Night life at MDI

“At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.” Pandit Nehru declared to the world when Indian became a free nation on the 15^th of August of 1947. He would have never realized that the holy fraternity of B School students would take his words too seriously.

If you are finding my thought process too arbit, I can reframe the famous words for you. “At the stroke of the midnight hour when the world sleeps, B skoolers awake to life and freedom and start their daily chores.” Any one who has been in a residential B school will have indelible memories of friends who wake up in the wee hours of the night, brush their teeth and log on to the internet to catch up with the day’s(oops.. the previous day’s) news.

My life is a perfect testimony to the above statement. Before coming to MDI, I was one of those disciplined (?) students who couldn’t stay awake after midnight even if Scarlet Johansson invited me to her place for the night. MDI, in a short span of around two years has had a disruptive effect on my biological clock to the extend that I sleep at around 5 am only after ensuring that I read the online edition of the local Mallu paper as soon as it gets uploaded!!!

This would be the case with most people who come into a B school. B School life is surely hectic but the very motivation for people to stay up in the night and sleep throughout the early hours should be taken up by research by our fellow FPM students. The interesting fact is that it is not just the academic rigor that makes us stay up all night. Just take a walk through the hostel corridor at around 2 am: you will find 20% of the students working on PPT/ Excel, around 50% glued on to their laptops watching a movie/ sitcoms, 20% doing “bakar” and the rest 10% sleeping peacefully.

This midnight life has its on economic and commercial effects. Prayas, our very own kirana store is jam-packed with customers lined up to buy eatables. Our own lazy “Jhaji” after fifteen plus years of experience in MDI recently came out of his claustrophobic den in the academic block to setup an eating joint that caters to the ‘midnight oil burners’. Arcus makes shitloads of money that would put our average salary packages to shame. Sharmaji has improved his night operations after seeking help from an internal consultant. This comes with its own “subprimal” effect on our pockets too. A student on an average spends around 40 rupees a day on night food (this is under the assumption that an average Mandevian is a non smoker). Simple calculation tells that we spend around 1200 rupees on night food only per month and if you calculate the annual rates, we will get a shock of our life.

Whatever maybe the financial impacts, these night jaunts definitely give you the experience of a lifetime. It gives us innumerable memories and sheds all barriers of time that is in our body system. For the more fortunate ones, night life in MDI has given experiences of a life time which is best explained by Frank Sinatra’s famous song

“Strangers in the night exchanging glances
Wandering in the night
What were the chances we’d be sharing love
Before the night was through.”