Saali Khushi

First year of grad school is generally very hectic barring few places. If we take a generous ensemble of "grad school" (i.e. including b-school), the statement still holds true. During the ghisai, man generally wonders why is he doing all this at the cost of his personal freedom, but then he justifies it by the prospect of getting a better job or becoming a good teacher. Owing to the strong growth of the Indian industry and globalization, finding good jobs (synonym: good paying jobs) in India is not difficult. Everyone knows about the exorbitant salaries of B-school grads (though historical) but even a PhD student from Comp.Science/Elec. gets a starting salary of 18-20 lakh. Although, there's discrimination between the departments. A Physics PhD ends up at BARC or goes abroad for Post-Doc and then joins BARC. A Math grad student generally spend rest of their life finishing PhD. A Bio PhD: they don't exist. You may ask why, well bio students are generally hot chicks who have boyfriends and get married early. Dudes who do research in bio (not doctors, they just mint money), 99% of them are gay and the rest get married early to the hot bio females, so salary becomes immaterial. Other sciences I don't care much.

It so happened that a senior in TIFR was applying for a post-doc and was particularly unhappy about the bad app scene. To step over others, he decided to get recommendations from top faculty in Computer Science. Being from IIT K, someone adviced him to take reco from Manindra Agarwal. Here's the verbatim:

Senior: I can't take reco from him.
Wise guy: Why?
Senior: I've only done one course with him.
Wise guy: You only need to do a course not inter-course.

The seriousness of the discussion made the comment even more hilarious. This joke is one of the gems and always cracks me up. It also reminds me of few other jokes which are classic. The setting was a 2nd AC train compartment from Mumbai to Patna. Jas and I were standing near the door, enjoying the cool morning breeze before a small cute kid came up to us. The verbatim:

Kid (very innocently): Uncle, uncle, iske aage kya hai?
Jas: dabba

Without saying anything the kid just turned back, crying his way back to mom. Such gems are produced by extraordinary people in ordinary situations. There are many more, but some other time.