We are 21st Century Gods. Let me tell you something about another layer of cultural fabric of IIMA student life before you can figure out what 21st Century Gods mean. We have 18 dormatories in old campus and 7 more in new campus. I live in D-21. But that's a boring label, isn't it? At least we don't feel good to throw just another number. Each dorm has its own identity and they like to maintain that at all cost. There are inter-dorm rivalries and intra-dorm strong loyalty! Super Tuchchhas visit their old dorms and cherish the memories, take people out for dorm-dinner! Yes, dorm dinner is an event when all 30 to 40 students go together for dinner and thats kinda very regular event and we have an outing manager to negotiate with Ahmedabad's lead restaurants and get hefty discounts! We cash IIMA brand everywhere!!! Well, I was talking about dorm identities. Each dorm has its own unique name. Student has also its own dorm-name. My dorm is that of 21st Century Gods and we feel like god!
We spend quite a good time back in dorms and its like our family. A family of 30 to 40 students in each dorm. Students Activity Office is very particular about composition of this groups. We are allocated to dorms on scientific basis as we join the institute and rarely anybody changes the dorm. At least I have not heard of anybody. They try to balance Fachcha vs. Tuchcha, Engineer - Non-engineer (thats like caste here: upper class and lower class!), IIT- Non IIT and what not (we don't know the heauristics that Student Activities office use, this is just my guess). Well, gender is something sacrosanct. We have saperate dorms for guys and girls :) but then students try to balance this equation by visiting cross-gender dorms! Dorms and NYC never sleeps. We are nocturnals. We work (and not work) at night! Well, each dorm celebrates their dormi's birthday at midnight. Its a tradition. We call a girl (on a guys bdday) as Guest of Honour and so do the girls (they call a guy as GOH). Birthday Manager of the dorm prepares a birthday invite and floats it on network. Midnight is the time when the poor guy gets bumps!
Well, now that you know that we are 21st Century Gods and we celebrate birthdays at midnight let me tell you what happened on 24th December. People called out and asked to assemble in the courtyard of our dorm and said that we have one of our dormie's bdday tonight! I could not recollect getting any b'day invite and was quite surprized, whose birthday it is? Voila!!! The birthday manager got out 3 kg of cake and announced that its Jesus's birthday today and thou is one of our dormies! We are 21st century Gods and we need to celebrate each and every dormie's birthday! This is what I meant by our identities, we live them in full spirit.
Wow! My dorm has impressed me with the philosophy that God is within. Each individual has the potential to be God (I like the same thing about Jainism where they say that everybody can become Tirthankar). God is one of us. We are one of the gods. Thats the philosophy that we have at Dorm 21. We celebrated Jesus's birthday last night and I felt so good! If you wanna meet Jesus look within. Thou stays with you, around you, is one of you.
-Dolly (Yep, that's my dorm name!)
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When this guy says "Engineer - Non-engineer (thats like caste here: upper class and lower class!)", he is expressing his personal view
Dragon
21st Century God
Thanks Dragon for pointing this out. I don't know why I wrote that. I myself was a non-engineer and never felt a difference. I don't think our community maintains any such caste system. I apologize for the error. I might have picked up this notion from the debate that revolves around design of CAT that is allegedly favorable for those who are trained in engineering schools and hence results into high percentage of engineers in incoming batches.
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