The Ten Commandments:
- Thou shalt not slumber – you’re creatures of the night, the undead (surely you don’t call this living, do you?!), zombies with a biological clock that says it’s thirty-three o’clock, when it is, in fact, the crack of dawn.
- Thou shalt abstain from bunking – and besides meaning you can’t hit the good ol’ sack without this worrying thought as to whether you’ll wake up in time to make a run for it, this makes you sigh and look back at under-grad and 75% with a sort of desperate longing.
- Honour thy deadlines – or you’re dead meat.
- Thou shalt participate in class – as often as you can, whenever you can think of anything that’s vaguely related to those valiant words that managed to penetrate through all that fog; or you risk that worst of all nightmares, being asked a question by the kind professor who decides to give everyone a fair chance exactly when you’re thinking wistfully of Maggi and all its merits.
- Thou shalt not participate in class – on pain of being labelled a DCP(Desperate Class Participator to the uninitiated) and subject to the constant threat of a surprise bumps session. As this is in direct violation of Commandment # 4, those who cannot strike the delicate balance get the worst of both in alternating phases.[1]
- Rajma is thy sal(i)vation – red, brown, greenish-purple, small, large, humanoid – the menu in the mess is a study of sorts in the manifold manifestations of that humble legume.
- Thou shalt speak Hindi – or you will have to try desperately to look intelligent through the twenty-seventh rendering of “Gupt Daan”, flap your arms and gesture wildly to the maid to get her to come sweep your room, and stare blankly when a joke that left everyone else in splits sounded vaguely like it involved a wild flower, a porpoise and the Headman of an Afrikaner Tribe.
- Thou shalt pay for thy sins – right through the nose, every time you’re as much as one second late for a Closed, er, an Open House, every time you so much as bat an eyelid in defiance, and every time your ill-starred cell phone rings merrily in class (COFFEEEE!!!!).
- Thou shalt be boiled alive – they said you’d do well, not be well-done yourself!
- Thou shalt wish thou wert never born – ‘cause the Birthday Song goes like this:
“Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you,
We’ll beat you black and blue,
And make you broke too!”
All considered, you’d be much better off doing something relatively harmless, like, say, befriending a homicidal maniac, or tracking down the Man-Eaters of the Tsavo; it would be infinitely more relaxing, and free of the mental and physical stress you’d be subjected to at B-School.
[1] Formally called the acute-obtuse cycle.
