Today is not more duping, but rather the sharing of a read I found particularly interesting:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2649596

This is possibly the longest I was away from writing this year, which was a weird feeling. When two days is the longest you go without publicly documenting your life and the weird observations that make up your day, you can really notice the changes the break in routine has on your life.

The answer is that surprisingly enough, it made a very small difference. Aside from the fact that I caught a bit of a flu and am under the weather, I don’t think avoiding writing affected me as much as it has in the past.

But this illness thing, boy do I hate it. It’s very odd to me that the way our body becomes stronger and more resistant to germs is by getting exposed to it in the first place (the way vaccines work, for example). And I’m particularly annoyed at the fact that I fall sick around the same time every single year.

One day I shall defeat you, weather-change. And when I do, I shall consume cool drinks like milkshake even in the cold temperatures. Just to celebrate.

So I was in the Scoring Room today and discovered that one of the juniors on campus who reads this blog felt very duped when I posted clickbait titles or something of the sort on twitter, or even marketed the fact that I had uploaded something new – but in reality, wrote only 10-15 words. I chuckled quite hard when I found out, for a variety of reasons. First, it felt good to know that I had become someone who had the ability to dupe people: albeit at a very small scale, and all the while being behind a computer. (As I typed this, I daydreamed a court scene where I was charged for fraud and the prosecutor attempted to use my previous sentence as evidence against me – so I’d like to make it unambiguously clear, this is humour.)

Second, I laughed because it was heartening to see that people stuck with this blog – from it’s very inception, I’ve seen that a few people read and talk to me about what I post. Considering that a majority of my viewership comes from my family, I don’t pay much attention to the stats for this blog. It’s just a thing I do. But to know someone is consistently reading is a delight: even though I might be duping them.

Third, it’s funny that people actually click on clickbait. It’s weird, but I’m wondering how people get attracted toward something that looks like a click-baity title. I’m a victim of the same process, and I find myself reading articles with catchy headings but with mediocre content. While I know that’s a skill, and several people do earn money for helping with marketing and clickbait, the science/psychoanalysis behind it amazes me. SSRN has a great collection of papers that are worth reading on this topic, so if you’re interested, you’ve got a starting point.

But to the junior and the people who I have duped by writing 10 words and making you click on a post to read 10 words. I shall write more, I promise. And if I dupe you in the future successfully, please accept a thousand apologies.

Some sad news today. The Mars Opportunity Rover has been declared dead. I never knew I’d be so affected by this news, and then I saw this comic:

I do hope they bring the Rover back one day. Somehow. Maybe then we can all visit it. It’ll also mean that we wouldn’t have left

In other news, one of our annual moot court competitions has begun, so campus is really lively at the moment. Which is always great fun. It’s also got me thinking a lot about how our campus manages to string together events one after another. Especially around February, which is the most active time on campus. People/committees just churn out events one after another. There’s so much happening on campus that at this point, there are 3 things I have the option of doing: attending a lecture on Aadhar, participating in helping with this moot, and attending a lecture on education. It’s pretty wild. I’m pretty lucky to be here.

The other really great thing about moots you organize? Wearing nice formals. Formal pants are underrated pieces of clothing. They’re so comfortable, wow. Can’t wait to wear all my formal things.

And eat all the good food.

I’ve noticed over the past few days that I’ve been struggling to engage in conversation with people over the phone/in person. For example, speaking to my parents has become super transactional – something I’m not too fond of. And they can tell this too. Recently they told me my voice sounded low over the phone. It surprised me that they could pick up on it, and I’m not entirely sure what caused it: because truth be told, everything is fine only.

But I guess I haven’t been telling them about my day in as much detail as I did back in first-year, or, that I don’t display the same level of enthusiasm about University as I did back then. That’s definitely a causative factor, I think.

And it’s something that deserves some level of correction, in my view. When I came down here in first year, I saw enough cynics in Law School for me to actively want to avoid becoming one myself. I don’t think that transformation is complete as yet: I’m not a cynic, I still love University. But, I do criticize it a lot – especially things like classes and the food, my two biggest complaints. And all of that criticism, all of that hate, has sucked a lot out of the enthusiasm out of me.

Maybe it’s actually time to revive a lot of that.

Learning how to use reddit to keep myself wholly entertained has been one of the biggest learnings in law school. Without a doubt.

 

It’s interesting to me that we’ve got more accessibility to a language that originates from our land in a foreign nation, than we do in the Courts of our own country. There’s a lot to think about in terms of making Courts more accessible, but perhaps this is a thought worth prioritizing:

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/middle-east/abu-dhabi-includes-hindi-as-third-official-court-language/articleshow/67925375.cms?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=TOI&utm_content=om-bm&fbclid=IwAR3z_MqjJiDdSBhybUQx4JVjzdhRPvmpLQYW40vKfQEpDhoVrPzqznlw180

I misspelt Forty in the title of this blogpost – which tells you more than you need to know about me.

In either case, something I really want to share with everyone is this amazing YouTube Channel called Extra Creditz, which is really cool. It basically contains videos explaining everything in the world:

https://www.youtube.com/user/ExtraCreditz

Do check out.

Something I enjoyed reading today: https://academic.oup.com/icon/article/16/4/1363/5297616?guestAccessKey=5930cbdc-1417-4 7a1-98bd-9feb7dc7fbe9&fbclid=IwAR0p7hsCNji872RTDyDTm_NZlAWSTLJwgXlEazx5DcHAxMaoi9DCMNvDzOk

Reading has the power to transform your life. It gives you the ability to live through another person’s lens for a few hours, or days, or weeks. It gives you perspective. It teaches you lessons, and gives you the opportunity to self-reflect. How would you behave in a similar circumstance? What consequences does your behaviour have? All of these questions and more, are questions I’ve been able to embrace in the past week – largely because I’ve been reading fiction.

Now, I was one of those kids that came to Law school and was taken aback by how much I didn’t know about the real world. My corrective mechanism to this was to read non-fiction: as much as I could. I tried doing that through 2017, and then through 2018 – where I started off with wanting to read one fiction and one non-fiction book a day. Non-fiction consumed my life in a way not much has. I’d be reading newspapers and longform posts whenever I was free, and turn over to a hardcopy of a non-fiction book when I was back in my room. I’d discuss largely non-fiction things with my friends – happenings from the real world, which I could analyze tangibly. I’m grateful for that, because I felt like I wasn’t as uninformed as I was earlier. I also dislike not knowing things, so reading non-fiction taught me a lot, which I enjoyed. But reading non-fiction can be drudgingly slow to get through, and tougher to remember. Bad non-fiction can be horrifying, because of this factual narration. The worst part is that it’s all real, there’s literally no escape from the truth. Even where you DNF a book, you’ll end up feeling like there’s something real you’ve left behind.

Which is what makes me so happy about reading fiction – a joy I’ve rediscovered. Good fiction is fast-paced, page-turning, and immersive. Bad fiction is slow, dull, with a lack of plot and narrative arcs to keep you engaged. In either case, fiction is a product of the human mind, and human creativity. It has the ability to get you really thinking about things you see in the world. Fiction is often a “reflection” of the world – it’s not necessarily the real world itself, which is something fabulous. You can adopt course corrective measures because you don’t enjoy how the world is when you read a piece of fiction. You can change your own behaviour. You can form opinions that have an impact.

Or, you can just enjoy a book without any real-world consequences, and get lost in a world that isn’t your own. That’s a liberating feeling I can’t get anywhere else, except between pages.

I’ve been fortunate to experience that in the last week more than ever. Class has become horrifyingly slow for me to sit through, so every night, I try to pick out a fast-paced book for me to read in case I need the time to go by. And boy, oh boy, does it.

The morality of my actions confuse me – should I be paying attention? But the morality of my decision to read means I can attend classes without feeling guilt – for I have been productive, and I have enjoyed my classes thoroughly. Sometimes the ends, they justify the means. I guess.

 

 

My campus has the ability to amaze me with the talent it seems to have on offer. For all the thoughts I have about how people here are the same – and have very overlapping goals after law school, I often realize that’s merely one facet of things. This is especially true at fests and cultural events that the University hosts. People’s ability to take charge of things and make this place smile is beautiful. People’s creativity is mind-blowing.

For example, very few would think about hosting a board games night during a Sports Fest. But our University has a rich tradition of board games being available at the night mess, and a lot of fights have ensued as a consequence of them. So why not, right? But that’s only one part of the story. The second half is the ability to make the night mess come to life by decorating it, putting up paintings and decor, giving a name that resonated with the masses and attracted a crowd, have live music by the Music Club – all these good things which make the event unique and memorable. All these things need effort, and the people who put the effort in are the people I admire – because it takes a lot to work in a team surrounded by individuals who have different talents and get them focused on a single goal.

That’s been my brain for the day.