Daily Archives: June 24, 2003

I’ll try and not keep too much to the ‘serious’ focus on XL (you can do a search on yahoo and google and find stuff for that!)

These next few posts are basically for XLers to relive those ‘JLT’ times at XL, and for non-XLers to know the ‘un’official part of XL that go so much into shaping the identity of an XLer.

So how does an XLer pass his/her day?

So now you get the main drift?

Dadu/Niranjan’s is the lovely samosa/ciggy joint that sustains Xlers when the mess does not!

Bishu’s Night Serai- A one stop shop for Maggi, Coffee, Tea, bread masala to get you through the night and those incomprehensible cases !

JLT – The name of the lovely lawn , called Just Like that ! Why? who knows, JLT!

OMAXI- The Old Monks Association of XlrI. The top of the XL social totem pole ! Led by the cheif (in red hood!) and clad in white or blue hoods….yelling “PBC” !

Wet Nights - Contrary to what people think only stands for the wetness of the liquor flowing in the party hosted by OMAXI.

Frax- The Free Riders Association of Xlri. The people who sleep through XL and learn how to be be a burden on others without doing anything has been converted into both an adjective and a verb e.g. “You frax!” and “I have been fraxing this whole term, so won’t you do my project ?”

GRAX – Gossip and Rumor Association of Xlri. Also translated into a verb “We have been graxing about that RG chap”

RG – Relative Grading, the way you get a D even if you get 80/100 just because the top guy has got 98/100 and nobody has 89/100 ! As is wont, has been converted to a verb e.g. “The topper keeps on doing RG every term” .

Put Sack – to crash to sleep (comes naturally either in class or in your room!)

Put Enthu – What an XLer does when he/she needs to pump up the excitement.

Put Fight – What an XLer does when the end terms or paper submissions are looming large.

GBM - General Body Meeting (alas! Not an orgy yet! ) What XLers do to timepass as a group.

IIMC – The only other management institute in Eastern India with whom XLers have a weird relationship ;-P

Mess Food- The one hate after the previous mentioned item that unites XLers across the generations.

Bodhi Tree – The shady place where XLers have bonded, having DMC (deep meaningful conversations) with other XLers!

The Un-official XL Alumni site

OK, here are some facts (and fiction!) about XL (the loving nickname of XLRI) located in jampot (the loving nickname of Jamshedpur) in the Indian state of Jharkhand (earlier part of Bihar):

XL was established by Fr. Quinn in 1949 …yeah its the oldest B School in India !

On the 25th anniversary of XL, Fr. Tome said:

“What does 25 years mean to me personally. Certainly not the
building, not a campus, not even a viable institution. Let me put it this way. Some
years ago, when Raisa Maritain, wife of the famous French philosopher,
Jacques Maritain, wanted to thank God for all that had happened in her life,
she wrote a book about the greatest gift God had given to her and she
entitled the book We Have Been Friends Together. That is what this anniversary
means to me…

“Unlike similar institutions that are amply funded from the very beginning,
for both capital costs and operations, our resources totaled zero. I will
share the secret with you once again. I believe it to be true, even though
it is against all the laws of that dark and murky science of economics. The
secret is this: decisions precede and generate resources, and not the
other way round.”

That statement in many ways sums up the spirit of XL and XLers (pronounced Excellers the products of XL. Even today the XL management states the defining culture as:

“The culture of XLRI is such that it accelerates the members’ passion for achieving excellence in everything they do. While informality, flexibility, humaneness, and espirit de corps are the hallmarks, growth and development of the whole person with integrity and ingenuity are the ‘summum bonum’ of the culture in XLRI.”

Also added a page with 4 poems of mine…

Posted some new snaps on my website

Snaps Page

New Snaps

Got this link from The Alternative perspective newsletter I get

It’s an article by Shashi Tharoor (the author of The Great Indian Novel and The Mammaries of a Welfare State) who is also a civil servant and UN employee on what does being Indian and India mean for him. I think it captures the ethos of India beautifully !

Well, this is India of our day-to-day experience – full of anomalies, inequalities, confusion or diversity (depending on how one tries to understand it)… Contemporary India, perhaps more than any other time, is Many Indias. To quote from this article by Shashi Tharoor, India is: “snow peaks and tropical jungles, with seventeen major languages and 22,000 distinct “dialects”… 51% illiterate but which has educated the world’s second-largest pool of trained scientists and engineers… birthplace of four major religions, a dozen different traditions of classical dance, eighty-five political parties and 300 ways of cooking the potato”…