First Day in XL

My first day at XLRI aka Excellence and integrity -well thats what our profs told us on the 2nd day.
It was 13th June of 2008 and our highly improved Indian Railways currently under a highly charismatic leader Mr Lalu Yadav brought us to Tatanagar at 2.30 pm just 5 hours late (no sarcasm intended :)). I firmly believe we were lucky to travel in this region at this time as Mr Lalu belongs to the region and trains must be doing a lot better then earlier.
After a little argument and little negotiations with the porters and the rickshaw walas(which most probably we lost – future managers ha!!) we reached XLRI at 3.30 pm.
Having figured out the rooms and settling down we set out in the evening to take a look at the campus.
Thats where my dear friend Manan's special PR skills came into picture and within no time me, Rohan, Rajdeep got introduced to 90% of the batch mates aka XLers ( 10% error margin is not bad I guess ;)). Well its a different story that we would require another couple of weeks to remember every ones names.

The part of campus which caters to the academic and the residential needs of the students is very close by and small, kind of short and smart. But “honesty” featuring always as one of my quality would admit that it is small compared to what I expected and did disappoint me a bit. But again this is life and it had a new beginning at XL now :).
So coming to the things we saw in campus that day.. the Gym - it was impressive but it was on 3rd floor and yes we did get a idea about an elevator to the GYM ;).. ha ha.
It was impressive pretty much all the equipments that I saw in my company gym which I feel (or as they said) was very advanced. And the USP of the gym was the instructor who had his photo instructing our dear Mr MSD aka M.S. Dhoni. He was proud to be associated with Jharkhand cricket and so were we.
There is a tiny miny multi purpose store there , which serves to the students needs like soaps, shampoos, stationary etc...
Then we went to look at the Library – I am not yet sure who get this horrendous idea the first day in campus. Anyhow the Library was grand – has 65000+ books so has to be ;) -- but to my surprise, pleasure I was not allowed inside as I was wearing half pants (3/4ths I believe – but the guard didn't).
We didn't care to walk around the majority of the campus which has faculty quarters and other facilities that we in BM program wont require much.

Coming back to the Xlers I would admit that they were all friendly and ready to mingle. We had a long session of introduction sometime late in the evening in our campus garden famously know as JLT- it had a history behind the name which is very close the Xlers heart. Yeah, some extra enthusiastic Xlers from among us also took over the responsibility of playing the seniors to the unsuspecting batch mates. It was fun and importantly every one was a sport and ready to do their bit to make the evening more fun.
Some or probably all of the people who had a bearable voice sung – and ya they did a splendid job.
Some even danced.. krazzy4 if I recall the song right – might have got some girls going crazzy for him.
We got to know about the batch which in addition to loads of engineers has even a doc, economic and math scholars.
That took us to another important aspect of the student life –Mess ka khana.
It was the first day and probably the mess managers wanted to create an impression. They served us Chinese food and it was quite decent.

Then in the night we went to take a look at the cafeteria of the campus which is right in the heart of the campus and has a pretty useful menu.
Thats abt it for my first day in XL