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Baazigar – Week 21 : Guwahati

Guwahati is called the ‘City of Eastern Light’ – probably named by some fuddy-duddy, Raj era British officer or historian. The Assam of the British era has a slightly different history from the rest of the country as it came under the rule of the Raj a little later. Assam always perceived the Chinese to be more interested in it than the British were. It saw Subhash Chandra Bose and his exploits as the centrepiece of its struggle while the rest of the country grew up on an entirely different set of heroes.

kunj sanghvi16 Mar 2013

Thank you, Ladies!

Yes. We do not need a special day to celebrate 50% of the planets human inhabitants. But we would like to use this specially marked day to acknowledge and thank all the women who have helped build InsideIIM in some way.

Ankit Doshi08 Mar 2013

Baazigar – Week 20 : Gangtok

When one hails from a city like Bombay, niceness, courteousness, and soft-speech are things one has never had to deal with. This goes deeper than we realize. Niceness or lack of it is a part of a city’s lexicon; its grammar and its body language. And Bombay revels in exactly this – a language where kids call parents with the most disrespectful pronoun – “Tu”, a grammar where mostly all inanimate objects are treated as male for convenience, people push and shove each other everyday to get into trains and buses and fight with taxi drivers as a part of a daily routine. It is then only natural that when a person from Bombay comes to a particularly courteous place, he just notices the oddity all the time. What’s more, he himself sticks out like a sore thumb, especially in off season.

kunj sanghvi05 Mar 2013

Baazigar – Week 19 : Patna

The villages of early civilization came up next to rivers as they provided water for the villages and fertility for the fields. Then the temple became the standard unit found in every Indian village – it was also the tallest building in the village out of respect. Then came the industrial revolution of sorts and cities, with benefits of water supply systems and industrial buildings started coming up anywhere and everywhere. With the evolution of careers and jobs came the need for rejuvenation, recreation and relaxation. This is where the maidan came. Every major city in our country has the maidan in the center of the city. Some have managed to endure while others have breathed their last. One of the several good things the British did was to give the maidans their due importance, as most major Indian cities of today developed and prospered in their era.

kunj sanghvi26 Feb 2013

Baazigar – Week 18 : Ranchi

Do you ever pay attention to those other people at the Filmfare and IIFA awards ceremonies - the editors, singers, cinematographers, etc? The camera never pans out to them. When a dance performance is on, nobody focuses on a choreographer to see if he is enjoying it. They all try and emulate the stars in dressing up. They think they wear the same long gowns and tuxedos and look the best they would ever do for the rest of the year. And yet there is always easy to tell who is a technician and who is a star. There will be that extra flab somewhere; something remiss about the fitting would stand out; maybe they would be wearing something that is so last season. Now if you are the cool kind who watch the Oscars and Grammys and watch the Indian ones only because it’s on in the living room on a Sunday evening, you would know the Indian stars are pretenders too. Look at a George Clooney or a Rihanna and you would notice that extra make up on Anushka’s eyes and Saifs attempt at pulling off highlights in his hair - so 2010!

kunj sanghvi20 Feb 2013

Baazigar – Week 17 : Kolkata (Calcutta)

I love yellow. Always have. I get drawn to yellow sweatshirts in apparel stores and aspire to drive sexy yellow cars. There have been girlfriends and bosses who have discouraged this love for the color in clothing and ppt template choices. Perhaps that is why I loved Calcutta so much. The taxis are the perfect shade of yellow. As are the trams and trains. The yellows just light up the streets in the early evenings as people rush home from work. Calcutta isn't shy of dressing up in yellow. And I don't look much unlike the yellow ambassadors in my yellow tshirt!

Team InsideIIM13 Feb 2013

Baazigar - Week 16 : Ajmer & Jaipur Litfest

The moment to write this blog post has passed. I have had a dose of a much more powerful drug since I left from Jaipur to come to Ahmedabad 3 days ago. In what follows, I’ll try and do justice to Ajmer and Jaipur but I know this one is going to be difficult, because all I really want to write about right now is my two years as a student of MICA.

kunj sanghvi29 Jan 2013

Baazigar – Week 15 : Gujarat

A man’s interaction with his native land and the native land’s with him is something that has always intrigued me. For the first 21 years of my life, Bombay was my home and the only place I would claim to belong to after India. That I was a Gujarati didn’t make me feel any affinity for Gujarat and Bombay is anyway as much a part of Gujarat as it is of Maharashtra because of the shared history. It also helped that my ancestors hailed from Karachi and none of them had really lived in Gujarat for the last 150 years. Basically, Gujarat up till 5 years ago was just a state I went to often because many pilgrimage places and not-so-cool relatives happened to be there. The 2 years at MICA, in spite of being in a ghetto which was a far cry from where it was located, made Gujarat too my unwitting second home. Today every trip to Gujarat is like going home. I am less of a tourist and more of a native here. Its one of the many ways a man interacts with his native land. The people all over the country who ask me these days on what topic I have based my stories in their home town is another way. It makes me scared just to look at such people in the eye and tell them what I have written about their home town. I humbly tell them I try my best but I wouldn’t have done full justice just by living there for a week.. And then the native land also interacts in peculiar ways. It interacts in absolute and unequivocal adulation for its favorite sons – the way a Dhoni was received in the new Ranchi stadium yesterday. Or the way ‘Sri Narendrabhai Modi’ is received all over Gujarat.

kunj sanghvi20 Jan 2013